What is King Charles’s net worth?
▲ £610 million
£600 million in 2023
A year on from the coronation, the magnitude of the King’s wealth continues to divide opinion. Some commentators insist that Charles III is a billionaire, arguing that the Duchy of Lancaster and even the Crown Estate are his personal assets.
We disagree. Both these estates come with the job as sovereign and there are rules circumscribing a monarch’s ability to sell or profit from them. To consider these the King’s personal holdings would be akin to an executive viewing the office laptop or the company car parked on their driveway as their own.
Then there is the even more confusing question of the monarch’s mass of art and jewellery, as well as the countless gifts that have been bestowed on royal family members over the centuries. Much of it is in the Royal Collection, a cache of more than a million objects including tapestries, manuscripts, sculptures, artworks and pieces of furniture, many of which are displayed in royal residences. As with the Crown Estate and the Duchy of Lancaster, this collection is not owned personally by the King but is “held in trust by him as sovereign for his successors and the nation”.
He may not be one of the UK’s 165 billionaires but the King is, of course, very wealthy. One of his former aides has described how the King carefully rebuilt his finances after his £17 million divorce from Diana, Princess of Wales in 1996, starting by assiduously saving the profits he received from the Duchy of Cornwall. “He became prudent at tucking away some money from the Duchy after that wipeout [of capital],” the former aide said. “We’re not talking vast sums here — several tens of millions, no more. There have been suggestions that Camilla brought a good deal of money into their relationship, but that’s really not correct.”
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The duchy is a £1.1 billion private estate of property and investments dating to the 14th century. Its holdings include almost 130,000 acres of land, 260 farms, the Oval cricket ground in south London and the land on which Dartmoor’s prison stands. Analysis of the duchy’s accounts shows that between 2011 and 2022, the King increased its annual profits by 42.6 per cent to £25.4 million. Over the same period, the estate’s wealth climbed by almost 50 per cent.
In 1990 the King launched his Duchy Originals range, selling products such as biscuits, beer, herbal medicine and garden tools from his Highgrove House estate through Harrods and Fortnum & Mason, and later Waitrose. Although the range demonstrates the King’s entrepreneurial flair, the profits have always been given to his charitable fund.
A few years later he tried his hand at house building, creating the sustainable Poundbury development on the outskirts of Dorchester in Dorset. Recently he announced a similar project, Nansledan, in Cornwall.
The duchy, meanwhile, was quietly pushing up its income by renting commercial properties in London, Milton Keynes and Cornwall. These revenues have almost doubled to £17.6 million over the past decade and account for more than a third of the money brought in.
Between 2012 and 2022 the King received £212.7 million from the duchy — opting, rather than being obliged, to pay income tax.
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• How the Crown Estate funds the royal family
As Prince of Wales, he was permitted to spend only the Duchy of Cornwall’s annual profits and was obliged to seek Treasury approval for disposing of any asset worth more than £500,000. He was also forbidden from personally banking capital gains from any property sale. Similar restrictions apply to the Duchy of Lancaster (which has £641.2 million of net assets) and the £15.8 billion Crown Estate, which is owned by the King only “in the right of the Crown” — it is not his private property. He cannot sell the Crown Estate’s assets and the annual profits are paid to the Treasury, from where he receives 25 per cent of the sum as the Sovereign Grant (formerly the Civil List) to fund the royal household’s expenditure, two years in arrears. Record profits of £442.6 million in 2022-23 suggest the King is to receive close to £110.7 million this financial year.
In addition, several properties associated with the monarch do not belong to him personally: Dumfries House in Ayrshire is owned by a foundation set up to preserve the property, its prized furniture and 2,000 acres of parkland; the Castle of Mey in Caithness, once the home of the Queen Mother, has been owned by a trust, presided over by the King, since 1996; and Highgrove House and the Llwynywermod estate belong to the Duchy of Cornwall.
“In all honesty their financial arrangements really aren’t as complex as [those of] many royal families and rulers in other countries, which are often far more opaque,” Robert Hardman, the biographer of the Queen, has said. “Our monarchy really isn’t as wealthy as many people would believe. I certainly don’t think the King is a billionaire.”
So if none of these royal trappings counts when assessing the King’s personal wealth, what does?
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Sandringham and Balmoral are his most valuable assets. The former, a 20,000-acre estate in Norfolk with about 300 properties, has belonged to the royals personally for more than 160 years. Produce from the orchards supplies Sandringham Apple Juice, and you can take a safari tour for £160 a person. The property firm McCarthy Stone valued the principal residence, a grade II* listed mansion, at £55 million in 2022, while the entire estate could be worth about £250 million, using conservative estimates of agricultural land values in the area supplied by the estate agent Strutt & Parker.
Prince Albert purchased Balmoral for Queen Victoria in 1852. The Aberdeenshire castle is surrounded by 50,000 acres, with mountains, forests, lochs, and grouse moors, and 150 other buildings. These include Birkhall, the 18th-century house that has been the King’s Scottish bolthole for more than 20 years. McCarthy Stone recently valued the castle at £60 million. Strutt & Parker points to a wide variation in the price of poor and good-quality land in the Highlands, ranging from £600 to £8,000 an acre. We value the castle and wider estate at a cautious £210 million.
An entirely legal quirk ensures that no inheritance tax is levied on assets passed from “sovereign to sovereign”. Estates are usually subject to a 40 per cent charge on wealth above £325,000. John Major introduced the sovereign’s exemption in 1993 when he was prime minister, arguing that it was “necessary to protect the independence of the monarchy”. The rule also created an incentive for monarchs to leave all their assets to their direct heir. Prince Andrew was said to have been left “in despair” by the way his mother’s wealth was transferred.
The Queen also passed on to her successor a large investment portfolio that is thought to consist of largely blue-chip shares and bonds, estimated to be worth about £120 million. She was fond of breeding and racing thoroughbreds, and although she had begun to sell her horses well before she died, it has been suggested that what is left of the pack is worth at least £27 million. A royal expert consulted for this article argued that the horses are in fact more of a liability than a lucrative asset now. The value of the Queen’s personal stamp and art collection is similarly impossible to value with precision.
Assessing Charles’s inheritance and his net wealth would be easier without another quirk of the royal finances: under a convention dating back more than a century, the wills of senior royals are not open for public inspection. What, if anything, the King inherited from his father is not known; Prince Philip’s will has not been made public. The Queen’s sealed will is held in a safe at an undisclosed location in London, along with those of more than 30 senior royals who have died since 1910.
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One other asset the King inherited from his mother is a love of thrift and frugality: he often wears suits and shoes he bought many years ago. “I’m one of those people who hate throwing anything away,” he has said.
And like many men of a certain age, he is known to be meticulous about switching off lights.
View the full list to see where money was made and lost in the last year
