Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Budget Overview

The Wikimedia Foundation's annual budget aligns our resources with the most important work of our Annual Plan Goals.

This year's budget reflects a commitment to financial planning that supports goals from the immediate to the multi-generational. We are investing in work that addresses the needs of today's internet while preparing for the future. As technology, regulation, and how people behave online continue to change, we are resourcing efforts that advance free knowledge, support volunteer growth, and respond to global opportunities and threats.

This budget reflects a belief that resourcing must be prudent, sustainable, and future-facing to advance our mission. As in recent years, Infrastructure remains the largest part of our budget, and we will continue to prioritize growing direct funding for the movement.

Budget by Goal	Budget ($M)	Budget (%)
Infrastructure	$97.2	47%
Volunteer Support	$60.7	29%
Effectiveness	$49.6	24%
Annual Budget	$207.5

Infrastructure remains the largest part of our budget, receiving 47% of total funding. The total amount of funding for this work is increasing in this plan, as it has in recent years. The proportion of the budget this represented has decreased slightly due to a shift in focus of goals for a few teams and rapid investment needs in other areas.

The Infrastructure budget funds a wide range of work in support of our mission, including: building the software experiences that allows for global reading; running and supporting a top-10 global website; enabling data, models, insights, and tools that can help assess the impact of our work; exploring strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of consumers and contributors; providing all of the critical functions which must exist at the Foundation to support our basic technical operations; and all of the other work described in our infrastructure goal. It includes the costs of all of the teams that do this work, the cost of running our data centers, and all of the other costs needed to support this work.

Volunteer Support accounts for 29% of our budget. The Volunteer Support goal focuses on ensuring that Wikimedia contributors can safely and sustainably participate in building free knowledge. It supports volunteers, affiliates, and movement leaders by strengthening trust and safety, providing direct funding and support, defending human rights, addressing legal threats, improving content integrity, and enabling regional connections.

Effectiveness makes up 24% of our budget. The Effectiveness goal focuses on strengthening the Wikimedia Foundation's internal capacity by ensuring financial sustainability, improving staff performance, managing risk, and improving operations. We are investing in long-term revenue strategies, enhancing collaboration and management practices, and improving our operations to increase efficiency and impact.

Supporting Volunteers and the Movement

We provide support to volunteers and our movement in a variety of ways, including by giving out direct funding through over 400 grants to affiliates and movement partners to support their work.

Grants and direct movement funding will increase by nearly 11% next year. This allows regional grants to keep pace with inflation and provides a modest increase in overall grant support. We plan to continue growing this funding by about 5% annually in FY26–27 and FY27–28 to support financial sustainability and help movement partners plan for the long term. Beyond grants, the Foundation also provides direct financial support to the movement in other ways, including funding events like Wikimania, the Wikimedia Hackathon and more ($2.7M) and legal defense for volunteers ($0.4M).

Working Capital Reserve

For sustainability and prudent planning, the working capital reserve remains within the Board-approved target of 12 to 18 months of operating expenses, which is also aligned with industry best practices. This reserve also provides the organization with flexibility to respond to unplanned or unexpected changes in the tax, regulatory, or policy environment.

This year, we may use a small amount, less than 1%, of the reserve to support Wikipedia's 25th anniversary as a highly strategic, one-time, non-recurring event. Using reserves in a limited way helps fund key one-time activities while staying aligned to nonprofit financial best practices and supporting long-term sustainability. Additionally, the Foundation each year identifies cost savings in its annual budget that can further grow the reserve and support long-term sustainability.

Maintaining industry best practices

In 2025–2026, 77% of the Foundation's budget is planned to go toward Programmatic Expenses, which is funding the direct work that supports our mission. This exceeds industry best practices and is similar to recent years. Independent evaluators like Charity Navigator set the benchmark for top-rated nonprofits at over >70% programmatic spending and use that standard in their charity ratings.

Appendix: Staffing Overview

The Foundation is staffed by over 640 people that span almost every timezone across all eight Wikimedia regions. The Foundation shares this annual snapshot of total headcount, geographic distribution, and growth analytics on a yearly basis in the Annual Plan. These figures are reported as of 31 December 2024.

Our total headcount	647	647 total Foundation staff on 31 December 2024. This number includes employees at the Foundation, at Employers of Record, and fixed-term contractors who have been at the Foundation for 6 months or longer.
Countries	46	People are located across 46 countries and all continents except Antarctica.
Growth in headcount	<1%	Headcount has grown by less than 1% in the past 12 months (Dec 2023 – Dec 2024).
Global/Non-US Workers	48%	48% of the Foundation's people are located outside of the United States.
Tenure in years	5.3	Staff members are staying on the average for about 5.3 years.

Additional resources