How Much of Your Donation Reaches the Project?

Every Ramadan the same question comes up in family WhatsApp groups and on Reddit: if I give £100, how much of it actually reaches the people it is meant for? Charities answer with badges and slogans, from 100% donation policies to pence-per-pound graphics. Almost nobody answers with the charities' own filed accounts, even though those accounts are public.

This analysis does. It takes the latest figures that 21 UK Muslim charities filed with the Charity Commission for England and Wales and compares what each spent on charitable activities with what it spent on raising funds. Together they spent £660.06m (Charity Commission register (analysed by HNCO), 2025). Of every £1, 89p went on charitable activities and £63.19m in total went on raising funds.

The figures cannot tell you which charity is best, and they do not measure the reward of a gift, which follows sincere intention. They do show how differently charities of similar size spend, where the '100% policy' claim fits in, and what questions to ask before you give your sadaqah or Zakat. If you are weighing where to give, our guide to verifying an Islamic charity in the UK covers the checks that sit alongside these numbers.

1 How Much of Every £1 Reaches Charitable Work? 89p Across 21 Charities

The headline is reassuring. Most money given to large UK Muslim charities is spent on their charitable work, and the combined figure of 89p in the pound is in line with what the biggest organisations say about themselves. Islamic Relief, the largest by far at £241.05m of spending, says 90 pence of each pound goes to humanitarian work (Islamic Relief, 2026); its filed accounts show 89.4% on charitable activities. The two measures are not identical, but they point the same way.

The spread underneath the average is what matters to a donor. Some charities spend a few pence in the pound on fundraising and others spend a quarter or more. Four of the 21 spent under two pence. Size does not explain it: the three largest in the group span fundraising shares from a little over one penny to nearly a fifth of their budget. For monthly givers, whose standing orders add up over years, that difference compounds. Setting up monthly sadaqah is a good moment to check where it goes.

2 Which Charities Put the Most Into Charitable Activities?

The charities at the top share a pattern: most run 100% donation policies, rely heavily on mosque and community networks, or both. Ummah Welfare Trust is the clearest case, a charity with one of the largest budgets in the group and very little recorded fundraising cost, built largely on community and word-of-mouth giving rather than paid advertising. Al-Khair Foundation, of similar size, also records very little spend on raising funds. How a charity classifies costs such as broadcast appeals can move money between categories, which is one reason the ranking should be read as a guide rather than a verdict.

A high share is a good sign but not a complete one. 'Charitable activities' in UK charity accounts includes the support costs of delivering programmes, such as field staff, monitoring and a share of head office, so two charities with the same headline figure can spend very differently on the ground. HNCO explains its own approach in how your donations are spent, and the same question is worth putting to any organisation you support.

3 Which Charities Spend the Most on Fundraising? Up to 31p in £1

High fundraising spend usually buys reach. Television appeals, street and door-to-door fundraising, celebrity partnerships and paid digital campaigns cost money, and the charities that use them heavily sit at this end of the table. The honest defence is that fundraising pays for itself: Islamic Relief says each pound it spends on fundraising brings in £14 in donations (Islamic Relief, 2026). A charity that spends a quarter of its budget on fundraising may still deliver more to projects in absolute terms than a smaller one that spends almost nothing.

Two cautions apply. A small charity in a growth year can post a high fundraising share while it builds a donor base, and one filed year is a snapshot rather than a trend; the register shows five years for each charity. And the fundraising share says nothing about how well the charitable money is used. It is one number to weigh, alongside project reports and evidence of results. For Zakat in particular, how to fulfil your Zakat obligation in the UK sets out what to confirm about eligibility before cost ratios even come into it.

4 Does a 100% Donation Policy Mean the Charity Has No Costs?

A 100% donation policy is a promise about where your particular gift goes. The charity meets its running costs from other money, typically trustees, sponsors, corporate supporters, investment income, restricted grants or donors who give specifically for admin. United Muslims, for example, says it tops up card fees itself, so a £100 gift that arrives as £3 short is made whole (United Muslims, 2026). That is a legitimate model, and many donors find it reassuring, especially for Zakat.

What it is not is proof of low costs. Islamic Relief, which deliberately does not use a 100% policy, argues that the badge can mislead donors about what delivery really involves (Islamic Relief, 2026). The accounts settle the argument better than either side's marketing: every charity in this analysis, with or without a policy, filed some spend on raising funds. HNCO describes its own model, with admin often covered by volunteers and dedicated admin donors, in how water donations are spent.

The question matters most for Zakat, where many donors want every penny to reach eligible recipients. Scholars generally accept that a charity acting as a Zakat collector may meet reasonable costs of collection and distribution, drawing on the Quranic category of those employed to administer it, which Islamic Relief cites in its own defence of admin costs. Others prefer a charity that pays those costs from separate funds, so the Zakat itself passes through untouched. Both positions are held in good faith. What a donor can do is choose deliberately: read the charity's Zakat policy, check whether Zakat is ring-fenced from general funds, and give admin support separately if you want to. HNCO's Zakat page sets out how it handles Zakat, and the best ways to give sadaqah in the UK compares giving routes for voluntary charity.

5 What Can Filed Accounts Not Tell You, and What Should You Ask?

Three limits matter most. First, the category boundary: 'charitable activities' includes the support and governance costs of running programmes, so it is an upper bound on what reaches beneficiaries, not a measure of it. Second, a few charities also report 'other' expenditure, which is why the charitable and fundraising shares do not always add up to one hundred; Human Appeal and One Nation are examples. Third, timing: some charities' latest filing covers a year that ended in early 2024, others late 2025, so the table compares recent snapshots rather than an identical year.

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