How many grant funders are there, and will you run out?

On a discovery call, a charity asked me whether we'd run out of funders after a few weeks. It's a fair question. I don't expect it, and the numbers below are why.

Why do charities worry they'll run out?

If you get a decent number of well-matched funders every week, it's natural to assume the supply must dry up.

My view is that the worry comes from knowing only a handful of funders. There are a lot of funders and grants out there, for most types of charity and most causes. The few you know about aren't the only right ones for you.

How many funders are there?

The Charity Commission publishes a register of registered charities in England and Wales. In the extract dated 15/10/2026, around 49,000 are tagged as making grants to organisations. About 12,000 of those have an income of £100,000 or more.

Read that as an outer limit, not a pool. The tag is chosen by the charity, and it can include trusts that only invite applicants. A funder's own income isn't the same as what it gives away. And none of these figures is cut by the size of the charity applying, so they don't tell you how many suit a small one.

For a sense of how fast a list shrinks, we looked at the funders for one charity. Fewer than one in four of them made the shortlist. That's a different set from the register, so it doesn't turn 12,000 into a number you can apply to. It does show why a big list and a good list aren't the same thing.

What happens to funders that are closed?

Many charities I've spoken to research by hand. They find a funder that's perfect for them, then realise it's closed. They write the name on a Post-it, the Post-it falls to the bottom of a filing cabinet, and they never see it again.

Our system keeps closed funders on a watch list instead of dropping them. The idea is that when one opens, it can go onto your list. So you might use up the funders that are open today, and some that were shut may have opened by then.

Can you apply to the same funder again?

Sometimes. About one in ten of the funder pages our checks covered stated a limit on applying again. The rest said nothing either way. The wording differed: one application a year, one a calendar year, a 12-month gap after any decision, and in one case a two-year wait. So "reapply after a year" fits some funders and not others. Check the page before you plan on it.

Is a funder more likely to give again? My guess is yes, because they already know you. I think a funder that's given to you before is warmer, and you may not have to pitch as hard. That's a guess. Our data doesn't measure it, and none of the pages we've recorded says it prefers past grantees.

If you treat funders as a pipeline instead of a one-off list, you can spot the ones that might come round again every year or every few years. It's worth looking again at funders who've already given to you.

Why a short list every week instead of a big database?

Our aim is to save you time. If you have to trawl a long database every week, you might as well Google it. So we match you to funders whose published criteria you appear to meet, and whose focus fits yours. In my experience a charity applies to a handful at a time, so why send a hundred? We'll send you that handful.

What to try this week

• Add a "last applied" and "can reapply from" column to your funder sheet, and fill it from each funder's own page.
• Put closed funders on a list with a date to look again. Don't leave them on a Post-it.
• Pick one funder that has given to you before and read what its page says about applying again.

And if you'd rather a system did the searching and the watching, that's what we built.