The Church of England Finances

This section of our website contains financial information about the Church of England. It has been compiled by some of our supporters (working in a financial scrutiny team we call ‘Finscrute’) who are chartered accountants, experienced business people or other professionals.

You’ll find below a consolidated financial picture, adding together the ‘National Church Institutions’ and the 42 dioceses, each which are individual charities. All the information used to compile these web pages is in the public domain. Source documents include: the Annual Report of the Church Commissioners; the Annual Report of the Archbishops’ Council; the Church of England Parish Finance Statistics; and the 42 sets of published diocesan accounts and information made available for each diocese on the Charity Commission website.

A Topline View

All the figures are for the calendar year 2024. You can obtain each diocese’s accounts here in the Finance by Diocese spreadsheet. Let us give you an overview here, in flowchart form, and below it, make a few observations:

Download this chart as a PDF

1. The Church of England has very substantial funds at the centre
   • The Church Commissioners has £11bn (£11,000m) funds that have been built-up over the years (top left).
   • The 42 dioceses have over £6bn funds in aggregate, made up of £4.3bn in Land, Buildings and Investments and £1.8bn in Diocesan Stipends Funds.
   • In 2024, Church Commissioners and Dioceses Combined could draw an annual investment income of £653m from these funds (adding the inflows from the 3 piggy banks above).
2. The Church of England has excessive overheads
   • Administration costs are duplicated 42 times over, once for each diocese. As a result, the combined diocesan Support and Administration Cost amounted to £154m (yellow box in the centre).
   • The total spent on parish ministry was £359m and additionally there was £45m for pension contributions, making £404m in total. These figures tell us that, roughly speaking, for every £7 spent on ministry, £3 was spent on administration. By comparison with other charities, 7:3 is a very poor ratio of frontline to overhead.
   • These administration costs exhaust almost the entire investment and rental income of the dioceses (bottom right), leaving parishioners to pay the bill for Parish Ministry. As you can see, £319m is sent by parishes to dioceses in the form of Parish Share, and it is this that funds all but a slither of the £359m Parish Ministry cost.
   • In that case we might look for help from the Church Commissioners with its £11bn of assets. But here too, it is a disappointing story of Head Office profligacy. £39m is sent to fund National Church Institutions (much of it Church House central costs) and a further £55m to Bishops and Archbishops. This amounts to approximately another £100m.
   • Despite this, in 2024 £202m was sent from Church Commissioners to Archbishops Council, for them to pass on in various forms of grant. We might hope that at least here the central funds might make a difference. 
   • Unfortunately the trends suggest otherwise. Diocesan overheads have risen in the three years 2021-24 by 29%, or about 9% pa. The number of diocesan employees paid over £60,000 has almost doubled from 107 in 2019 to 195 in 2024. In the meanwhile, the number of stipendiary priests has fallen by 10% in the last 5 years, a loss in headcount of some 700.
   • Compared to that 29% increase in diocesan costs over 2021-24, parish ministry has risen by a paltry 6% over the same period.
   • We conclude that only a small amount reaches parishes; the rest is dissipated. 
3. The Heart of the Church continues to be in the Parishes
   • Parishioners don’t just pay for Ministry, they pay also for the running costs and repairs of their churches, providing £1bn annually through donations and fund-raising events.
   • This is used to fund £0.7bn of parish running cost along with the £0.3bn for ministry.
   • The parishes pay for themselves, whilst the rest of the church spends the income from our inheritance – £653m in 2024.

A Detailed Look at the Church of England’s Finances in Aggregate

The aggregation done by Save the Parish is detailed and revealing. We haven’t added in parishes – they are separate and too numerous to add.

The figures below look specifically at what we call Head Office – which is essentially the Dioceses, the Church Commissioners, and the Archbishops’ Council. There are some convoluted money flows within the Church of England. Many of these, however, are internal and ‘within Head Office’. Think of them like transfers of money from our left pocket to our right pocket. For example, grants from the SMMI committee just go from the Strategic Investment Board to the dioceses in the first instance – both ‘Head Office’ entities.

The figures below give you a simple picture of the external position, ignoring all the internal money flows, and showing just what comes in from external sources as income, and what goes out as real expenditure. The results are in £m. 

Total income – £1,030m. 

• That’s a considerable sum – for rough comparison, the revenue of National Grid Electricity Transmission is £2,619m.
• At the top of the income breakdown is Parish Share – £319m – the aggregated amount paid by parishes to their dioceses.
• The rest is income from the inherited legacy of the Church, comprised of £367m income from investments, and a further £283m which is permitted distribution from capital growth in 2024. 
• All in all, the £1,030m income is a very significant amount which matches the £1,000m that parishes raise through hard-won, sacrificial giving and events.

Expenditure that ‘Head Office’ controls, £769m in total. 

• The first line is £404m spent on Parish Ministry. This is mostly paid for by Parish Share (£319m) and expenditure from Diocesan Stipends Fund (£40m) which is set aside for this purpose. 
• The second main item is £239m spent on Dioceses, Bishops, and Archbishops Council. The £154m diocese spending funds over 2,000 employees. 
• All in all, the figures present a stark contrast between Head Office, which appears to be financially secure thanks to the investment income which derives from the inherited assets of the Church of England, and the Parishes which are financially stretched and desperate for more clergy. In the parishes it’s scrimping and saving to keep going, to make ends meet. In Head Office, money is spent by the million on social causes and administration, little of it reaching parishes. Whatever the merits of these causes, they are not the causes that the Church of England’s endowments are for. The investment income is the most wonderful gift, but if we are cutting the number of priests, it seems it is not being used optimally.

Where are the grants from Archbishops’ Council? 

• The grants from Archbishops’ Council are initially sent from Archbishops’ Council to one of the Dioceses. Both the Archbishops’ Council and the Dioceses are considered to be Head Office in this analysis, and so the grants are initially an example of ‘left pocket/right pocket’ internal transfer mentioned at the top of this section. 
• If a Diocese passes the money to a parish, then it becomes Parish Ministry, and therefore part of the £404m at the top of the expenditure in this analysis. The Archbishops’ Council has increased the value of its grants in recent years, so it is extremely disappointing that the expenditure on Parish Ministry remains broadly flat despite this increase. 
• It seems that some of the grant money remains in the dioceses’ bank accounts and does not emerge from it. Another part gets spent on outside activities and social causes (for example Net Zero, Racial Equality) that cannot be classified as Parish Ministry. All in all, we carry on spending from the investment income on favoured causes as if there are no financial pressures elsewhere in the Church. This spending is not properly voted-on or approved by General Synod. By contrast those of you out at the nerve endings – the parishes – will know that it is very difficult, and sometimes so serious that there are clergy lay-offs and/or vacancies that are left deliberately unfilled, to make ends meet. 

(Last updated: 10/01/2026 )