Part Two ended with a question. How could two estimates of Charles’s fortune be more than a billion pounds apart? I wanted to find out what each publication was actually counting.
The King’s Private Fortune
£680 million, according to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2026, which ranked him 230th, up from joint 263rd in 2023. [1]
£1.815 billion, according to a Guardian investigation published in April 2023. [2]
So, let’s start with the obvious problem. The estimates were published three years apart, and they counted different things. That explains the gap, but it doesn’t tell us which figure to use when we ask how rich the King really is.
What I found was that the public office, the inherited estates and his own possessions don’t fit neatly into one total. Before I could judge either headline, I had to untangle them.
Two figures, two definitions
The Sunday Times counts Charles’s personal holdings, including Balmoral, Sandringham and private investments. It excludes assets he holds because he is monarch, such as the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Lancaster and the Royal Collection. [1] I can see the logic in that. He can’t sell the Crown Estate as if it were his personal property.
The Guardian looked at the wider picture. Its investigation included property, jewellery, art, vehicles, stamps, horses and investments, as well as the benefit of receiving income from the Duchy of Lancaster. It counted the Duchy’s then-reported assets of about £653 million as beneficial wealth, although Charles can’t dispose of that capital personally. [2]
The massive difference between the valuations comes down to what counts as belonging to the King. The Duchy’s £653 million alone is equivalent to over half of the £1.135 billion gap. Charles can’t sell Lancaster land and keep the money, as he could with Sandringham, but he receives its income for as long as he is King. I don’t think that benefit should disappear from the calculation simply because the capital isn’t his to cash in.
Buckingham Palace disputed the Guardian’s calculation, calling it “a highly creative mix of speculation, assumption and inaccuracy”. What it didn’t do was publish a complete inventory of its own to compare it with. [2]
The Palace has a fair point. Count an estate as if Charles could sell it tomorrow and you inflate what he personally owns. But the Guardian has a point too. One estimate measures personal assets, the other adds the benefits that come with the office, and neither is an audited balance sheet we can check.
I went back to the Royal Household’s own explanation. It lists three sources of funding: the Sovereign Grant, the Privy Purse and Charles’s personal income from investments and private estates. But the Household doesn’t publish a complete list of his personal investments or what they earn. [3] [4]
The King pays tax. But under which rules?
I thought the tax figures might tell us more. In June 2026, Buckingham Palace published the King’s personal tax payments, reportedly the first such disclosure by a reigning monarch in modern times. [5]
His latest bill was £12.9 million for 2024/25, up from £11.7 million the year before, and the Palace said his total since becoming King exceeded £30 million. [6]
The Prince of Wales paid about £16 million over the same two years, according to the tax think tank Tax Policy Associates. [7]
Those are substantial bills, and anyone who says the King pays no tax is wrong. But why are his payments voluntary at all? In plain terms, when it comes to tax he sits outside the law the rest of us live under. Acts of Parliament don’t bind the Crown unless they say so, and the Treasury confirms the income tax and capital gains tax laws don’t. [8] He pays at normal rates under a voluntary arrangement introduced in 1993 and updated in 2023. [9]
Under that arrangement, Charles pays tax on private investment income and on Duchy of Lancaster income not used for official duties. The Sovereign Grant is for official work and isn’t treated as his personal taxable income. [8]
Tax Policy Associates tried to work backwards from the disclosed numbers. The Duchy of Lancaster’s surplus in 2024/25 was £24.4 million. Assume all of it was taxable with no deductions, at the top rate of 45%, and the tax comes to about £11 million. [7]
But Charles paid £12.9 million. On those deliberately conservative assumptions, Tax Policy Associates worked out that he must have had at least £4 million of other taxable income or gains. [7]
Any official expenses deducted from the Duchy income would push that figure higher. That’s what frustrates me. We have a tax bill, but not the income, deductions or workings behind it, so even a tax specialist can only work out a minimum. I wanted to know what the King earned, not just what he paid.
Inheritance tax is different. Private property passed directly from one monarch to the next isn’t taxed at all, and that’s how Balmoral and Sandringham reached Charles. Ordinary families get a tax-free threshold, and anything above it can face inheritance tax. The Treasury argues that these estates have both private and official uses, and that the monarchy needs to stay financially independent. [9]
So yes, he pays his income tax. He also inherited two estates under a rule no other family in the country can use.
The Duchies raised another question. Neither pays corporation tax, and both have Crown-related exemptions from capital gains tax. [10] [9] The Treasury confirmed in April 2025 that the Duchy of Cornwall was exempt from corporation tax as a Crown body, while the Prince of Wales voluntarily paid income tax on the surplus left after official expenses. [11]
The Duchy says it isn’t a corporation, that its capital is preserved for future holders, and that charging corporation tax on top of the Prince’s income tax would tax the same income twice. [12]
I don’t buy it. The royal estates collect millions in rent, including from the NHS, the armed forces and state schools. [10] The Duchy may not be a corporation in law, but it behaves like one in every way that matters. If my limited company makes a profit, it pays corporation tax, and if I take that profit out as dividends, I can pay tax on it again. That’s the deal for the rest of us. The Duchy is excused from the first half of it.
What the accounts still cannot tell us
The Duchies publish audited accounts and the Palace reports on how the Sovereign Grant is spent. That’s real scrutiny, and it counts. But I still couldn’t find a full list of Charles’s private investments or an independent valuation of what he inherited. Those were the documents I wanted to read, and they aren’t public.
Supporters of the monarchy argue that it needs financial independence and that private wealth deserves some privacy. I can accept that, up to a point. My question is where private wealth ends and hereditary privilege begins, and the published accounts don’t answer it.
How Britain Compares With Europe
In Part One, the Sovereign Grant came to about £2 a head. I wanted to test another familiar defence: Britain is hardly the only European country with a royal family, so perhaps ours is no more expensive than the others. That sounds straightforward until you look at what each budget actually includes.
These are the main published royal funding allocations for 2026, not each monarchy’s total cost, and they don’t all pay for the same things.
| Country | Published royal budget | Approximate amount per resident |
|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom, 2026/27 | £137.9m [4] | £1.98 |
| Netherlands | €60.8m [13] | £2.81 |
| Denmark | DKK 154m [14] | £2.87 |
| Norway | NOK 307.7m [15] | £4.36 |
| Sweden | SEK 190.5m [16] | £1.36 |
| Spain | €8.43m [17] | £0.14 |
Method: I divided each country’s published royal allocation by its population and converted to sterling using the European Central Bank’s reference rates on 21 October 2026. All results are rounded to the nearest penny. [18]
Population: Eurostat’s 1 January 2026 figures for the European countries, and the ONS mid-2025 estimate for the UK. [19] [20]
The UK figure is for the 2026/27 financial year and includes the refurbishment money covered in Part One. The others are calendar-year 2026 allocations. These are amounts per resident, not individual tax bills.
Britain’s allocation is the biggest in this table. Per resident, Norway, Denmark and the Netherlands are higher. But I can’t honestly say which monarchy is cheapest.
The Dutch budget identifies about €21.1 million of additional royal spending, including palaces, state visits and a yacht, but doesn’t break down security costs. [13] Norway identifies about NOK 161.1 million elsewhere for properties, vessels, official visits and support, again without police escort costs. [15]
Denmark’s figure combines two separate headings, while Sweden’s includes palace administration and heritage as well as the court. [14] [16] Spain’s €8.43 million covers the household, not security or state-owned palaces. [17] Britain’s Grant includes maintenance of the occupied royal palaces. [4]
I can tell you what each country publishes, but not what any of them really costs. If I pretended otherwise, I’d be presenting an incomplete figure as a complete one.
Which leaves the question I keep coming back to. How much of the royal finances can the public actually check?
Part Four follows the rules that limit scrutiny: sealed wills, Freedom of Information and the King’s immunity from the courts.