2025 Salary Survey: fundraising market trends

Driven by high demand and short supply, fundraisers' salaries have been rising in recent years, but how have things changed in the last 12 months? What kind of roles are organisations offering and which are the most challenging to fill?

Here's what our fundraising specialists had to say in our 2025 Salary Survey (available here).

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​It’s not the way we might want it to happen, but a combination of fewer vacancies and significant redundancies across the sector has boosted the number of fundraisers in the market for new jobs, alleviating some of the more extreme candidate shortages that have characterised the last few years.

That’s taken much of the pressure off salaries, which are broadly where we left them a year ago, with some in areas like trust fundraising for smaller charities even having slipped back slightly.

Any uplift has been mainly at the most junior levels, thanks to candidates turning down starting salaries around £23k, on the understandable grounds that living on them has progressed from challenging to near-impossible, however many luxuries (travel, food, basic human dignity…) you’re prepared to give up.

Rising costs and their causes are also behind a sharp rise in the number of 12-month contracts ‘with a view to extend if successful’.

That’s essentially fundraising code for ’if you’re bringing in enough revenue for the role to pay for itself’. At a time when predicting anything much beyond a week in advance seems audacious, secure funding for the future is increasingly rare.

As a result, we’re also seeing an increase in roles covering two or more fundraising functions, such as Corporate Partnerships and Trusts, Corporate and Community, or Community and Events.

Nonetheless, fundraisers have been valiantly hitting targets and maintaining revenue despite the challenging market. The only trouble is that rising operational costs mean they need to be raising more than ever just to stand still.

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It’s not who you are, but where you’re at

You’d imagine that having more fundraisers on the market would make vacancies easier to fill, but for every position where that holds true, there’s another that’s as challenging as ever, and the difference is often location.

With charity HQs (particularly of larger organisations) heavily concentrated in the South East, fundraisers are too, presenting challenges for those hoping to recruit them further afield. Back within the fundraising heartlands however, it’s perhaps less about the office location than how often you want people there.

Flexibility is still hugely important to candidates and fortunately for them, there’s little sign in the charity sector of the growing ’back to the office’ push currently afflicting the business world.

For many organisations, that’s likely because the funds saved on office space are now a lifeline elsewhere, throwing a spanner in the works of any reversal. As such, flexibility looks ironically permanent, and asking candidates for more than three days a week on site is asking for trouble finding potential applicants.

One reason is that many fundraisers have seized the opportunity of remote and hybrid working to swap the country’s priciest corner for places where their salaries will stretch further. Having done so, the prospect of returning to a longer and more expensive daily commute has all the appeal of a three-day train delay outside Milton Keynes, as they’d rather not discover in person.

As for the most sought-after candidates? Making their tenth appearance too, it’s fundraisers with around a year’s experience: the sweet spot at which they’ve been trained (crucially, at someone else’s expense) and can add value, but are still junior enough to accept a lower salary.

And as ever, there are very few of them around, largely because no-one wants to be the mug that invests in training new starters, only for everyone else to poach them the moment they’re done.

So what is the solution? And will we still be asking this question in another ten years? That might be the one prediction we can make with absolute confidence...

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For more on the market, including this year's figures across each major department, see the full 2025 Salary Survey here, or for help with recruiting or your charity job search, just contact our specialists, call us on 020 7820 7300 or email info@harrishill.co.uk

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