This page provides a detailed explanation of the calculations and data underpinning the amount parishes are asked to contribute to fund Parish Support Costs.
How attendance data is used in the parish share calculation
Part of the contribution each parish is asked to make, funds parish support costs. Parish support costs make up 11.7% of the Diocesan Budget and funds . To determine how much each parish is asked to pay, attendance and other data is used.
Each year in January churches are asked to complete the Statistics for Mission return for the October attendance and other metrics in the preceding year. This is used as source data for the Montly Members metric, which is a statistical calculation which produces a figure which represents the number of people per parish who are likely to contribute financially to the life of the church in a monthly period. The following elements are used the calculation:
October Sunday Attendance
This takes the adult church attendance figures for the four Sundays in October, removes the highest, as there is usually a Harvest Thanksgiving service in October which can skew the outcome, then averages the remaining 3 Sundays (assuming that the church has 1 service per week) to calculate the Sunday Attendance. In churches where there are only 1 or 2 services in October, or if a comment on the return suggests another higher than usual service attendance in October, the Usual Sunday Attendance (USA) figure may be substituted for this figure.
October Weekday Attendance
This takes the adult weekday service attendance figure, which by definition is a count of those adults who did not attend a Sunday service already in that week, and similarly removes the highest figure and averages the remaining 3 weeks’ attendance to calculate the Weekday Attendance.
Summed up to Parish
The October count figures are at a church level, so if the church is in a multi church parish, the Sunday and weekday attendance figures are summed together to make parish level figures prior to the removal of the highest respective figures and averaging of the remainder as described above. If a Benefice is known to have a peripatetic congregation, then the figure is summed to the Benefice level and divided equally between the two parishes to reflect this arrangement.
Electoral Roll
Electoral roll is a parish level figure by definition, which is reviewed each year in a parish and renewed every 6 years. Research has shown that the roll slowly grows each year of review and drops on the 6th year at renewal and therefore a compensation is applied for the appropriate year in the cycle to smooth this effect to calculate the Smoothed Electoral Roll.
Calculation
These three figures are then combined by a formula that is weighted one third of the Smoothed Electoral Roll and two thirds Sunday Attendance and Weekday Attendance, to calculate the Annual Monthly Members number.
3 year rolling average
The Annual Monthly Members figure is then averaged with the preceding 2 years Annual Monthly Members figures and rounded down to a whole number to create the 3-year rolling average Monthly Members figure, which is done to smooth out any year-on-year fluctuations in Statistics for Mission returns which might arise due to, for example, interregnums or bad weather. The 3-year rolling average Monthly Members figure is used in the share calculation for the PS1 and PS2 elements distributed by congregation size, explained elsewhere on the Parish Share web pages.
Non returning Parishes
For the last 3 years, we have achieved over 99% returns for the Statistics for Mission return, but for the few parishes with missing information, the previous year’s Annual Monthly Members is used again when calculating the 3-year rolling average Monthly Members figure.
Pastoral Measures
Where a pastoral measure has taken place, the figures for the current year and previous years are combined/separated appropriately to ensure a consistent rolling average calculation.
Example
A medium sized single church parish
Smoothed Electoral Roll: 129
Sunday Attendance: 64
Weekday Attendance: 11
2025 Annual Monthly Members: 108
2024 Annual Monthly Members: 145
2023 Annual Monthly Members: 127
2025 3 year rolling average Monthly Members: Rounded down, the figure of 126 used in the share calculation.
