A record more than 38,000 wills included gifts to charity last year, pushing the total donated to a new annual high.
The legacy notification company Smee & Ford said there were 38,178 charitable estates recorded in Engand and Wales in 2023, the highest number since it started tracking sector data in 2012.
The company said it estimated that charitable legacy income totalled more than £3.9bn in the year to the end of June 2023, based on data filed with the Charity Commission and its own estimate for charities that do not provide legacy information to the regulator, up 3.2 per cent on the previous year.
Smee & Ford said almost 11,000 different charities were mentioned in wills in 2023, the highest figure it had recorded and beating the previous high of 10,708 in 2021.
The figures come as His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service works to reduce a backlog that built up in the probate service during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The sums received by charity have been boosted by a general rise in the average value of estates in recent years.
Smee & Ford, which examines every will that passes through probate in England and Wales, said 13.7 per cent of wills included a gift to charity.
In a report, Smee & Ford said the Office for National Statistics has predicted that the number of annual deaths, which was 581,367 in 2023, will rise to 700,000 by 2023.
“Based on these predictions and if the trend towards leaving charitable gifts in wills continues, we can expect to see the number of charitable estates reach 40,000 in 2029 and the total number of bequests in wills to surpass 130,000 in 2028, reaching 150,000 by 2043,” the report said.