The Charity Commission for England and Wales
Charity Register (England & Wales)
Every registered charity in England and Wales — close to 400,000 of them — with finances, trustees, activities and contact details. The definitive account of who the charitable sector is, who runs each one and how big it is.
At a glance
- Publisher
- The Charity Commission for England and Wales
- Updates
- Updated daily
- Cost
- Free — open data
- Last checked
- 2026-07-21
Professional & B2B servicesFinancial servicesBusiness & companies
What your business can use it for
- Sales prospectingBuild target lists of charities filtered to your patch, cause or size — every registered charity with its activities, income band and contact details in one place.
- Customer & supplier checksCheck a charity before you deal with it — status, finances, trustees and whether it is actually on the live register — straight from the regulator.
- Market analysisSize and segment the charitable sector by cause, area and income, so advisers and suppliers to charities understand the market they sell into.
Works with data you already have
- Company numbers — for charitable companiesCompany numbersAbout 31,000 charities are also companies and carry a CRN; zero-pad to 8 digits before joining to Companies House
- Charity or organisation namesBusiness namesMatch on registered name; expect some cleaning as names vary
- Contact postcodesPostcodesEach charity carries a contact postcode you can join to any postcode-keyed dataset
How to get it
- Full register download — Charity CommissionBulk downloadNo account needed. The complete register as a set of linked tables — charity, trustees, finances, classification and more. The same file each day carries the latest daily extract.
What's involved in using it
- The register comes as 13 separate tables — charities, trustees, finances, activities and more — that have to be linked together on the charity number before you get a full picture of any single charity.
- Some fields contain line breaks and tabs inside them, which quietly break a straightforward spreadsheet import unless they are handled properly.
- Linking charities to Companies House data only works for the roughly one-in-twelve that are also companies — the rest have a charity number but no company number — and even then the numbers need reformatting to match.
The technical detail, for whoever sets it up (4)
- England and Wales only. Scottish charities (OSCR) and Northern Irish (CCNI) sit on separate registers not included here.
- Removed charities are kept in the file with a removal date — filter on registration status to get the live register, or you will count charities that no longer exist.
- Income and spending figures come from the most recent submitted annual return, which can be 12–18 months behind — check the accounting period date before comparing.
- Linked or subsidiary entries share a main charity — dedupe to main registrations before counting, or groups are double-counted.
Ask us about Charity Register (England & Wales)
Ask a factual question about Charity Register (England & Wales) — what it covers, how often it changes, whether it matches the records you keep — and we will answer, free. Or tell us what you are trying to work out, and we will tell you what it would take to get this data working next to the numbers you already have.