What you can spend the money on

Where Million Hours funding comes from

Million Hours funding comes from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and The National Lottery Community Fund (the Fund).

The funding is divided like this:

• £12 million from DCMS, to be spent by 31 March 2026
• £7 million from the Fund, to be spent by 31 March 2027

When you need to spend the money by

Because of the way this funding is divided, most of the funding needs to be spent by 31 March 2026.

If you are applying, you should plan to:

• spend most of the funding by 31 March 2026 (at least 63%)
• run most of your activities by 31 March 2026
• decrease funding and activities after 31 March 2026
• spend all your funding by 31 March 2027

For example, if you have £50,000 you should spend at least £31,500 by 31 March 2026.

You should show how you’ll do this in the budget that you send with your application.

You should not increase how much your organisation is spending until we’ve offered you funding

As we will not be able to fund everyone who applies.

What we can fund

Most of the funding you ask for should be for the direct costs of running extra hours of youth work.

We can fund:

• staff salaries to deliver this work
• volunteer costs to deliver this work
• training costs
• other direct costs to deliver youth work, like materials, equipment and food
• the cost of reporting back to us about your funding

We can also fund overheads

This could include things like part of your rent or insurance. Or part of a salary for someone not directly involved in this work. Like a senior manager or an office admin worker.

For example, delivering these extra hours of youth work could end up being a quarter of the work your organisation does. In that case, we might fund a quarter of your overheads for that time.

This is sometimes known as full cost recovery. Find out how to work out overheads in our guide to full cost recovery.

What we cannot fund

We cannot fund:

• things you’ve spent money on in the past and are looking to claim for now (retrospective costs)
• buying a vehicle
• buying land
• building works, maintenance, or refurbishment
• activities that unreasonably benefit particular individuals, rather than the wider community
• projects where political activities are the main purpose, or that support or oppose a specific political party
• religious activities (we can fund religious organisations if their project benefits the wider community and does not include religious content)
• loan repayments
• fundraising activities
• services that you have a statutory duty to provide
• activities that make profits for private gain
• VAT reclaimable from HMRC
• contributions in kind
• partnership set up costs
• entertaining
• statutory fines or penalties