UK charities

Check a charity, understand its tax, ask it for help.

Find any UK charity on its official register, see how charity tax really works, and ask for help the safe way.

The short version

Check a charity’s number on its official register before trusting the brand.
“Charities pay no tax” is not quite true: relief has conditions, and some income is still taxed.
There is a calm, 7-step way to ask a charity for help — see below.
We publish how charities work, never a directory of the people in them.

Start at the official source

Three nations, three official registers.

Use the exact charity number when possible. A public brand, a registered charity and a trading subsidiary can be different legal bodies. Absence from one register is not, by itself, proof that an organisation is not charitable.

England and Wales

Charity Commission

Search registered charities by name or number and read their stated work and filed information. Some charities do not have to register — the law calls them excepted or exempt — or sit outside the ordinary registration threshold.

Search at the official source

Scotland

OSCR

The Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR) holds the Scottish record. Search the Scottish Charity Register by exact number, purpose, status, form, geography or income.

Search at the official source

Northern Ireland

CCNI

The Charity Commission for Northern Ireland (CCNI) publishes identity, purposes, activities and annual reporting information. Use its register search and guidance.

Search at the official source

TaxSorted does not copy these national registers. There is no local charity directory, trustee list or address book on this page.

Relief with conditions, not a magic label

“Charities pay no tax” is the wrong map.

Why charities get tax relief

Relief comes with strings. Money must serve recognised charitable purposes and public benefit, trustees carry duties, and reporting is public. This is analysis of the structure, not a statement of law or a reward for a brand appearing benevolent.

Where ordinary tax remains

Recognition by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC — the UK tax office), the source and use of income, trading activity and the exact tax all matter. Non-qualifying income or non-charitable spending can be taxed; VAT (Value Added Tax) and trading follow their own rules.

Check HMRC charities and tax guidance

Reach the service, not a private person

A calm way to ask what help is actually available.

1Verify the charity number and jurisdiction at the official register.
2Read its stated purposes, activities, area and latest reporting date.
3Follow the organisation website linked by the official record.
4Use its generic service form, public help line or role-based inbox.
5State the help needed, relevant area and only the eligibility facts requested.
6Ask whether the service is open, whether it charges, what it needs and where it refers people it cannot help.
7Understand the privacy route before sending a case file, identity document or safeguarding detail.

Nobody “owns” a charity like shares

Ask who governs, holds and controls each legal body.

Trustees direct and steward a charity under its governing document.

Members may have defined votes.
In England and Wales, a corporate charity can hold assets in its own name. An unincorporated charity may need trustees or a custodian to hold property.
Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal forms and rules.
A charity can also control a separate trading subsidiary.

Calling all of that “ownership” hides the real duties and boundaries.

Stay inside the purposes

The governing document defines the charitable purposes and decision structure. Resources must be managed for those purposes and public benefit.

Keep and report accounts

Returns, accounts, trustee reports and external scrutiny depend on jurisdiction, legal form, income, assets and reporting period.

Manage conflicts and assets

Trustees steward the charity, make collective decisions and protect its money, property, people and reputation. Payment and private benefit are constrained.

Meet ordinary duties too

Charitable status does not remove employment, safeguarding, fundraising, company, VAT, PAYE (Pay As You Earn payroll), data-protection or other activity-specific duties.

Read the accounting boundary

Income ≠ spending ≠ assets ≠ impact.

Always carry the reporting period, the currency and the source’s precision. Check whether figures describe the charity alone or a consolidated group.

Income: Money recognised during a period; not the cash left at the end.
Expenditure: Accounting spend; not a standalone measure of benefit or impact.
Assets: Resources held or controlled at a date; many are restricted, invested or not readily spendable.
Reserves: A policy and accounting measure; not simply a spare bank balance.
Pay: Staff cost and published bands must not become an invented named salary.
Funding: An award, payment, donation and delivered result are different events.

How we protect people in this data

We are designing a way to show what charities say next to what they file. It is not live yet. These are the safety rules it must obey first — heavy detail, for careful readers.

Compare public claims and records without inventing a character score.

This is the published model for a future ledger, not a populated organisation directory. It keeps each evidence kind distinct, attributes the source voice and links back to the original wording. A legal object, a normalised claim and a reported result are not interchangeable just because they concern the same charity.

The API stores a human-reviewed paraphrase, not a quotation. Its locator is a human editorial assertion, not a mechanically proven anchor. Follow it to the publisher's words as available at review time; the permanence field says whether a publisher version or lawful archive is known. Public review notes, IDs, attribution, terms, limitations and locators are screened too: no copied source excerpt or personal detail, and locators remain pointers rather than quotations.

A TaxSorted editorial number cannot call itself reported. TaxSorted-derived finance must show its exact arithmetic, while programmes, funding, assets, control, observations and outcomes stay attributed to an external institutional source.

Formal objects and attributed claims

These establish an object or preserve a reviewed TaxSorted normalisation of what a linked source says. They do not, by themselves, prove delivery or effect.

Organisation identity: An exact registered organisation or official institution, kept separate from its source document and attributed claims.
Source document: Reviewed metadata plus bounded public review declarations and notes; source bodies, excerpts, images and attachments stay external.
Plan: A stated intention, target, budget or future programme.
Self-report: An organisation’s own account of its work, performance or results.

Records, transactions and assessment

These preserve disclosures, decisions, transfers, reported delivery, reported change or independent analysis as separate evidence.

Filing: A submitted account, return, trustee report or other formal disclosure.
Award: A decision to allocate money; not proof of payment, delivery or impact.
Payment: A recorded transfer; not proof that a service was delivered or worked.
Output: A sourced record of an activity, service or thing produced.
Outcome: A sourced claim or measurement of change, with its method and limits.
Evaluation: A review whose author, method, independence and conclusions remain visible.

Keep the relevant context attached when records are compared

Source voice: Who is speaking: the subject organisation, regulator, funder, auditor, delivery partner, evaluator or TaxSorted editorial analysis.
Date: The event, publication and retrieval dates where each is available.
Scope: The exact organisation, programme or aggregate population described; item-level assets and locations are excluded.
Period: The time covered by the evidence, not merely the webpage date.
Metric: The exact scope and metric definitions, method, units and accounting boundary.

Missing evidence is not contradiction.

A gap records evidence that is missing, unavailable, unsafe, conflicting or deliberately excluded. It does not make a claim false. An award is not a payment, delivery or impact result, and those stages must never be silently filled in.

If an aggregate would need suppression, its value is omitted and a reviewed coverage gap records only that an omission happened. Its fixed wording cannot repeat the amount or sensitive context, and it cannot point back to the source.

Every financial fact receives a disclosure review. Every derived financial fact and numeric comparison receives a fresh result review. If an input is people-derived, the result stays people-derived and needs its own reviewed-safe smallest cell. Staff costs, remuneration bands and trustee remuneration are always treated as people-derived. The final privacy review follows disclosure, so it also checks the disclosure reviewer's public limitations text.

Only human-reviewed, logically incompatible records or statements about the same exact organisation identifier, period, scope key and definition, and metric key and definition may be labelled inconsistent. Two money records must also match basis, measurement stage and amount date. Differences in voice, timing or method stay visible as differences.

No honesty, trust, faith or impact leaderboard is produced from this evidence.

The people and belief boundary

An organisation purpose does not establish a person’s private belief.

Advancement of religion can be an official charitable-purpose category. This guide does not turn it into a denomination map, congregation list or inference about trustees, staff, donors, members, attendees or beneficiaries. Publicly listed names and addresses are not copied into a TaxSorted bulk people service.

No local charity mirror. No bulk people export. No person-to-religion graph.

For developers

The bounded API, its schemas and the machine-readable explanation traces.

Build from the framework without pretending it is the official register.

The bounded API describes sources, official register doors, legal forms, tax treatments, obligations, funding, finance disclosures, control and help routes. It does not reproduce a national charity database. A later organisation snapshot needs source rights, a complete inclusion rule, stable identifiers, correction and update rules, human approval and a confidential safety-reporting route.

Open `/v1/charities/uk` Read OpenAPI Bulk exports Data dictionary Register doors Why-graph adopters

Explanation traces for tax treatments

Every published tax treatment now has a machine-readable explanation trace. It connects stable record fields to their exact reviewed sources, keeps the possible benefit beside the reverse tax path, and names what is still missing. The corpus now admits exact primary-law records where reviewed, with supplementary law and conditional procedures kept separately queryable. The graph still says when a binding provision, case selector, deadline, or route is not established instead of dressing guidance, adjacency, or a sector map up as a conclusion about a real case.

Walk the income-and-gains why graph

Open shape, guarded publication

Builders can use the accountability schema.

The evidence types, provenance fields, collection guide and comparison rules are open for structural reuse. No route accepts candidate documents. The two named blockers—confidential correction intake and asset-level rights review—are immediate, not exhaustive: all nine admission conditions must pass before any organisation row is published. Use the zero-row example and runtime validator; JSON Schema alone does not perform the graph, arithmetic or history checks.

Accountability index Accountability schema Zero-row example

Primary doors used for this guide

Reviewed 13 July 2026. This is public research, not legal, tax, accounting, safeguarding or grant advice. Check the current regulator, HMRC and organisation before acting.