£24.7 Billion and Falling: What the UK's New Volunteering Report Means for Sports Clubs

The Report Everyone in the Sector Has Been Waiting For

On 11 July, DCMS finally published "Estimating the Economic and Social Value of Volunteering" — the first serious government attempt to put a comprehensive number on what volunteering contributes to England's economy. London Economics ran the analysis with Basis Social and NPC. The headline: £24.69 billion per year.

That breaks down as £16.43 billion in replacement cost (what it would cost to pay someone to do the work) and £8.26 billion in wellbeing benefits to the volunteers themselves (valued using the Treasury's WELLBY methodology, the same framework used for health interventions).

1,244.9 million hours of formal volunteering in England alone. Which works out at roughly £13.20 per hour in replacement cost — lower than Australia's equivalent figure, because the UK methodology matches volunteer activities to specific occupation codes rather than using a blanket average wage.

The Wellbeing Number Is New and It Matters

Previous UK attempts to value volunteering stuck to replacement cost. This report is the first to apply the HM Treasury Green Book's wellbeing appraisal framework at national scale to volunteering. The £8.26 billion figure says: volunteering does not just produce outputs that someone would otherwise have to be paid for — it also makes the volunteers themselves measurably happier and healthier.

£2,012 per volunteer per year in combined economic and wellbeing value.

That is a number worth putting in front of a local authority when you are arguing for community facility access. It is a number worth putting in a Sport England funding application. It is a number that reframes the conversation from "we need help" to "we are generating £2,000 of public value per volunteer, and all we need from you is a pitch to play on."

But the Trend Is Going the Wrong Way

Here is what concerns me. The Community Life Survey 2024/25, published in December, showed formal monthly volunteering at 17% of adults. In 2013/14, it was 27%. That is a ten-percentage-point decline over a decade.

The ONS Household Satellite Account, also published in December, found that volunteering hours fell by over 40% between 2014 and 2023. It was the only category of unpaid household work to show a sustained decline across the entire time series. Every other category — childcare, cooking, cleaning — either held steady or increased. Volunteering just kept falling.

COVID accelerated the decline, obviously. But the trend predates the pandemic. Something structural is happening. People are volunteering less, and the organisations that depend on them have not adjusted.

What This Looks Like in Sport

Sport England's Active Lives data from April shows 10.5 million adults volunteered to support sport and physical activity in the year to November 2024. That sounds like a lot — and it is — but it is still 1.7 million below pre-pandemic levels.

Sport England's separate ROI research values sport volunteering at £6.3 billion in replacement cost and £8.2 billion in social value (wellbeing benefits). These are staggering numbers. Community sport in England is effectively subsidised by £6.3 billion per year in free labour.

The question that nobody in the sector wants to answer honestly: what happens when that subsidy shrinks? Because it is shrinking. Every year. And the clubs that are most dependent on it — the small, single-sport, volunteer-run clubs — are the ones least equipped to adapt.

The Replacement Cost Debate

I should flag that there is a genuine methodological debate about what hourly figure to use for volunteer replacement cost in the UK. The options:

• £13.20/hr — the DCMS occupation-matched figure (most rigorous)
• £14.35/hr — ONS median hourly wage (most commonly cited by charities)
• £12.21/hr — National Living Wage from April 2025 (floor rate, rising to £12.71 in April 2026)
• £13.45/hr — Real Living Wage (£14.80 in London)

For most clubs writing grant applications or annual reports, the ONS median of £14.35 is the simplest to cite and defend. For formal economic analysis, the DCMS figure carries the most authority. For a conservative estimate that nobody can challenge, the National Living Wage is your floor.

Pick one, cite it, and be consistent. The worst thing you can do is use a different number every time.

What UK Clubs Should Actually Do With This

I have spoken with enough club secretaries and volunteer coordinators to know that the response to a report like this is usually: "That's interesting. Now I need to go chase three people about their subs."

Fair enough. But here is why these numbers matter to you specifically:

Grant applications. Sport England, local authorities, and trusts increasingly want to see the value of in-kind contributions. If your club has 30 volunteers each giving 3 hours a week for 40 weeks, that is 3,600 hours. At £14.35/hr, that is £51,660 in volunteer labour. Put it in the application. Every time.

Making the case for technology. If your treasurer spends 6 hours a week on admin — reconciling payments, chasing memberships, preparing accounts — that is 312 hours a year. At £14.35, that is £4,477 in volunteer labour on tasks that membership software handles automatically. The software costs £40-50 a month.

Retaining volunteers. NCVO's Time Well Spent survey found 14% of volunteers now worry about out-of-pocket costs — up from 5% in 2019. The cost-of-living crisis is making volunteering more expensive for the people doing it. If your club is not reimbursing travel, not providing refreshments, and not saying thank you in any systematic way, you are losing volunteers to organisations that do.

Talking to your council. When a local authority is considering whether to maintain a community facility, the argument "our club uses it" is weak. The argument "our 30 volunteers generate £51,660 per year in economic value at this facility, plus £60,000 in wellbeing benefits based on the DCMS methodology" is a policy argument backed by the government's own figures.

The Uncomfortable Bottom Line

The DCMS report confirms what everyone in community sport already knew: volunteering is the invisible infrastructure that holds everything together. The report also confirms that this infrastructure is eroding. Formal volunteering is in long-term decline. The volunteers who remain are stretched thinner. And the institutions that depend on them — from parish councils to Premier League community trusts — have not reckoned with what happens when the free labour dries up.

For clubs, the practical response is not despair. It is measurement. Know what your volunteers are worth. Track their hours. Use the numbers in every conversation with funders, councils, and governing bodies. And invest in systems that reduce the admin burden, because the single biggest thing you can do to retain a volunteer is stop wasting their time on tasks a computer can handle.

The £24.7 billion figure is powerful. Use it. But do not wait for the trend to reverse on its own. It will not.