The Martin Lewis Charity Fund 2026: £25m explained...

As that pledge was public, I feel there’s a duty of transparency to account for what it's done. So I blog an update roughly once a year. This is the 2026 version and I’m pleased to say it's going well...

The big picture: the original £10m is now well over £25m

It’s now 14 years since the original donation, so no surprise things have changed. Thankfully, though, it's in a positive way…

• Charities fund: £20.6m. Originally I put £9m into a Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) fund, which works like a charity bank account – I decide where the money goes, but can only use it to make charitable-type donations (anyone can do this for £10+/mth donations).
  
  - Of that, £11.3m has been paid directly to charities from the fund
  - Even better, there’s still almost £9.3m left in the fund.
  
  If you think this doesn't add up, delightfully you're right. Primarily that’s because the investments I put a chunk of the CAF charity money in did well, and the money has earned interest too. So that means the total donated plus still in the fund is £20.6m.

• Citizens Advice: £2m was donated separately directly to Citizens Advice (£1m in 2012, and another £1m in 2015).

• Other adjacent donations: £5m. On top of that £22.6m, there's another £5m of donations, I'll detail below, which either weren't in the original pledge, were before the pledge, or the funding was indirect.

All in all, making as large a number as possible, that's a total of well over £27m (whoop whoop). So let's start with a table of the key Major Charity Recipients...

The Big Projects in more detail

This year, I’ve been focusing on existing projects, so the main change is just more money to them. I do have a really interesting new project idea, it’s early days, I’m putting it out to tender at the moment to find a charity partner to deliver. Can’t say anything yet, but it’ll be (very) public when I do hopefully by summer - though no promises.

1. THE BIG ONE… The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI): £5.1m.

I set up the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI) charity in 2016, and still provide its core annual funding (£400,000 in 2026). It has been far more successful than I could have ever envisaged, mostly due to the dedication and hard work of its now unbelievable 25 brilliant full-time team members.

Its role is to break the toxic link between money problems and debt problems, by researching and advocating non-partisan practical policy changes at government, regulators and companies – so its work can impact millions. Excitingly, at the start of 2026 we got FCA 'super-complainant' status, making MMHPI only the fourth organisation to have that powerful status at all three financial regulators (alongside august company: Citizens Advice, Which?, and the National Consumer Council for Northern Ireland) - an amazing accolade for the team's work.

MMHPI has been at the forefront of many crucial changes, as you can see in the MMHPI timeline. These include...

- Getting the government to agree to improve hideous Council Tax debt collection processes
- Introducing gambling blocks on credit and debit cards
- Working to get debt advice embedded within mental health work
- Getting debt breathing space for people in NHS crisis care
- Our Mental Health Accessible audit team has pushed many big firms to improve how vulnerable customers are treated.

Crucially, all MMHPI's work is real-world based, as when our team of policy experts come up with solutions, we then ensure it goes through the thousands on the MMHPI lived experience panel to get their views and experience. If you've had money & mental health issues, please do consider joining it.

The charity is doing so well, I’ve been able to start to reduce my core annual donation, as other groups (often large charity funds) have been donating too or funding specific research (always done with total independence).

2. The 'Martin Lewis Coronavirus Poverty Fund': £3.4m. (£2.1m from me, £1.3m raised from others).

At the start of the Covid crisis, back in March 2020, my aims were simple...

- To provide urgent relief to those struggling due to the pandemic
- To use my profile to bring in other donations (before the official fundraising scheme was in place)
- To do this via small charities, in order to help them survive too, including food banks, domestic abuse charities, cancer groups and more

At the final tally, I'd put £2.1m in and, wonderfully, after asking others with deep pockets to join, they added £1.3m, all of which meant 415 small charities received an average of £8,000 each at speed. For full details, including a breakdown of where the money went and how we decided, see Covid poverty fund – where the money went blog.

NB: While the external donations technically went to my charity fund, so they could be paid out, I haven't included them in the main fund totals at the blog's start (but they are in the 'adjacent' £5m).

3. Financial education in schools (including textbook) via Young Money: £1.8m.

Financial education has long been a campaigning priority for me. Delightfully this year we heard that financial education will be strengthened in England’s curriculum, and I’m already having talks about what is needed to make that work, which may see the numbers for this bit increase in coming years.

I worked with the Young Money (then Pfeg) branch of the Young Enterprise charity in our first successful campaign to get financial education on the English national curriculum in 2014, so the charity seemed a natural partner, and I've campaigned with it, and funded a number of projects since...

- Funding and developing the first curriculum-mapped financial education textbook, and sending 340,000 of them to all English state schools (100 per school). Click for a free PDF download.
- Then the UK's official Money and Pensions Service, agreed to go halves with me, to do further textbooks for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with each of us putting in £162,000.
- To go with the textbook, a new teachers' digital e-learning pack to help teachers
- Funding My Money Week 2016-2018, so kids in all UK schools get access to free managing money resources.
- In recent years, I’ve funded further digital teaching resources to accompany the textbook.

4. Citizens Advice UK: £2m.

Two £1m donations in 2012 and 2015 split across UK nations in proportion to population. I did this partly as I love Citizens Advice's voluntary ethos, but also to expose that debt-counselling funding had been cut by the Government during the recession.

With the second donation back in 2016 I was delighted they used the money in England to set up the Martin Lewis Citizens Advice Fund (its choice of name, not mine), giving local branches innovation grants to develop new digital and other ways to reach and help more people – which hopefully paid dividends during the pandemic.

5. Trussell Trust: £650,000.

The bulk of this money was for the Trussell Trust to first pilot, then in 2015 roll out, putting financial triage in food banks. Part of the idea was to see if the concept worked so that the food banks could then engage councils and other community stakeholders to do it everywhere. It did work. Then for Christmas 2022, I also funded a straight £50,000 donation towards food poverty, in light of the cost of living crisis.

6. The MSE Charity: £450,000.

This is the total of my personal donation(s) to the MSE Charity since 2012. I set the charity up in 2007 to give grants to small charities working in consumer education or financial empowerment and it's still going. This money is separate from my donations before 2012 and MSE's (i.e., MONY Group's) donations since. In total, they add up to a further £1.2m (that isn’t included in my charity fund totals at the top of the blog, as it's not from me).

7. Grief Encounter (including the helpline): £207,000.

Grief Encounter provides grief counselling and help for children who have lost a parent or sibling. While I normally focus on charities within my expertise, as those who have heard/seen my 2018 BBC Radio 5 Live interview on grief will know, this is something that, sadly, strongly resonates with me.

I was already a patron of the charity when a couple of years ago they mentioned the idea of a helpline so children who were struggling had someone they could call. It struck a chord. I wished I'd had such a service, so I agreed to fund setting it up and running a year. As that year ended, Covid hit, demand went up, but funding opportunities elsewhere disappeared, so I agreed to fund a second year to keep it going.

8. The mortgage prisoners campaign: £60,000.

Perhaps my most frustrating one on the list. The funds were to write three London School of Economics mortgage prisoners reports, to provide policy solutions to help the 200,000 people unjustly, desperately and life-debilitatingly trapped in closed-book mortgages due to the financial crash. The last report was published in February 2023 and sent to the Government after it'd agreed to look at the solutions. Nothing happened.

There is a now a new Government and we continue to push for justice for these people whose lives have been devastated, made even worse in recent years by the spike in interest rates. Still though, no news (this is an unedited cut and paste from last year's blog, which sadly tells you all you need to know about how little has changed).

9. A cheat. £3m to set up Citizens Advice Scams Action (not my money).

In 2018, I started a campaigning lawsuit against Facebook for defamation after it kept publishing huge numbers of scam ads with my name and image in. In 2019, I dropped the case, and as part of the settlement it agreed to donate £3m to set up a new anti-scam wing of Citizens Advice, and launch a scam ad reporting tool unique to the UK. For more, see Martin Lewis in possibly record settlement with Facebook.

I wish it had worked better. The charity has helped many, but now I feel like there are still as many scams on Meta and elsewhere as there’s ever been. Worse they are now often deep-fake videos with criminals using the technology to try and gain even more money off people.

After that I worked on a campaign (with both MSE, MMHPI and others) to get the government to include scam ads in the Online Safety Bill. It did. That act is now in place, but we’re still over 18 months away from it being implemented. Social media and the internet in general still remains an unprotected wild west for scams...

NB: For clarity, this Facebook money ISN'T included in my fund totals at the top (barring the 'adjacent' category).

Transparency is important for charities.

If you think the blog is overkill, there’s another point I want to make here. I believe transparency is important in charities, both about who is donating, but especially for charities who do policy work to be overt about who the bigger donors are. That way people can decide for themselves if there's an agenda or any vested interests. Sadly, not all do. I hope to be clear about what I'm linked to here. Plus, the blog is also a good opportunity to talk about some charities you may know less about (or may not know are charities).

Where else money has gone, other smaller projects...

• £165,000 to the Support Through Court helpline. I'd been a patron of this charity, which helps those having to represent themselves in the civil or family courts (due to terrible legal aid cuts). Then Covid hit and its helpline funding ran dry, so I stepped in to help for the year.

• £147,500 to Money Buddies, a Leeds-based financial help counselling charity.

• £110,000 to Demos to fund a digital democracy toolkit, to allow policy suggestions to be worked on with the general public rather than just policy wonks.

• £100,000 to Mind for mental health work.

• £100,000 to National Energy Action to fund a new web chat service in time for the 1 April 2022 54% price hike – in order to relieve pressure on its oversubscribed phone lines.

• £45,000 to the John Schofield Trust to support mentoring, to improve the range of voices in my industry, broadcast journalism, so it's not just those who know someone who get the help.

• £35,000 to First Light Trust for financial triage and drug help for military veterans.

• £20,000 to the RNIB to support those who have lost their sight to manage their financial lives.

• £16,000 to fund the Alzheimer's Society financial services charter.

• £10,000 to Drive Forward Foundation.

• £10,000 to Winston's Wish to help children and young people who have lost a parent.

• £10,000 to High Performance Foundation, supporting young people to help improve resilience, mental health and employability skills.

• £8,000 to CILIP to write and publish the A warm welcome: Setting up a warm space in your community report.

There are a decent number of donations below £8,000 too, but I think that is a good cut-off.

The (attempt at) logic behind these donations

A 'giving philosophy' at first sounded a bit pratty to me, but I now feel it’s a good modern term for deciding what donations you make – and I do try to have a logic behind my decisions.

I've always believed MoneySavingExpert.com, while profit-making, has a public service remit at its core. Its primary job (since 2012, this has been codified and protected by our Editorial Code) is to cut people's bills and fight their corner.

Yet there are many people, and sectors, a website and broadcasting don't reach or help. So as I'm fortunate enough to have substantial funds so I can give to charity, I want to fill in some of the gaps. Many of the donations try to do just that. For example...

• Citizens Advice, Money Buddies & National Energy Action give 1-on-1 help, which a website can't do.

• MMHPI helps those with mental health issues, which can impair people's ability to help themselves.

• Trussell Trust financial triage helps many offline without access to crucial information.

• Financial education is there to help prevent future problems.

Of course, some donations, such as those to the John Schofield Trust and Grief Encounter, are more personal, but overall I hope there is a cohesion to my giving.

Other charities I work with (often as a patron)

As we're on the subject of charity and I'm self-auditing, to finish, it's probably also worth noting down those charities I'm a patron of or ambassador for, which I haven't already mentioned:

• The Social Mobility Business Partnership, which gives children from underprivileged backgrounds access to professions and work experience so they're not disadvantaged.

• National Numeracy, to help improve functional numeracy.

• Living Wage Foundation, I'm one of its 'champions'.

If you got all the way down to here, thank you for reading.