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.
Professional & B2B services Financial services Business & companies
| Publisher | The Charity Commission for England and Wales |
|---|---|
| Licence | Open Government Licence v3 what this means |
| Updates | Updated daily |
| Cost | Free — open data |
| Last verified | 2026-07-21 |
What your business can use it for
Sales prospecting
Build 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 checks
Check a charity before you deal with it — status, finances, trustees and whether it is actually on the live register — straight from the regulator.
Market analysis
Size 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
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Company numbers — for charitable companies
Company numbers
About 31,000 charities are also companies and carry a CRN; zero-pad to 8 digits before joining to Companies House -
Charity or organisation names
Business names
Match on registered name; expect some cleaning as names vary -
Contact postcodes
Postcodes
Each charity carries a contact postcode you can join to any postcode-keyed dataset
How to get it
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Bulk download
Full register download — Charity Commission
No 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 company data only works for the roughly one-in-twelve that are also companies, and even then the numbers need reformatting to match.
Worth knowing before you start
- 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.
- Only about one charity in twelve is also a company; the rest have a charity number but no company number, so you can only join the charitable-company subset to Companies House.
- 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.