Third Sector’s countdown of the highest-paid people in the UK voluntary sector reaches its penultimate stage with the release of the charities in spots 50 to 26.
This section of the Charity Pay Study 2024 includes charities that paid their highest earner between £284,441 and £350,000, according to their most recent set of accounts.
The list, which Third Sector has produced every two years since 2013 but has become annual for 2024, ranks the top 100 charities according to how much they pay their highest earner.
The list only includes the highest-paid person in each charity to ensure it is not dominated by a relatively small number of organisations.
The largest charity by annual income in this section is the British Council, which did not appear on the list last year because of a change in chief executives, but returns at number 30 this year.
The smallest was the think tank Asia House, which had an annual income of £2m and an average of 17 members of staff. It paid its highest-earning individual between £280,000 and £290,000 in 2023.
Unicef UK features on the list at number 50 because of termination payments of £103,000 in 2023 to Mike Flynn, its former deputy executive director of public engagement.
The charity’s executive director, Jon Sparkes, received a package worth £184,000, including pension contributions and social security costs, which would put him well outside the top 100 list this year.
One anomaly in this section is the Environmental Defense Fund UK, which lists its highest-paid person as receiving between £300,000 and £369,999.
This is in contravention of charity reporting requirements, which state that charities must list the number of people earning more than £60,000 in brackets of £10,000.
The charity, which did not identify its high earner in the accounts, did not respond to multiple attempts for clarification by Third Sector.
The final part of the list will be published on Monday.
Some of the charities include pension, national insurance and other contributions in their basic salary data, others do not. Some also include termination payments among their salary information, while others separate it out. Many charities on the list only list their high earner in a pay bracket of £10,000; where this is the case, the midpoint in the salary band is used for the purposes of any broad calculations.
Where pay brackets were £1 above or below the nearest £1,000, they have been rounded for consistency. In cases where two or more charities reported the same salary bracket for their highest earner, the organisation with the lowest annual income has been placed higher.