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.
They have worked together to create a consolidated financial picture, as the Church of England is a very complex organisation comprised of 7 ‘National Church Institutions’ and 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.
At present, all the figures are for the calendar year 2023. You can see the total picture here, and the diocese accounts on the tab adjoining this one, named CofE Finance – by Diocese.
These pages are to help you understand where the Church of England’s money comes from and is being spent. They will also show you how the much larger sums of money being raised by parishes are being spent.
Familiarity with these numbers can help you fight the arguments that “There Is No Alternative” (‘TINA’) to cutting parish clergy. If you have any financial information which you feel may be helpful to us, or you have the expertise to offer our financial scrutineers some voluntary help, please contact us.
Did You Know?
The Church of England has substantial funds at the centre
- The Church Commissioners has £10bn (£10,000m) funds that have been built-up over the years
- The 42 dioceses have £6bn (£6,000m) funds in aggregate
- In 2023, Church Commissioners and Dioceses Combined could draw an annual investment income of £574m from these funds
Imbalance between Parishes and ‘Head Office’
- The Parishes have very few assets but, mainly thanks to parishioners’ generosity, they pull in a colossal annual income of £1bn
- The Parishes paid £315m to Head Office (2023) through the Parish Share scheme
- The Dioceses spent £348m on parish ministry (also 2023) and £47m on clergy pension contributions, making £395m in total.
- The difference between parish share ‘income’ and parish ministry expenditure (£315m-£395m) is £80m (2022 similar at £84m) – dividing that into the £574m Head Office investment income, we compute 14%. This tells us that only 14% of Head Office investment income goes directly to parishes; 86% goes elsewhere
- Moreover, large amounts of ‘diocese’ investment income come from glebe land, which was originally donated to parishes, but transferred to dioceses for administrative reasons in the 1970s.
Church of England – Cash Flow Diagram
Created and presented by the Financial Scrutiny Committee.
This detailed chart shows that the Church of England, far from being a single entity, is an ecosystem of different organisations. Here the Parishes are shown in Green, the Dioceses above them are shown in Yellow, and the National Church Institutions at the top in Blue.
The bottom of the chart shows that in 2023, Parishes received £1bn from giving, and passed £315m of it to Dioceses in the form of Parish Share.
The middle of the chart shows that in 2023, Dioceses paid £348m for Parish Ministry which figure rises to £395m when pension payments are added. So it could be said that in aggregate, dioceses paid for Parish Ministry by a combination of the £315m Parish Share and £80m additional funds. The Dioceses received £42m income from endowments that came originally from the parishes as Glebe, so passing on £80m is not generous. Dioceses also received £122m income from their Land, Buildings and non-DSF Investments. Additionally they got grants from Archbishops’ Council. From these combined sources, dioceses were able to fund £143m of internal spending and employ over 2,000 people.The top left of the chart shows a piggy bank with £10.4bn in it at the end of 2023. These are the Church investment funds managed by Church Commissioners and in 2023 they generated £414m income and capital growth for distribution. These funds get spent in the various ways shown in the chart, including £150m going to Archbishops’ Council which is the conduit for passing money on in grants. The spending of this money is determined by a small committee. The centre tends to allocate to projects in million pound dollops whilst in the parishes, we would be able to make significant changes with £10,000.
Church of England’s Finances in Aggregate
Save the Parish has done something simple and revealing – added together the accounts of the 42 dioceses and the Church Commissioners, for 2023, as we have done too for each of the previous four years. Note: we haven’t added in parishes – they are separate and too numerous to add, but we know from church statistics they raise about £1,000m pa.
The figures below look specifically at Head Office. There are lots of 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.
Our purpose now is to give you a simple picture of the external totality, 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.
Let’s start with the total income – £910m. That’s a lot of money, equivalent to a good-sized business. At the top of the income is Parish Share – £315m – the aggregated amount paid by parishes to their dioceses.
The rest is income from investments, in one form or another, making about £300m income with a further £222m permitted distribution from capital growth in 2023.
That’s a very significant amount which sits alongside the £1,000m that parishes raise through hard-won, sacrificial giving.
Now let’s turn to the expenditure that ‘Head Office’ controls, £980m in total. Now see in the first line that £395m is spent on Parish Ministry. Some of the other expenditure looks innocent enough, but the amounts are huge. Just remember some rough maths as you look at these figures. If a vicar costs £50,000 pa, each £1m is the salary of 20 vicars.
So let’s look at the two expenditure sub totals: first of all £219m for the dioceses. It’s made up of the £143m on Dioceses’ Administration, £47m on Bishops and Archbishops, and £29m given by dioceses to support the National Church in the so-called ‘5 votes’. The £143m diocese spending funds over 2,000 employees. The £143m spent in 2023 was 19% higher than the amount spent in 2021 – in the same period the spending on Parish Ministry stayed flat. 0% change. The £47m spending on Bishops amounts to over £1m per diocesan bishop. The £29m given to support the National Church is far from trivial.
All in all, it looks like there is a stark contrast between Head Office which appears to be financially secure, thanks to all the investment income which derives from the inherited assets of the Church of England, and the Parishes which are well-stretched and desperate for more clergy. In the parishes it’s scrimping and saving to keep going, and make ends meet. In Head Office, as we have just heard, it’s have another £190m to ensure Net Zero and £20m on Racial Justice. Whatever the merits of these causes, they are not the causes that the Church of England is meant to be spending its money on. 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.
You may be wondering, where are the grants from Archbishops’ Council? The answer is, they are not included here, for they are an example of a ‘left pocket/right pocket’ internal transfer – as mentioned in my introduction. Initially the grant money travels just from Archbishops’ Council to a Diocese, both of which are considered to be Head Office in this analysis. If a Diocese passes the money to a parish, then it becomes Parish Ministry, and therefore part of the £395m at the top of the expenditure in this analysis. The Archbishops’ Council has increased the value of its grants in recent years, but the extraordinary thing is, expenditure on Parish Ministry remains flat despite this. However, it does seem that a lot of the grant money remains in the dioceses’ bank accounts and does not emerge from it.All in all, we carry on with huge expenditure from the investment income as if nothing is wrong, as if there are no financial pressures elsewhere in the Church. It is not even properly voted-on and approved by 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. Those funds from Head Office are badly needed to stop this bad trend, and so to revitalise the parish.
(Last updated: 10/01/2025 )