UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) · Foreign Aid Spending, Last 12 Months (IATI) · US$ billions

## What this measures

Money the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) paid out each month, as it reports to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI): disbursements and expenditures, converted to US dollars. Each point is the sum of the twelve months (four quarters) to that date.

The FCDO spends about two-thirds of UK aid; other departments (the Home Office's in-donor refugee costs among them) are not in this series.

## Why it matters

The OECD publishes each year's official aid figures in April of the next year and its recipient tables a year after that. IATI is where publishers report spending as it happens, so it shows month by month who cut, who did not, and where the money stopped arriving, well before the OECD tables.

## How to read it

Months vary with the timing of large payments: December and March, the end of the calendar and the UK financial year, often run high.

IATI data arrive as publishers report, and recent months fill in late. The IATI Datastore keeps no earlier versions, so Palanor measures each publisher's lag from IATI-Stats' daily record (January 2024 to October 2025) of how far its newest transaction trailed each day's read, and uses the 90th percentile, capped at 90 days: 51 days for the FCDO. A month is published only once its end is that many days past and the publisher has reported it, and the six newest published months are flagged preliminary. Each point keeps the value Palanor first read and the date it read it, so later revisions can be measured.

## What it does not say

Coverage: in pounds, the IATI total was £7,759 million in 2023 and £5,720 million in 2024, against FCDO ODA spend of £9,491 million and £9,469 million in the UK's Statistics on International Development: 81.8% and 60.4%. The fall in 2024 is in what the FCDO publishes to IATI, not in its spend, so read changes between 2023 and 2024 with that in mind. A month's figure is cash reported as paid out in that month, not what was budgeted or committed, and it says nothing about what the money achieved. Values are in each transaction's own currency, valued at its value date. Euro and pound values are converted at the Federal Reserve's monthly average rate for the value-date month (FRED EXUSEU, EXUSUK); a value date outside the window read, or after the latest monthly rate, takes the transaction month's or the latest rate.

## Source

IATI Datastore (api.iatistandard.org/datastore), transactions of type 3 (disbursement) and 4 (expenditure), read weekly by /api/cron/iati-spending-sync (src/lib/iati/spending.ts). FCDO data are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Data © their publishers, used under the licences in their IATI Registry entries.