Political party donations and loans in Great Britain

You must report certain donations and loans to us so we can publish them to provide transparency for voters. We publish details of the amounts and the donors and lenders on our website. We do not publish the addresses of individuals who donate or lend.1

You must submit quarterly reports showing donations accepted and loans your party entered into during each reporting period. You must report all impermissible donations dealt with (returned or forfeited) and all impermissible loans entered into during the relevant reporting period. You must also report certain changes to existing loans. There are separate reports for donations and for loans.

We use ‘benefits’ to refer to both donations and loans over £500. Benefits of £500 or under are not covered by the law and do not need to be recorded, added together or reported.2

The reporting requirements below apply to benefits accepted by a central party organisation. If your party has accounting units, the central party treasurer is responsible for reporting benefits from accounting units as well.3  A different reporting threshold applies to accounting units. You can find more information in the section on Parties with accounting units.

Permissible benefits

Parties are required to report benefits that exceed a set threshold, whether this is by a single donation or through multiple benefits. This ensures there is parity between single and aggregated donations and loans. 

In the legislation, multiple benefits are reportable when the “aggregate amount” of the benefits exceeds the reporting threshold. In the guidance, we call this grouping benefits.

The first time the total of all permissible donations accepted or loans entered into from the same source in the same calendar year exceeds £11,180, you must report these benefits. This may be a single donation or loan of over £11,180, or multiple benefits which together add up to more than £11,180.4

Once you have accepted a benefit or group of benefits of over £11,180 in a calendar year, for the rest of the year you must report any additional benefits from the same source each time the total of benefits that have not previously been required to be reported exceeds £2,230.5