Average fundraising salary rises in UK charities

The average salary for a fundraising role in a UK charity grew by 3% to £39,800 (€47,900) in 2023, according to CharityJob.

The specialist recruiter’s CharityJob Salary Report 2024 is based on the 48,500 vacancies posted on the site during 2023. Total vacancies were 22% lower than in 2022 – a figure the report says is “in line with national trends”.

In fundraising specifically, vacancies dropped by 19% to 7,700.

Pay rose in most charity specialisms, with the exception of finance (down 1% to £48,800), and most significantly in operations (up 9% to £37,900) and business services (up 6%, to £40,000).

Money and location

Across the sector, working location impacted pay.

Just over half of UK charity jobs are based in London, the report notes, and fundraisers based in the capital could expect average pay of £41,600 – equivalent to €49,872 (up 3% on 2022). Fundraising pay elsewhere in the country is lower, at £37,600 – or €45,076, but during 2023 rose at a quicker rate of 9%.

Across all charity roles, salaries were significantly higher on average for hybrid (£38,200) and fully remote posts (£37,700), while pay for on-site posts dropped by 1% to £33,600.

Fundraising was the only specialism in which this was not the case, with on-site posts paying more – an average of £40,100 (€48,073).

Just 12% of roles in the sector as a whole were advertised as fully remote, compared to 44% being on-site, and the same proportion again being hybrid.

The statistics also show that at junior and mid-level, fundraising salaries are similar regardless of how big the charity is. There is however a significant difference for director roles, where charities with less than 20 staff offered average pay of £68,100, rising to £74,500 for charities with more than 100 staff, as seen in the table below:

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