The monarchy's core public funding for 2026 is settled: the Sovereign Grant is set at £132.1 million for 2025-26 and rises to £137.9 million for 2026-27. Spread across the UK population, that headline figure works out at a little under £2 per person a year — though, as you will see, it deliberately leaves out some of the biggest costs of running the Crown.
Every summer the palace publishes its accounts, and every summer the same question trends: what does the Royal Family actually cost, and who pays for it? With King Charles III's reign now well established and Buckingham Palace still wrapped in scaffolding, here is a clear, figures-first breakdown of the money — where it comes from, what it buys, and why the grant recently jumped by more than 50%.
The short answer: £132.1m, then £137.9m
The Sovereign Grant is the single pot of public money that funds the monarch's official work. According to the Royal Trustees' official report, it stands at £132.1 million for 2025-26. The Trustees confirmed in March that it will rise again to £137.9 million for 2026-27, to cover the final year of the Buckingham Palace refurbishment, after which it is expected to fall back.
| Financial year | Sovereign Grant |
|---|---|
| 2021-22 to 2024-25 | £86.3m (held flat) |
| 2025-26 | £132.1m |
| 2026-27 | £137.9m |
For context, the UK's population is roughly 68 million (ONS estimates), so £132.1 million is about £1.94 a head — the price of a cheap coffee, as royal supporters like to point out. Critics counter that this number is only part of the story, and they have a point, as the section on security below explains.
What is the Sovereign Grant?
Created by the Sovereign Grant Act 2011, the grant replaced the older Civil List and a patchwork of separate government payments with one annual sum from HM Treasury. It funds the monarch's official duties, including staff, travel, receptions and state visits, plus the upkeep of the “occupied royal palaces” such as Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Think of it as the running cost of the institution rather than the personal wealth of the King.
How the figure is calculated
Here is the part that surprises most people: the Sovereign Grant is not a flat handout voted through by Parliament each year. It is pegged to the profits of The Crown Estate, the vast portfolio of land, seabed and property that legally belongs to the Crown but whose surplus goes to the Treasury.
The mechanics, set out by the Royal Trustees, run like this:
- The grant is a fixed percentage of The Crown Estate's net revenue profit, using the figure from two financial years earlier.
- That percentage was cut from 25% to 12% for 2024-25 onwards, after a surge in Crown Estate income made the old rate untenable.
- A floor rule means the grant can never be set lower than the previous year's amount, even when profits fall.
So the 2025-26 grant is based on The Crown Estate's 2023-24 accounts. Those showed a net revenue profit of £1,100.7 million; 12% of that, rounded up, gives the £132.1 million figure.
The offshore wind windfall that changed the sums
Why cut the percentage from 25% to 12%? Because The Crown Estate owns most of the seabed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland — and the boom in offshore wind has been enormously lucrative. Option fees from Offshore Wind Leasing Round 4 pushed the estate's net revenue profit to around £1.1 billion in 2023-24 and roughly £1.15 billion in 2024-25, with about £1.07 billion of that coming from offshore wind alone, Reuters reported.
Had ministers left the rate at 25%, the grant would have ballooned. Cutting it to 12% kept the cash award, still a record in pounds, from spiralling further. The Crown Estate itself has flagged that this was a temporary spike: its net revenue profit fell back to about £0.5 billion in 2025-26 as the one-off option fees dropped away, according to its annual report.
The Trustees have reduced the proportion of Crown Estate profits used to calculate the Sovereign Grant from 25 per cent to 12 per cent, reflecting a significant increase in Crown Estate profits from offshore wind developments.
Why the grant leapt from £86m to £132m
The Sovereign Grant sat at £86.3 million from 2021-22 all the way through to 2024-25. The jump to £132.1 million is not a pay rise for the King — the extra money is ring-fenced for the Buckingham Palace Reservicing Programme, a ten-year overhaul of the building's decades-old wiring, plumbing and heating. That project is due to finish in 2027, and the grant is expected to shrink once the bills are paid.
What the grant does not cover
This is where the “£2 a head” framing gets complicated. The Sovereign Grant pointedly does not pay for:
- Security — royal protection provided by the police and military is funded separately and its cost is not published, for obvious reasons.
- Ceremonial occasions such as coronations and state funerals, which are met by other government budgets.
Anti-monarchy campaigners, including the group Republic, argue that once security and other hidden costs are added, the true annual bill runs into hundreds of millions of pounds. The palace and monarchists respond that the Royal Family generates far more than it costs through tourism, trade and soft power. Both claims are contested; what is not in dispute is the official grant figure itself.
Grant, Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall: not the same thing
Public confusion often comes from mixing up three very different income streams. The Sovereign Grant is public money. The two Duchies are private estates that hand their profits to individual royals.
| Income source | Who receives it | What it funds |
|---|---|---|
| Sovereign Grant | The monarch (institution) | Official duties, upkeep of occupied palaces |
| Duchy of Lancaster | King Charles III (private) | Private and some official expenditure of the monarch |
| Duchy of Cornwall | Prince William, Prince of Wales (private) | The heir's household and private activities |
The Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall are landed estates worth hundreds of millions of pounds each, and their surpluses are entirely separate from the Sovereign Grant formula. Neither is counted in that £132.1 million.
Is it good value?
That is a political question rather than a financial one, and reasonable people land on opposite sides. What the numbers make clear is that the Sovereign Grant is smaller and more mechanical than many assume — a percentage of Crown Estate profits with a two-year lag — while the parts that inflame the debate, notably security, sit outside it altogether.
If you like following where big money moves, the same appetite for the numbers runs through our breakdowns of Wimbledon 2026 prize money and the FIFA World Cup 2026 payouts. And for Britain's privately wealthy rather than its royally funded, see how sports stars such as Harry Kane and Rory McIlroy built fortunes that dwarf the annual grant.
Figures are drawn from the Royal Trustees' Sovereign Grant report, royal.uk financial reports and The Crown Estate, and are accurate as of July 2026. Public estimates of security and other costs are contested and are not part of the official Sovereign Grant.
