King Charles will receive a whopping £45 million pay rise, which means that his official yearly income will go up by more than 50 per cent.
The annual accounts for Buckingham Palace were made public on last week. They cover the first full fiscal year of the king’s rule. They include the months after King Charles and the Princess of Wales were both diagnosed with cancer. From January on, neither could do any public work.
There will be a rise in the sovereign grant from £86 million in 2024-25 to £132 million in 2025-26, thanks to profits of £1.1 billion from the Crown Estate. This is part of the money that supports the throne.
Crown Estate
The monarchy gets 12 per cent of the income from the Crown Estate, which it uses to pay for its work and the £369 million renovation of Buckingham Palace that will take 10 years. Aides to the Royal family said that the extra money will be used to finish the castle reservicing project by 2027.
A report from the National Audit Office (NAO) said that the project to renovate the palace was well managed, although rising costs due to structural damage and the finding of asbestos could have been foreseen. The net cost of the 10-year project, as of the end of March, was £238.9m, which is 65 per cent of the budget.
The amount given to the palace by the sovereign gift will be looked at again in 2026–27 to make sure it is appropriate.
Prince of Wales
Royal records also show that the Prince of Wales got £23.6 million from the Duchy of Cornwall in the first full year after his father died and left him the land and property estate.
The Prince and Princess of Wales, their three children and their non-profit work are all paid for by the duchy surplus. Aides say that after government costs are taken out, William pays a standard rate tax on the amount, just like his father did.
In 2019/2020, King Charles (the then Prince of Wales) received more than £1 million from the people of Cornwall who died intestate—meaning they passed away without leaving a will.
Intestacy rules
Due to a rule on unclaimed estates that dates to the Middle Ages, if a person in Cornwall dies intestate and has no surviving relatives then the estate automatically goes to the Prince of Wales. A similar rule is in place in Lancaster for the Duchy of Lancaster, which also dates to the same time.
For the rest of the country, if a person dies with no will and no next of kin then the estate is passed over to the Crown, as per England and Wales’ intestacy rules.
The big rise in the sovereign grant in 2025–6 and 2026-7 will pay for the last stages of the Buckingham Palace reservicing programme, according to Michael Stevens, the king’s Keeper of the Privy Purse. This will allow to finish on budget and in time.
Public reimbursed
Frogmore Cottage, the house on the Windsor estate that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex paid £2.4 million to have fixed up, is still empty. The public has since been reimbursed for the costs of the renovations.
There were more than 2,300 official events by royal family members in the UK and abroad this year, down from more than 2,700 last year.
Charles took part in 464 public engagements, and the queen went on 201, of which 103 were joint engagements. The wedding and events that happened around it last year cost the sovereign grant £600,000. This meant that the total cost to the sovereign grant was £800,000.
Staffing and palace parties
This amount included costs like staffing and palace parties, as well as any furniture or costumes that could be used again, like the king and queen’s coronation robes and the Imperial State Crown that needed to be adjusted.
Charles’s income went up because the crown estate’s earnings more than doubled, going from £443m the previous year to £1.1bn in 2023–24. The crown estate is the country’s collection of historical and commercial landholdings.
The royal household used to get 25 per cent of the crown estate’s profits to pay for their official duties and the renovations. But last year, the government and royal household agreed that the royal household would only get 12 per cent. This was partly because they were looking forward to the huge money that would come in from the auction of offshore wind licenses.