Total headcount

• In 2023 the voluntary sector in Scotland employed just over 136,000 people.
• That means that 5% of Scotland's 2.66m workers are employed in the voluntary sector.

Workforce growth

The sector’s paid staff headcount grew substantially in the early 2000s and then flattened off and hovered between 125,000 to 128,000. There was then a small rise to 135,000 in 2019/20 and the figure has remained fairly stable for the last few years, sitting at 136,000 in 2023.

The chart above also presents figures from the Annual Population Survey (APS)/Labour Force Survey (LFS). These show a roughly similar trend over time. However, the APS figures are substantially lower than the OSCR figures, possibly due to APS survey respondents only being asked about their main jobs and the survey relying on people to self-identify as working in the third sector. We do however use the APS/ LFS data on proportions of part-time workers and for workforce diversity figures - see below.

In the most recent wave of the Scottish Third Sector Tracker in Spring 2025, 67% of responding organisations said they had seen their own staff numbers stay the same, 20% said it had decreased. Only 12% said the number of staff had increased, down from 24% in the Autumn 2024 wave suggesting that we might see a small dip in staff numbers over the next year.

Full Time Equivalents (FTEs)

• We estimate that the voluntary sector in Scotland employs just over 101,000 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff.
• The high level of part-time workers in our sector means that the number of FTE employees is substantially lower than the headcount of 136,000.

We estimate that the voluntary sector in Scotland employs just over 101,000 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff. This is made up of around 89,000 FTE staff working for Scottish charities and a further 2,000 FTEs employed in other third sector organisations such as Credit Unions and CICs, and around 10,000 FTEs employed in the Scottish arms of UK-wide charities.

For comparison, the Scottish Social Enterprise Census estimates that 89,970 FTE employees worked in the social enterprise sector in 2021. The Census includes the majority of large voluntary sector employers.

Note: Please note that our estimates for FTE employees are not as robust as the headcount figures. As part of SCVO’s charity accounts analysis we look at staff headcount data and also collect FTE data. Unfortunately, FTE data was only available in around a fifth of the accounts examined in 2023. While our FTE estimates are based on a small sample of around 150 organisations we have included them here as it is important to recognise that the high level of part-time workers in our sector means that the number of FTE employees is substantially lower than the total headcount.

As well as directly employed staff the sector also pays the wages of many more people who are not considered 'employees', for example accountants, consultants, cleaners, tutors and tradespeople etc.

Casual workers and agency staff are also often not included in employee figures.

The sector also plays an important role in stimulating jobs in the wider economy. It isn’t possible to put an exact figure on the number of jobs indirectly linked to sector activity but some areas to consider include:

• encouraging tourism (for example, the amount of people brought in by things like the Edinburgh Festival, community arts festivals, theatres, museums, zoos) and knock-on impact on local businesses.
• stimulating construction, eg housing association properties, heritage renovations, hospice builds. 
• purchasing specialist services such as design, printing, marketing, software etc from other businesses.
• hiring spaces and hospitality staff for charity conferences and fundraising events.

More than a third of the voluntary sector's workforce work part-time - a far higher proportion than in the public and private sectors.

37% of the Scottish voluntary sector’s workforce is currently part-time according to the Annual Population Survey (APS) (Jan -Dec Tables, Table 1.19B).   This is substantially higher than both the public sector (28%) and the private sector (25%).

According to the APS 55,200 people work full-time in the third sector and 31,800 people work part-time.  As mentioned above the total APS figure of 87,000 people working in the Scottish third sector is substantially lower than our own estimate of 136,000.  This is due to the APS survey relying on people self-identifying their employer as being third sector, but in addition the APS only looks at people’s main jobs, meaning that it may be missing a number of part-time employees whose primary job is in the public or private sector.  If so, the rate of part-time working in the sector may be even higher than 37%.

Note: in the Annual Population Survey (APS), respondents self-classify their main job as either full-time or part-time, based on their own assessment of whether they work full-time or part-time, rather than any specific hourly threshold.

Other data sources on part-time working

The Scottish Social Services Council (SSSC) and Care Inspectorate have data on the paid workforce employed in the social service sector across the public, private and voluntary sector. While this data is for 2,300 voluntary sector care providers and only covers around half of voluntary sector employees it is interesting to note that the SSSC data shows that more people in the voluntary sector work part-time than full-time. The extent to which the social care workforce differs from the wider sector workforce is not clear.

• The SSSC figures for 2023 show 53% of voluntary sector employees in social care being part-time.

"There is a lively ongoing debate within the sector about the pros and cons of different types of funding arrangements. This covers, for example, the purported shift from grants to contracts, and the extent to which this might add to or detract from third sector organisational autonomy and sustainability. The strength and vitality of the third sector will become increasingly salient in an emerging era of constrained public finance” (link)

Macmillan, 2010

The voluntary sector employs 136,000 people – more than both Food & Drink production (123,000) and the Creative industries (90,000) and almost twice as many as Arts, entertainment and recreation (71,000).

The voluntary sector is not separately identified in most official statistics, and sector workers will currently be recorded against the other industries eg Human health and social work activities.

There are are several intiatives currently underway exploring options for improving the sector's visibility on official datasets, such as creating satellite accounts for civil society - see for example Fraser of Allander's blog on Measuring the voluntary sector.

Just over 1 in 3 charities employ paid staff, meaning there are around 6,700 charitable employers.

Most of these charity employers (72%) are small, with between 1-9 paid staff.

However, the bulk of the sector’s employees are employed by Medium and Large charities.

72% of staff in Scottish charities are employed by the 4% of charities with annual turnovers over £1m, and the top 100 Scottish voluntary sector employers together employ over 50,000 staff.

Around half of paid staff are found in charities with a main office in Edinburgh and Glasgow, but this ‘head office’ effect means that we do not know how many of these charities employ staff out with the central belt.

Almost half of all paid staff are employed in social care related activities, but paid staff are found across all types of activities and sub-sectors.

There is very little official data available on how much public sector money goes to voluntary sector organisations, so we currently use estimates based on detailed analysis of Scottish charity accounts.

Very few public bodies track whether their funding recipient is a voluntary organisation or social enterprise, despite government commitments to things like improving the third sector’s experience of procurement and increasing the number of social enterprises in Scotland.

There are currently calls for a ‘Civil Society satellite account’ to make the voluntary sector more visible in the National Accounts, as well as a call for public sector funders to make their funding more transparent on their own websites or via sites such as 360 Giving.

The Scottish Government has started to link data from the Scottish Procurement Info Hub with the Social Enterprise Census and estimates that Scottish public body procurement spend in Scotland with charities and social enterprises was approximately £944 million in 2021. However, this is recognised to be an underestimate as it does not include all organisations or money coming via non-procurement routes.

Given this gap, the data used in this report is therefore based on SCVO’s bi-annual analysis of around 600 to 800 charity accounts, weighted to be representative of the sector - see our Sector Stats Methodology paper for details. While overall figures are robust there may be some minor issues relating to attribution. For example, a charity may say in their accounts that they received money from their local council, but that money may have originally come from the Scottish Government or the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.

Delivering public services has long been a key part of the sector’s role and can offer greater stability for organisations and better quality services for service users. While many in the sector have welcomed the move towards more formal funding relationships with government, there are associated tensions and questions for the sector to try to balance.

Macmillan’s Third sector delivering public services evidence review highlights six themes:

• compromised independence
• ‘mission drift’
• loss of responsiveness and innovation
• employment conditions
• inter-organisational relationships
• polarisation within the third sector

Realistically we are unlikely to see public sector funding of the third sector rise substantially. Based on the trends we’ve seen and the current economic environment it is likely that many organisations will see below inflation increases, if not stand-still budgets or outright cuts.

In the most recent wave of the Third Sector Tracker 16% of respondents thought that their local authority was planning to decrease or withdraw their funding and 8% thought the Scottish Government would be decreasing funding.

Local authorities have had a real terms increase to their 2025/26 budgets, but given the pressures on their budgets it is unlikely that the sector will see much of that additional funding, although it may help mitigate some pressure points, eg increased Employer’s National Insurance Contribution costs.

We have also seen cuts to some important specialist income streams such as Creative Scotland funding as well as cuts to things like International Aid, which will have implications for many organisations, especially those which rely heavily on a single main funder.

Recent announcements of cuts to things like welfare budgets are also likely to have an indirect knock-on effect by increasing demand for some services.

If ‘more money’ isn’t a realistic option, how can the public sector and third sector work together to make the most of tight budgets and deliver the outcomes and services we both want to see?

Fair Funding is central to a sustainable voluntary sector in Scotland. It includes:

• multi-year funding
• sustainable funding, including inflationary uplifts
• flexible funding
• accessible funding, including timely notifications

Longer-term, multi-year funding

The sector has been calling for longer-term funding for over a decade, and while the government has been supportive in principle, progress has been slow. Recently Scottish Government and Creative Scotland have run pilots of two-year and multi-year funding. This is still the exception, and is only available to a small fraction of organisations, but is a welcome step.

Accessible funding

Delays in funding can cause disruption and stress. A quarter (25%) of Tracker respondents in Autumn 2024 said that they had experienced delays in funding from Scottish Government (an increase of 6%); 22% had experienced delays in funding from their local council.

Not all improvements require additional funding, but can be about making processes more efficient and flexible. The government have committed to timely notifications which will hopefully reduce these delays and uncertainty.

Last year the Economy and Fair Work Committee published the findings of its enquiry into the Procurement Reform (Scotland) Act 2014. The Committee found that while the Act has had a positive impact on increasing the transparency of procurement processes, “inconsistency, bureaucracy, and inflexibility are still creating challenges for small businesses and third sector organisations.”

As part of SCVO’s own submission to the Committee we looked at a range of reports about the experiences of voluntary sector organisations wanting to engage in public sector contracts and the procurement process, and found that there was a broad consensus:

• Good policies are in place, but there is still a disconnect between policy and practice on the ground.
• More still needs to be done to encourage and facilitate participation of third sector organisations in procurement.
• Significant barriers to third sector organisations’ participation in procurement work remain – the most frequently cited barriers are the complexity of procurement processes, short term contracts, poor terms and conditions, and a lack of engagement with contracting authorities despite the legislative aims.

There does appear to be a shift towards more flexible and collaborative models, and increased efforts to engage more voluntary organisations and social enterprises.