The King has several private properties \u2014 the Sandringham estate, Balmoral and Birkhall and a number of houses in Romania. Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, Kensington Palace and St James\u2019s Palace are all owned \u201cin right of the crown\u201d, meaning they cannot be sold.<\/p>\n
The Crown Estate\u2019s profits are soaring. Norman Baker, the former Liberal Democrat MP and author of Royal Mint: National Debt, a comprehensive investigation into the royal finances, noted in his book: \u201cThe crown estate \u2026 holds the rights to the seabed around Britain<\/a>. This means, incidentally, that Britain\u2019s huge expansion in offshore wind, the world\u2019s biggest such development, is giving the royals a huge windfall, hundreds of millions of pounds that before 2012 would have gone into the public purse.\u201d <\/p>\n In last year\u2019s royal settlement, funding for the royals rose by 53 per cent, from \u00a386.3 million to \u00a3132.1 million and it is set to rise to \u00a3137.9 million for 2026-27. This is expected to fall back again when the sovereign grant is reviewed later this year.<\/p>\n These sums are made public but what will happen next is largely unknown.<\/p>\n How much income tax do the royals pay? <\/p>\n It was the row over repairs after the Windsor Castle fire in 1993 that proved to be the catalyst for the late Queen to start paying income tax voluntarily on the income she received from her duchy. Her advisers convinced the Treasury that many of her costs, including some from the running of her private residences, could be put against tax, as legitimate expenses. <\/p>\n In 2025, the Duchy of Lancaster reported a surplus of \u00a324.4 million for Charles. The Palace says that the King pays tax at the highest rate on the income he took from this, but the precise sum is not disclosed. <\/p>\n \u2022 Revealed: the property empires that make Charles and William millions<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n The same goes for Prince William<\/a> with the money he takes from the Duchy of Cornwall. Last year it generated a surplus of \u00a322.9 million. The Palace says William also paid tax at the highest rate on his income \u2014 though it did not say how much.<\/p>\n Damage after the fire at Windsor Castle in 1992<\/p>\n PHOTO BY ENGLISH HERITAGE\/HERITAGE IMAGES\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n They are both allowed to make deductions before tax is paid. A memorandum of understanding agreed between the late Queen and the Treasury makes it clear that certain payments to support official duties are deductible, but the details are opaque. <\/p>\n Why do the duchies get other tax breaks? <\/p>\n The Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall are ancient landed estates, dating to the 14th century. They own tracts of land across many counties and scores of prime properties in central London. They have become wildly more successful in recent decades, moving away from rural homes to more lucrative properties including office blocks, service stations and shipping terminals. An investigation by The Sunday Times in 2024 revealed that the duchies were charging organisations including the NHS and the army to use their land. The Duchy of Lancaster alone received \u00a3829,348 annually from the NHS \u2014 \u00a311 million over 15 years \u2014 to allow ambulances to be parked in a south London warehouse.<\/p>\n The most recent accounts from the Duchy of Lancaster showed that its collective assets were worth \u00a3678.7 million. <\/p>\n \u2022 King Charles\u2019s estate to review rents charged to NHS and schools<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n While they operate like commercial estates, they are exempt from corporation tax and capital gains tax because they are Crown bodies, not companies. This is not popular with the public. A 2024 poll found three quarters of those surveyed believed that the royals should pay corporation tax and capital gains tax on their estates.<\/p>\n How was Andrew\u2019s settlement with Virginia Giuffre funded? <\/p>\n Details of the settlement Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor made with Virginia Giuffre<\/a> in 2022 following the civil claim she brought against him remain confidential. It was reported at the time that he paid about $15 million, although some subsequent reporting said the sum was much lower. <\/p>\n Andrew with Virginia Giuffre and Ghislaine Maxwell<\/p>\n AFP\/UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK<\/p>\n The Sun reported last month that Queen Elizabeth provided a \u201cloan\u201d of about \u00a37 million, a further \u00a33 million came from the estate of Prince Philip, and the remainder from other members of the royal family. The King has denied reports that he was party to the 2022 settlement, although it is possible that he inherited obligations from it made by the late Queen. <\/p>\n Questions remain, though, over the loan terms and the precise source of the funds. In particular, whether the sum from the Queen, who died later that year, came from the Duchy of Lancaster, the property portfolio that provides the monarch with an income. This would call into question the Palace\u2019s claim that the settlement was funded by the late Queen\u2019s \u201cprivate wealth\u201d. The Labour peer Baroness Hodge of Barking, who previously chaired the public accounts committee and has long probed the royal finances, said the duchy income should be considered \u201cpublic money given to the sovereign\u201d. <\/p>\n \u2022 The Queen was blind on Andrew \u2014 now the royals play catch-up<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n Andrew is said not to have paid back a penny. Initially, it was suggested that he would repay the loans by selling his Swiss ski lodge, Helora. However, he is thought to have made little from offloading the Verbier chalet for \u00a319 million in December 2022, as it had a hefty mortgage. <\/p>\n How does Andrew afford it all?<\/p>\n Andrew and his former wife, Sarah Ferguson<\/a>, had an extravagant lifestyle<\/a>, but how that was bankrolled has largely been shielded from public view. Andrew\u2019s array of wealthy friends with whom he has struck up working relationships \u2014 who include a Libyan gun smuggler and a smattering of Eurasian dictators \u2014 want confidentiality too. <\/p>\n Sarah Ferguson and Andrew at Royal Ascot in 2019<\/p>\n MAX MUMBY\/INDIGO\/GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n He receives a small pension of about \u00a320,000 annually from his career in the navy. Last year, as part of the King\u2019s attempt to address the Andrew issue, it emerged that he intended to give his brother an allowance for property and living expenses from his private funds. After his withdrawal from public life the late Queen gave her second son an annual allowance, believed to be \u00a31 million a year. <\/p>\n Before this, as a working royal, Andrew received support from the sovereign grant and, before that, through the civil list. In 2010, the last year for which there is a published figure, Andrew received \u00a3249,000. After David Cameron\u2019s government replaced the civil list with the sovereign grant in 2012, the sums given to individual family members became more opaque. <\/p>\n \u2022 Financier who gave Prince Andrew and Duchess of York \u00a31.4m is jailed<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n When he was a trade envoy, some of Andrew\u2019s excesses were mopped up by the taxpayer. Despite claims from the Palace that he paid for \u201call personal expenses\u201d during trade trips, civil servants now allege that some of Andrew\u2019s bills for massages<\/a> and exorbitant hotels were foisted on taxpayers. In 2009, it was revealed that he had spent \u00a360,000 of public money on chartering a private jet for a three-day jaunt to Azerbaijan to attend the Caspian Oil and Gas exhibition. He was close to the country\u2019s president, Ilham Aliyev, who would go on to win the inaugural Organised Crime and Corruption Person of the Year award in 2012. <\/p>\n Did Andrew receive a tax break from his house? <\/p>\n Sunninghill Park, a mansion near Ascot, was a wedding present to Andrew and Fergie from the late Queen when the pair married in 1986. The property, which was nicknamed Tesco Towers due to its unappealing red brick design, was sold in 2007 to Unity Assets Corporation, a British Virgin Islands-based business, for \u00a315 million \u2014 \u00a33 million above the asking price<\/a>. <\/p>\n Three years later, it emerged that the buyer was Timur Kulibayev, the son-in-law of the then-president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. No one ever moved in and the house was demolished a decade ago. Representatives of Andrew and the Kulibayev have always stated there was another potential buyer and that the transaction was purely commercial and legitimate.<\/p>\n Andrew kept the proceeds from the sale, even though the property had initially been owned by the Crown Estate for the benefit of the taxpayer. The Sunday Times revealed last year that the sale went through an opaque trust structure created by his mother. <\/p>\n A source who worked at HMRC in the late 1980s and 1990s alleged that when the property was rebuilt before Andrew and Sarah Ferguson moved in, he and his colleagues were told to treat the reconstruction as a new build, to prevent them having to pay VAT. \u201cThe work should have been charged at the standard rate and we zero-rated it because we were told to,\u201d he alleged. \u201cWord came down from above that we had to do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Why are their inheritances secret too?<\/p>\n![\"Fire](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1772330902_338_\/7b5b676c-1319-4797-b128-68eb2917cc48.jpg\")
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