‘This is why people aren’t donating any more’: The outcry over charity CEOs’ six-figure salaries

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/05/15/the-controversial-row-over-charity-ceos-six-figure-salaries/

by GnolRevilo

32 comments

  1. I’m sure they all do a very good job and when I’m next stopped in the street by a canvasser, I’ll be sure to bring it up as they ask me for my bank details as I walk back home from buying at the local charity shop. 

    Bags on show. 

  2. This has a ridiculous headline but surprisingly it isn’t a ridiculous article. It points out:

    *Oxfam, for example, brought in more than £300 million last year, employed 4,000 staff and 20,000 volunteers and ran more than 500 shops. This makes the CEO’s £125,000 salary seem rather low, particularly when you compare it with what an equivalent-sized private company would probably be paying for a CEO role – probably somewhere between £500,000 and £1 million a year.*

    and

    *While there are many charity executives on very healthy salaries, those who receive remuneration in the high six or even seven figures usually work for companies that don’t rely on donations from the public. This includes the Wellcome Trust, a charity that makes its money from an investment portfolio.*

  3. Good luck getting a top quality CEO for 5 figures. It’s tough to stomach but the reality is C level paid are on top notch pay. If you want quality you need to at least attempt to compete.

  4. Been going on for years, biggest scammers out there.

  5. I stopped giving to large charities for this very reason 25 – 30 years ago. I was a truck driver and had the job with a couple of other guys I worked with to go to Cancer Research in London to move them about a 1/3 of a mile. While waiting to start the move I glanced out the window into the car park. It was full of luxury cars. We moving filing cabinets and I said why are they moving a third of a mile down the road expecting the answer to be the lease is up. It was a simple answer. Postcode W1 to WC1. All we moved was the files. The rest of it which was perfectly good was skipped. The cars were all directors and the CEO and so on. When I got to the new office, all new furniture and that prestigious postcode. So you want to know where your donations go,

    When I got back I did some research of my own into what these senior management get paid. It was shocking.

    Now move on 25 years, they don’t want a donation, they want you to have a subscription so they can carry topping up their bonuses.

    I even went around with my mum when I was a young teenager collecting donations.

    I now only donate to local charities with local interests at heart.

  7. The problem is CEO pay in the private sector has become completely divorced from actual performance or outcomes. It’s just a ridiculous number regardless of whether you do a decent job (see Thames Water executives).

    The idea was that CEOs get the high salary because the buck stops with them. Fairly or not, if anything went wrong, they took responsibility and it was their career on the line if it didn’t. And much of that big salary number was tied to the fortune of the company (i.e. company stocks).

    Now that link has completely been divorced and large company CEOs are paid 7 figures just by default so the charity sector struggles to compete.

  8. What would you rather, a well ran charity paying a £200k CEO salary and managing to do £10m of good? Or a shit show with a £50k CEO salary doing £1m of good?

    Who am I kidding, I know exactly what most of the population would go for…

  9. More transparency is needed so the media platforms can report with less speculation.

  10. Why would someone who is competent and qualified choose to be CEO of a major charity if the pay was going to be peanuts for such a role?

    Charities report annually the percentage of their income that makes it directly to the cause they are supporting. When I was at Teenage Cancer Trust this was around 80p per £1 donated – and I still had people telling me that wasn’t good enough somehow. 

    In my 2 years there as a fundraiser I sourced over £350,000 of funding from some of the most deprived areas of the UK, and yet I would regularly get told I should be ashamed of myself for taking a wage from a charity – as if my children don’t deserve to eat or have a house

  11. Expecting people on 5-figure salaries to club together and donate to pay 6-figure salaries was always a hard sell. Bosses pay is completely disconnected to employees and what the majority will ever have the opportunity to earn. The charity sector has to keep up with industry to keep the calibre. Some charities are wasteful/greedy and that tars the others. I find the Charity Commission website useful as they detail the number of people earning over £60K.

  12. It’s wrong to say this level of pay is OK because of the CEO pay levels at other private companies. BOTH pay levels are too high. CEO pay is divorced from reality. This is why we end up with billionaires and a poor middle class.

  13. “Six figures” sounds a lot but that’s only £100k which isn’t exactly loads of money for a CEO.

  14. Elephant in the room for the big charities is how many of them are unnecessarily based in London. 

  15. It is not just the high salaries that appear to be a problem. Another issue is the amounts of money spent in fundraising. Money going into advertising and marketing and not into the aims of the charity itself. Still all this extra spending just generates more taxes for the government.

  16. I’d never donate to large charities. I dislike them even more since they started sending paid chuggers out to knock on doors!

    here are a huge number of smaller, local charities to donate to instead. Not necessarily local to where *you* are- my personal choice is animal rescue orgs. Some are in places I’ve never been anywhere near.

    A couple I’ve donated to have NO paid staff, letalone a CEO.

  17. Let’s not pretend that the charities are getting “value for money”.
    All the talk of CEOs salaries, overlooks that in many cases the charity runs itself. And that the CEO is only wanted because of their connections, or due to a “regime” change inside the charity.
    Charities tend to rely on their operations staff a lot more than whatever high salary CEO has been brought it that year. And it’s a rare charity CEO that is working full time for that charity.

  18. typical tory tripe again from the Torygraph

    the only people who even give a shit about charity CEO pay is those who’s own pay and living conditions are shit.. and that’s because of wealth inequality, which is the intended result of the neoloberal Thaterism we’re living through

  19. Reading the article I feel like for many the issue isn’t CEO salary it’s how fucked our economy is. The person that earns £23k or so a year is rightly complaining she can’t afford anything, but that’s not the fault of charity CEOs is it? We’ve had decades of government mismanagement, greedy companies and wages falling in real terms, minimum wage 50 years ago was enough to support an entire family and own a home, if that was the case now I am sure there would be far fewer complaints. I get people having a knee jerk reaction to hearing these salaries but if they weren’t struggling themselves would it really matter that much, surely the important thing is the % of money the charity uses for their cause, and how effectively they spend that money.

    Also the charity CEOs could earn 3-5 times more in the private sector, 279k is a lot of money but it’s a 700m turnover business, in the private sector that’s a £1- £2m annual package role easily, maybe more. Assuming they do a decent job they deserve genuine thanks and recognition, how many people would turn down a 3-5 times pay increase to go from charity to private. Ridiculous response from the general public

  20. For me it’s less about what the CEO is getting and more about the ratio of the wages to actual charity work. If a charity is spending 97% of its income on the CEO and other workers, what’s the point. If they’re using a larger portion of the cash on the actual end products of charity work (i.e. that service users are benefiting from) then the CEO’s salary doesn’t really matter

  21. Controversial. Let’s ask a simple question. What does a CEO of a charity actually do? It’s non-profit. It already has a business model. There are no improvements to be made other than those suggested by the people working in the shops. What exactly are they doing? They don’t even need to manage people because there will be other directors (also doing nothing) on top of area managers, regional managers and shop managers.

    These people are leeches. They will be directing profits to stocks and shares to make profits never spent rather than actually help the people the charity was set up for.

    If you want to give to charity then find a local one like a hospice or animal sanctuary. I’m shocked people are defending them. Where do you think chuggers (charity muggers who accost you for a direct debit on the high street for those that don’t know) came from? Who do you think is giving them bonuses for your money? They aren’t volunteers. It makes me sick to think about it.

  22. Oooh nooo 6 figure, they might almost afford a terraced house one day

  23. Charity pay at all levels is very poor compared to the private and public sector. A CEO running a public sector organisation with revenues of £300m would easily be on £175k.

  24. Yeah when people defend this it often goes something like

    “Well the value they bring justifies it, you just don’t understand business”

    Cool I am not donating to a business

  25. Some of these big charities are a genuine disgrace with the way they handle funds, run up expenses etc. But this is not an issue, they need a good CEO to stay alive and 6 figures isnt even that ridiculous. Industry/FTSE CEOs will take home millions. Id rather the funds were placed in the hands of a competent exec team

    So 6 figures isnt even getting you the best of the best. Good luck getting a competent one for sub 100k, coz even if you did find one theyd be gone in a hot minute

    Because the system is unequal just get way too bothered about people earning big salaries.

  26. I have a feeling these comments where written by CEOs

  27. Umm… tax people less and they’ll have more money in their pockets. That should help. Also I never understood why tax money is used to give out to charities, just seems like it breaks the idea, and the money could be more usefully spent elsewhere, or go into reducing taxes.

  28. It has been the virtue signalling go to executive to job for some time, badly run with an average of 5% of revenue going to the named cause, it has just become another rort for wealth extraction & tax avoidance.

    An aquantance worked for one of the big UK charities, the directors awarded themselves new range rovers while cutting head count to save costs.

    In a post industrial economy the work world is packed with rent seekers looking for well paying jobs.

    HR
    Public Service
    Charities
    Compliance everything from DEI to Climate

    All are just bloated refuges for make work wealth extraction.

  29. Damn this divide and conquer mind virus has really got to some people hasn’t it!?

    What is the problem ? Of course charity CEOs should get paid properly.
    Just because it may be a charity, why does that mean they shouldn’t be paid properly for highly competitive, challenging, accountable, strategic etc work.

    I’m an accountant for an international big charity, I get paid £55k, less comparatively than I’d get in the private sector. CFO gets about £100k, again way lower than compared to in business. Still doing the same job, still need to be an experienced chartered accountant finance professional.
    Your CFO, along with all the other C suite roles: HR director, COO, General counsel/chief legal, chief marketing. etc these are the people the CEO manages. CEO is accountable to board of trustees, responsible for huge restricted funding packets from a variety of donors, gov agencies, institutions, philanthropy etc plus potentially commercial fundraising operations as well.

    If you want skilled people you pay for it. Anyone who wrongs their hands about charity or public sector people being paid for what they do is pathetically ignorant.

  30. Charities providing services that should be provided by the state instead and funded by progressive taxation.

    It’s an obvious problem with an obvious solution.

  32. I think it’s used as an excuse for people not to give to charity, but I don’t think it’s a reason. As here, people are wise enough to understand why charities need to pay some large salaries.

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