On 17 July 2025, the Electoral Commission published headline figures which detailed what the major parties spent their money on in the 2024 general election.
What are the rules for disclosing party spending?
Election spending in the UK is regulated at candidate level and at party level.
At party level, there are different rules for disclosing spending, depending on the amount. Parties that spend less than £250,000 are less strictly regulated than parties that spend more than £250,000:
- parties that spend under £250,000 have three months from the election to submit their spending returns
- parties that spend over £250,000 have six months from the election to submit their spending returns
The figures published in July 2025 are for parties that spent over £250,000.
Party spending for some smaller parties has been available since 13 February 2025. Spending by the 53 parties in this group totalled £733,575. The top five parties were:
- Plaid Cymru: £156,531
- Workers Party of Britain: £81,292
- Sinn Féin: £68,499
- Alliance Party of Northern Ireland: £52,229
- Women’s Equality Party: £41,004
Are there party spending limits?
There are limits on how much a party can spend at a general election, but this varies depending on:
- how many seats the party stands in
- whether the seats are in Great Britain or Northern Ireland
If a party stood candidates in all 632 constituencies in Great Britain, its party spending limit would be just over £34 million. Party spending limits were increased for the first time since 2000 in 2023 by “80% to account for inflation”.
The Electoral Commission has detailed guidance on party spending limits.
How much did parties spend in 2019 and 2024?
Parties spent more in the 2024 general election than they did in the 2019 general election. Total reported party spending in 2024 was £69.3 million; in 2019 it was £50.1 million. However, if adjusted for inflation, party spending in 2019 was £62.1 million.
There was also considerable variation in the amount of party spending between the six parties with the highest vote share in both 2019 and 2024, as shown in the chart below.
The chart also shows that the Labour Party and the Conservative Party generally spend more than the other parties and, according to Electoral Commission analysis, were the only parties to spend 70% or more of the new spending limits. The Conservatives spent exactly 70% of the new limit (£23.8 million). Labour spent 89% of the new limit (£30.1 million).
The uprated spending limits had little effect on the spending of the other four parties with the highest vote share, with only the Greens spending more in 2024 than they did in 2019. The 2019 general election also marked the only general election since 2001 in which Labour and the Conservatives were not the two biggest spenders (2001 was the year in which the current system for collecting party spending figures was introduced).
In 2019, the Liberal Democrats reported party spending of £2.4 million more than Labour. This was also more than twice as much as the party had ever reported spending at an election. Its previous high was £6.8 million in 2017.
What did parties spend money on in 2019 and 2024?
Parties are required by law to report spending in nine different categories:
- advertising
- campaign broadcasts
- market research/canvassing
- media
- overheads and general administration
- party manifesto material or third-party campaign/referendum material
- rallies and other events
- transport
- unsolicited material to electors (unsolicited material includes services like leaflet printing and delivery)
The chart below shows reported spending, by category, for the 2019 and 2024 general elections, and shows that:
- advertising and unsolicited material dominate, collectively making up 67% of all party spending in 2024 and 69% of all party spending in 2019
- unsolicited material is the most prominent category, making up 38% of all party spending in 2024 and 41% of all party spending in 2019, though this is lower than at candidate level, where spending on unsolicited material is consistently closer to two thirds of overall spending
Online advertising
It is possible to gain a sense of how much parties spent on online advertising by doing a keyword search of notable suppliers that allow paid political advertising, such as Facebook/Meta and Google.
Neither X/Twitter nor TikTok allow paid political advertising; this means spending on these platforms is relatively low, so they rarely appear in spending returns. For example, the total reported spending on Twitter/X advertising in UK general elections between 2015 and 2024 was £68,000. The total reporting spending on Tik Tok advertising in the 2024 general election was £36.
2015 was the first general election where Facebook/Meta (though Meta only appears in 2024) and Google appear in spending returns. The chart below shows how much parties spent on Facebook/Meta and Google (using keyword searches) as a proportion of total advertising spending in the 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2024 general elections. These figures are presented in cash terms (not adjusted for inflation) for ease.
These figures show that party spending on Facebook/Meta and Google (which includes advertising on YouTube) rose from 25% of total advertising spending in 2015 to 42% in 2017, 52% in 2019 and 54% in 2024. 2024 marks the first general election since 2015 in which there has not been a 10-percentage point increase in online advertising spending compared with the previous election.
Academics who have tracked the growth of online campaigning have suggested that online campaign spending is underestimated because keyword searches for spending on notable suppliers do not capture “digital intermediaries”. Digital intermediaries are organisations that conduct online campaigns on behalf of third parties, or as part of a wider suite of services. Because of this, academics have criticised the current ways in which election spending is reported, as they “do not provide a full picture of election activity, particularly as it relates to data-driven campaigning”.
In a report published alongside the release of the 2024 party returns, the Electoral Commission suggested that “the current spending categories should be revised to provide electors with more useful information about what campaigners have spent money on”.
Does it usually take a year for full election spending returns to be released?
No.
In 2019, election spending returns for parties spending over £250,000 were published on 7 October 2020 (ten months after the election). In 2017, election spending returns were published on 19 March 2018 (nine months after the election).
In its report, Regulating Election Finance, the Committee on Standards in Public Life addressed the timeliness of election spending returns in a chapter dedicated to “reporting timeframes”. Conducting a comparative analysis, it found that “disclosure requirements differ greatly” between countries and that the UK is “towards the higher end of the range”.
The committee considered the current disclosure regime in the UK to be “incompatible with the principles of openness and accountability” and concluded that the reporting periods should be shorter. It recommended that the reporting timeframe for parties spending over £250,000 should be reduced to four months, and that the Electoral Commission should publish returns within two months of receiving them.
Further reading
This is the second in a series of Commons Library Insights which cover spending in the 2024 general election. The other two are:
About the author: Sam Power is a Parliamentary Academic Fellow working in the Parliament and Constitution Centre in the House of Commons Library, and Lecturer in Politics at the University of Bristol.
Image by: Russss via Wikimedia Commons
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