The Short Answer

Build the page from the accounts your trustees approved, and from nothing else. State the financial year. Show expenditure under the headings your statement of financial activities uses, at the figures it reports, with a sentence on what each heading contains. Say who examined or audited the accounts, link the full set, and link the note that discloses senior pay rather than characterising it. Lead with the amounts in pounds. If you add a pence-in-the-pound figure, put it beneath them, work it out from that year's accounts, and say what it is a share of. Never publish a ratio the accounts cannot reproduce.

The page answers the question the public weighs most when deciding whether to trust a charity. It is also the page where a well-meant simplification is most likely to become a claim you cannot support.

What the Public Is Asking

The Charity Commission's Public Trust in Charities 2026, published on 8 July 2026, surveyed 4,681 people in England and Wales in January 2026. Asked what matters in deciding whether to trust a charity, 55% chose "Most of the money raised is spent directly on the causes the charity supports", the most chosen answer. A separate answer, "It is easy to see how much the charity has raised, and how this money has been spent", was chosen by 40%.

The 2026 focus groups were small (three groups, 17 people), so they describe views rather than measure them. Some participants wanted to know "how much of their pound reaches the cause, similar to a 'GoFundMe' style breakdown". They generally accepted that some overhead spending is necessary, naming staff who deliver services, fundraising and basic administration among the costs they understood. And the report's summary found that "High CEO pay appears to be a focal symbol of mistrust, not just as a cost issue, but as a perceived misalignment with charitable values."

So the public wants a simple breakdown, accepts that running a charity costs money, and reads senior pay as a test. A page built from the accounts can meet all three. A page built from a slogan meets the first and fails the other two the moment someone checks.

Build It From the Accounts

Your accounts already report spending in a fixed structure. For a charity reporting on an activity basis it is three lines: raising funds, charitable activities and other (SORP 2026, module 4). The previous edition uses the same three lines. Charities with gross income over £500,000 must report this way; smaller charities preparing accruals accounts may analyse by type of cost instead, and receipts and payments accounts sit outside the SORP.

Whichever format your accounts use, the page uses it too. That is the whole method: the page is a readable view of a document that already exists, has been examined or audited, and is on the public register.

What the page carries:

  • The year. The financial year the figures cover and its end date, in the heading, not in a footnote.
  • The headings, at the accounts' figures. Expenditure under the lines the accounts use, with the total, and the significant activities the accounts break charitable spending into. Round only as the accounts round.
  • A sentence per heading. What "charitable activities" means for your work, and what sits inside "raising funds".
  • Who checked them. Whether the accounts were audited or independently examined. If your charity crosses an audit or examination threshold (they change for financial years ending on or after 30 September 2026, under the Substitution of Sums Order 2026), the report attached to the accounts changes too, and the page should say why. The thresholds are set out in what UK charities must publish.
  • The source. A link to the full accounts for that year, and to your entry on the Charity Commission register.

Two lines in the accounts need explaining on the page, because they are where a reader most often draws the wrong conclusion.

There is no separate admin figure. For a charity reporting on an activity basis, the SORP requires support costs, such as governance, finance, IT and human resources, to be apportioned across the activities they support "in order to arrive at the full cost for each reported activity" (SORP 2026, paragraph 8.7). The total support costs, including governance costs, are disclosed in the notes. So the charitable activities line already includes its share of running costs. A page that shows a separate "admin" slice has either taken it from that note, in which case say so, or made it up.

Raising funds is wider than fundraising. SORP 2026 includes in it the costs of events, non-charitable trading and selling donated goods, including running charity shops. A charity with shops will show a raising funds line that includes the cost of running them. Explain that in one sentence. Left unexplained, it reads as money spent on asking for money.

Accessibility is part of honesty here. If the breakdown is a chart, the same figures belong in a table beside it; the impact visualisation post covers how. Where the page itself goes and how the full report is presented is covered in publishing your annual report online.

The Pence-in-the-Pound Problem

The focus groups asked for a per-pound breakdown, and many charities publish one. The difficulty is that the accounts do not measure what "of every £1 you donate" implies. The statement of financial activities reports income by source and expenditure by activity; it records what was spent from all income, not what happened to a donated pound. Divide charitable spending by total expenditure and you get one figure. Divide it by donations and legacies and you get a different one. Neither is wrong. Publishing either without saying which is.

If you publish a per-pound figure, three rules hold:

  1. Work it out from the named year's accounts, and state that year beside it.
  2. Say what it is a share of, in words: "of our total expenditure in the year to [date]", not "of every £1 you give", unless that is genuinely what you calculated.
  3. Replace it when the next accounts are approved. A figure carried forward from an earlier year is no longer describing anything.

The Code of Fundraising Practice, in force from 1 November 2025, says "Your fundraising must not mislead existing or potential donors", including by "leaving out information" or "exaggerating details". The Code is a regulatory code, not statute, and whether a given page is fundraising is a question for your own adviser. A breakdown on the page people read just before they give is where I would assume it applies.

I would lead with the pounds, not the pence. Show what was spent under each heading in pounds sterling, as the accounts report it, and let the reader see the proportions for themselves. A per-pound figure can sit underneath as a reading aid, worked out from those same totals under the three rules above. It should never be the only number on the page.

Senior Pay: Point to the Disclosure

The accounts already answer the pay question. The SORP requires the number of employees whose benefits fall in each £10,000 band from £60,000 upwards, or a statement that there are none, and the total employee benefits received by trustees and key management personnel (SORP 2026, paragraphs 9.34 and 9.36). It also says trustees should consider what funders and other stakeholders need, and that it "may be helpful" to give the chief executive's or highest-paid employee's pay.

The page should send people to that answer rather than write a new one. On the website that means:

  • Link the staff costs note in the accounts, by name, from the where-your-money-goes page.
  • If your trustees have chosen to disclose the chief executive's pay in the accounts, the page can state it, at the accounts' figure and for the same year.
  • Do not add comparisons, benchmarks or a defence of the figure. The page reports; the trustees own the decision, and the annual report is the place for their explanation.

A reader who suspects senior pay is being hidden will look for it. Finding it one click away, in the accounts, answers the suspicion better than any paragraph written for the purpose.

The Register Is the Check

The page is not the only public record of your spending. A charity's financial history on the Charity Commission register lists expenditure on charitable activities, raising funds and governance for each of recent years; Shelter's entry is an example that shows five. A donor, a journalist or a grant officer can put your page beside it in a minute.

That makes currency a governance question, not a design one. The page needs a trigger, a source, a check and a sign-off:

  • Trigger. The day the new accounts are filed, the page changes, and the previous year moves to an archive with its own accounts linked.
  • Source. Your finance lead supplies the figures from the approved accounts.
  • Check. Someone other than the person who built the page confirms each figure against the accounts. If there is any doubt about how a figure is derived, your auditor or independent examiner is the person to ask, not your web team.
  • Sign-off. The same trustees who approved the accounts, or the committee they delegate to, approve the page.

What the Page Is For

A where-your-money-goes page does not persuade anyone that your overheads are low. It shows them where to check, and shows that you expected them to. Built from the accounts, dated, linked and kept current, it is one of the few pages on a charity website that a sceptical reader can verify completely.

Further Reading