The Short Answer

The Budget of 28 October 2026 gave charities no new support and several new dates.

  • Unchanged: Gift Aid and charitable rate relief.
  • Coming on 1 April 2027: a 3.9% National Living Wage rise, with no money to help charities meet it.
  • In the fine print: three small tax measures, on pension property in estates, VAT on energy-saving materials, and VAT on land sold to housing associations.
  • For INGOs: UK aid stays fixed at £9.38bn for 2027, which Bond calculates is £320m short of 0.3% of national income.
  • For fundraisers: real incomes are forecast to fall into 2028-29, after a year in which UK giving already fell.

Every figure below was checked at its source on 2 November 2026. I have kept third-party figures with the organisation that published them.

What the Budget Left Alone

  • Gift Aid. Neither the Budget report nor HM Treasury's overview of tax legislation and rates contains a measure on it.
  • Charitable rate relief. The business rates package is for pubs, music venues and qualifying retail, hospitality and leisure properties in England. Their 100% small business relief threshold rises from £12,000 to £18,000, and it does not change charitable relief.
  • The Inheritance Tax rates. Annex A lists the 36% rate for estates leaving 10% or more to charity in both 2026-27 and 2027-28. The nil-rate band stays at £325,000 and the residence nil-rate band at £175,000.
  • The employer National Insurance rate. Annex A lists 15% above the £96-a-week threshold for 2027-28, with the Employment Allowance at £10,500.

CFG's Clare Mills acknowledged that the Budget did not introduce major new costs for charities beyond the minimum wage increases. That is the one that matters.

The Wage Rise Comes With No Money

On 1 April 2027 the National Living Wage rises 3.9% to £13.21 an hour, which the Treasury says is worth £910 a year to a full-time worker. The rate for 18- to 20-year-olds rises 3.9% to £11.27.

NCVO's verdict on organisations delivering public services is direct: "They'll likely not receive the necessary uplifts to grants and contracts to cover the increasing cost of delivery from higher national living wage and minimum wage rates."

I have not found a published estimate from NCVO or CFG of what this rise costs the sector, so I am not offering one.

The real value of the rise will be thin. The OBR forecasts CPI inflation at a quarterly peak of 3¾ per cent in early 2027, shortly before it takes effect. The ONS had CPI at 3.5% in the 12 months to September 2026, up from 3.1%.

Three Tax Measures in the Fine Print

These are the measures a board paper saying "nothing for charities" would miss. All come from HM Treasury's overview of tax legislation and rates.

Measure From Who should notice
Those administering an estate choose how notional pension property is treated when calculating the reduced 36% Inheritance Tax rate 6 April 2027 Legacy fundraisers
Energy-saving materials VAT reverts from 0% to 5%, and heat batteries join the relief for residential accommodation and charity buildings 1 April 2027 Anyone planning work on a charity building
New zero rate of VAT on land sold to registered social housing providers 1 April 2027 Housing associations and charities selling land to them

Pensions and legacies. Most unused pension funds come within an estate for Inheritance Tax from the same date. Penningtons describes the change as letting personal representatives choose whether pension property forms part of the estate's general component when working out entitlement to the 36% rate. The reduced rate depends on at least 10% going to charity, so that choice can change whether a gift gets there. It is not a new legacy incentive.

Energy-saving materials. HMRC's VAT notice gives the zero rate until 31 March 2027, and it has covered buildings used solely for a relevant charitable purpose since February 2024. If you are planning a retrofit, the date is worth raising with your adviser now.

Land and housing. Charity Tax Group's Luke Hall said the group was "pleased to see the government act on VAT reform for social housing, a change CTG has advocated for".

Two smaller items sit in the same document. Jointly owned property can be donated under the Cultural Gift Scheme from 6 April 2027. An enabling power also allows future rules on non-business VAT refund claims, including those from "certain types of charities". It changes nothing yet, but it is worth your adviser's attention if you claim through VAT126.

Money That May Reach Your Work or Your Beneficiaries

None of this is general charity funding. Some of it may reach particular services or the people they support.

Homelessness and advice charities should also read the opposite entry. The Resolution Foundation finds that prolonging the Local Housing Allowance freeze into 2027-28 means over a million private renting families lose out, 91 per cent of them in the bottom half of the income distribution.

UK Aid Stays Fixed at £9.38bn

Bond's calculation is simple. On the latest OBR forecast, 0.3% of national income would be £9.70bn in 2027. The budget was fixed at £9.38bn on the March 2025 forecast. That is a £320m shortage against what Bond calls "the paltry target of 0.3%".

The Budget announced no top-up, and it does not hold out a near return to 0.7%. It says the government "remains committed to restoring ODA spending to 0.7%" of national income "as soon as the fiscal circumstances allow", and that the OBR's forecast shows the fiscal tests "are not due to be met within the Parliament". Press reports of a plan to restore 0.7% are not a government document, so I would not plan on them.

The path down, as Full Fact tracks it, runs from 0.48% of national income in 2025/26 to 0.37% in 2026/27 and 0.3% in 2027/28.

Use the final figures for 2025, not April's provisional ones. The FCDO's final statistics put UK aid at £13,095 million, or 0.44% of national income. Support for refugees in the UK took £2,403 million (18.4%), down £424 million on 2024.

Where the Cuts Land

Bond's reading of the FCDO annual report sets out the country picture:

  • Bilateral regional programmes cut by 43%, to £1.79bn in 2028/29.
  • Malawi and Mozambique cut by about 90%, to £5mn each in 2028/29.
  • Somalia cut by 49% and South Sudan by 46% from pre-cut levels.

Bond also reports that fragile and conflict-affected states rise to 70% of country and regional spending, while total UK aid to them still falls 34%, to £655m. Least developed countries see "a 49% decrease (£766mn)" between 2024/25 and 2028/29.

The National Audit Office puts the reduction in total FCDO aid programme spending at 31%, and in multilateral spending at 22%.

UK aid is also falling alongside other donors. The OECD's preliminary figures show aid from its development committee members down 23.1% in real terms in 2025, to USD 174.3 billion, or 0.26% of their combined national income.

Plan for Flat-to-Falling Giving

The donor base was already shrinking before this Budget. CAF's UK Giving 2026 found:

  • the public gave an estimated £14 billion in 2025, down from £15.4 billion in 2024
  • 55% of people gave, down from 69% in 2016, or about six million fewer donors
  • one in five (22%) say they don't donate because they cannot afford it.

The outlook for household budgets is worse. The Resolution Foundation expects typical non-pensioner incomes to fall 3.0% (£1,050) between 2026-27 and 2028-29. It also cites predictions that the energy price cap reaches £2,192 in the first quarter of 2027, £608 (38%) higher than a year earlier.

Direct help is limited. The Budget gives up to 20 million households in council tax bands A to D in England a £100 payment from January 2027.

My reading, and it is a reading rather than a published forecast: plan for flat-to-falling individual giving through 2027, and for a wage bill that statutory contracts are unlikely to cover.

What the Sector Said

What This Changes on Your Website

A Budget does not rewrite your website, but it does date some of what your website says. These are the pages a funder or a solicitor would notice first.

  • Your gifts in wills page. Any line about the 36% rate should stay close to GOV.UK's wording and promise no saving. What a gifts in wills page needs covers how to keep it right.
  • Your where-we-work page. If a programme shrinks or closes as UK funding falls, the page should change with it. The where-we-work post covers what to do when the context changes.
  • Your funder logos. A logo implies an active relationship. If an FCDO grant has ended, the logo wall should show it.
  • Your due diligence evidence. If you are still applying for UK funding, check your site against what FCDO assesses.
  • Your own website budget. In a tight year the website is an easy line to cut. The internal case is worth having ready before April.

The Budget offered charities very little money. What it left you with are dates, and those are the part your website can get wrong in public.

Further Reading

What This Post Does Not Cover

This is a reading of published documents as they stood on 2 November 2026. It is not tax, legal or financial advice. Whether a measure applies to your charity, your building or an estate is a question for your own advisers.

Several things have not been published yet, including the October inflation figures (18 November) and any NCVO or CFG estimate of what the April 2027 wage rise costs the sector. Some measures here apply to England only, and I have not looked at how the devolved governments are using their share of the funding.