Methodology

The Charity Commission for England and Wales regulates charities in those two countries only. Scotland has its own regulator, the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR), and Northern Ireland has the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI). Each of those bodies publishes its own register, separate from the England and Wales one we use here. This site currently covers England and Wales only.

Each charity row carries: charity number (the unique key), name, registration status, regulator type (CIO, registered charity, CIO foundation, etc), date of registration, date of removal (if applicable), latest income and expenditure, the period-end date of the most recent accounts filing, contact address and postcode, website, telephone, and (where given) public email and Companies House number. Trustees, classifications (causes), and areas of operation are stored as separate many-to-many relationships.

1. Every day, a scheduled job downloads the latest JSON ZIP bundles from the Charity Commission's Azure blob storage.
2. Each bundle is unzipped and parsed: the charity master record, trustees, classifications, and areas-of-operation rows.
3. Rows stream into new tables (charities_new, trustees_new, charity_classifications_new, charity_areas_new) via Postgres COPY.
4. Indexes are built on the new tables after loading completes.
5. A single atomic ALTER TABLE … RENAME swaps each new table in. The old tables are preserved for 24 hours as a rollback safety.
6. Per-cause, per-area, and per-outcode aggregates are recomputed.

• Income and expenditure figures depend on the most recent accounts filing on record. Some charities are slow to file; smaller charities with income under £25,000 file simplified returns; the very smallest are not required to file accounts at all.
• Some charities are still on the register but have not filed for several years. We surface these on /notable as “zombie” charities.
• Trustee names are presented as the Charity Commission publishes them; the same individual may appear under slight name variations across different charities.
• Classifications and areas of operation are self-reported by charities at registration. They reflect declared activity rather than independently audited fact.
• This site covers England and Wales only. See above for Scottish and Northern Irish registers.

For corrections to the underlying record (charity name, trustees, registered address, financials), update the record with the Charity Commission directly. Our daily refresh will pick up corrections automatically.

If you spot a presentation error on this site, email [email protected] and we'll fix or remove the issue within 48 hours.

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