Just to be on the safe side, however, the palace negotiated a safety net. The sovereign grant continues the dubious practice of the civil list in that the sum paid each year under the sovereign grant can only stay the same or go up, never down. Moreover, in the unlikely event that the Crown Estate’s profits fall, the government will make up the difference, therefore immunising the royals against any slump in income.

• Prince Andrew has not paid rent on Royal Lodge for two decades

The civil list provided £7.9 million in support in its last year, 2011, plus a sum to cover transport costs. In 2025, the sovereign grant that replaced it will generate £132.1 million for the royals. That is a compound annual growth rate of 22.29 per cent. Even if you add in all the extra costs in transport or otherwise that were met outside the civil list in 2011, that still generates an annual compound growth rate of more than 10 per cent.

A bankrupt royal family of 1760 has become fantastically wealthy, with King Charles alone having reportedly amassed a fortune worth at least £1.8 billion.

Fewer working royals, spiralling costs

There is a legitimate argument for a monarchy, just as there is for a republic. What there can be no argument for is the unreformed imperial monarchy we uniquely still have, and its enormous and ever increasing cost to British taxpayers.

Charles made it known before he mounted the throne that he wanted a slimmed-down monarchy, a view that was broadly welcomed by almost everyone.

If we now have 11 working royals, that is indeed a noticeable reduction compared with, say, ten years earlier. However, that has been achieved more through the effects of external circumstances than by design. The Queen and Prince Philip have died, Harry and Meghan have excused themselves and Andrew has had to be cast into outer darkness.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex at a baseball game in Los Angeles in October

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Yet the cost to the public of the monarchy has not reduced in line with this decrease. On the contrary, despite having fewer working royals, the bill for the taxpayer has ballooned, along with the wealth of the royals.

Buckingham Palace regularly trots out the line that our royal family annually only costs each of us the price of a cup of instant coffee, or some such. The fact is that Britain’s monarchy is vastly more expensive than any other European monarchy.

Official figures from across Europe allow us to compare the relative annual costs of the continent’s monarchies, in terms of direct support from governments. The headline figures give us:

• Britain £132.1 million (2025)
• Netherlands £46 million (2024)
• Norway £24 million (2022)
• Belgium £12.5 million (2021)
• Sweden £11.5 million (2021)
• Denmark £10.8 million (2022)
• Spain £7.4 million (2023)

The UK figure of £132.1 million is itself a rise of an incredible 53 per cent from the previous year, and light years away from the £7.9 million of the civil list. Taking into consideration all the sundry items in 2011 that were not covered by the civil list means the expenditure in that year was still only in the region of £31 million, so it has more than quadrupled in the 14 years since.

It is difficult to establish exact comparisons, as each monarchy accounts for expenditure in different ways. In the Netherlands, for example, the costs of the upkeep of palaces and the costs of state visits are not included, which therefore underestimates to a degree the real cost. Similarly in Spain, many costs related to the monarchy are covered directly by government departments. In some countries the monarch pays tax and in others they do not. The Dutch parliament voted in 2024 to impose a tax of about 49 per cent on the previously untaxed king.

The annual cost of the Spanish monarchy, led by King Felipe and Queen Letizia

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The Spanish and Swedish monarchies in particular are even less transparent than their British counterpart about money, so it is possible the figures quoted are significant underestimates. Yet it would be unwise for any supporter of the British royal family to draw comfort from such caveats. The reality is that there appear to be far more hidden costs relating to the British monarchy than to any other. That £132.1 million is merely the tip of a very large royal iceberg.

Many of these hidden costs to the taxpayer relate to the controversial treatment of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and other unique wheezes such as the exemption from inheritance tax on private property handed down from monarch to monarch, and the bloated bill for security, which is thought to cost between £150 million and £200 million annually.

The anti-monarchy group Republic produced a detailed report in 2024 and estimated that, all things considered, the annual cost to the public purse of supporting the royals was now in excess of £500 million each year.

Its calculation is this:

• Expenditure from sovereign grant and surplus £108.9 million
• State buildings used by royal family £96.3 million
• Duchy of Cornwall profits/gains — lost £65.3 million
• Duchy of Lancaster profits/gains — lost £33.6 million
• Royal collection net surplus — lost £11.8 million
• Cost to local councils £31.9 million
• Security £150 million
• Costs met by government departments and Crown Estate £7.5 million
• Bona vacantia proceeds — Duchy of Cornwall £0.1 million
• Bona vacantia proceeds — Duchy of Lancaster £4.8 million
• Total £510.2 million

The annual cost of the Danish monarchy, led by King Frederik X and Queen Mary

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Whatever the sum, it is undoubtedly much higher than that of any other European monarchy. There are a number of factors that have led to this unhappy position.

A dying concept

One is the historical context in which the British monarchy has existed and which means today that while other monarchies have evolved and modernised, ours has not. It retains characteristics and trappings long abandoned elsewhere. We have the last imperial monarchy, with a mindset and sense of entitlement little different from that shown by their relatives such as Tsar Nicholas of Russia and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany more than 100 years ago.

The concept of monarchy has been dying since the French Revolution of 1789. But even so, change was slow. By 1900, just France, Switzerland and the tiny territory of San Marino had a republican form of government. The first great extinction, as it may be termed, was driven by the First World War, which destabilised governments across mainland Europe. Great monarchies fell. In 1917, the tsar of Russia was deposed and later he and his family were murdered. The war also accounted for the kaiser in Germany and the emperor in Austro-Hungary. In 1922, the reign of the sultan ended and Turkey was added to the list of toppled monarchies. The second great extinction came as a result of the Second World War and accounted for the monarchies in Italy, Albania, Romania, Yugoslavia, Croatia and, eventually, Greece.

Today the list of surviving European monarchies is short. From near universality in 1900, in 2025 just seven remain. Besides Britain and Spain, there are the Scandinavian kingdoms of Norway, Sweden and Denmark and the Benelux countries of Belgium and the Netherlands. To this thin list might be added the principalities of Monaco, Andorra and Liechtenstein, along with Vatican City.

It is possible to piece together the elements of public money reaching the British royals, whether directly through grants or indirectly through unique tax breaks. We cannot, however, estimate with any certainty their undoubtedly substantial income from private investments, though it is safe to say that none of the King’s siblings is worth less than £20 million, with the possible exception of Andrew, who has been haemorrhaging money while his sources of income have at least in part been drying up.

The annual cost of the Swedish monarchy, led by King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia

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It is more challenging to produce an accurate figure for the wealth they have amassed in royal coffers since 1760, and estimates have varied wildly. The lowest estimate for Charles’s wealth comes in at £350 million; the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List puts the figure at £640 million. The Mail on Sunday as far back as 2001 put the wealth of Elizabeth II at £1.15 billion. The Guardian in 2023 estimated Charles’s worth to be £1.8 billion, taking account of the inheritance from his mother. A September 2025 documentary on Channel 5 also put Charles’s worth at £1.8 billion. For what it’s worth, my estimate would put the figure north of £2 billion. Altogether the royal family directly controls 250,000 acres either through estates such as Balmoral and Sandringham or through the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which they controversially claim are “private”. For clarity, all these estimates exclude possessions held in trust for the nation, such as Buckingham Palace, the crown jewels and most of the royal collection.

What is clear, though, is that whatever the total wealth of the royals, and King Charles in particular, the accumulated sum dwarfs that of other European monarchs, just as the ongoing income for the British royals dwarfs that of their European opposite numbers.

Precise figures are unsurprisingly hard to come by, but in 2017 the magazine Royal Central assembled what data was available. Its estimates at the time were as listed below:

• Queen Elizabeth II (UK) £345-£422 million
• King Willem-Alexander (Netherlands) £154-£230 million
• King Carl XVI Gustav (Sweden) £54 million
• Queen Margrethe II (Denmark) £30.7 million
• King Harald V (Norway) £23 million
• King Felipe VI (Spain) £15.3 million

The Queen at a service for the Order of the British Empire in St Paul’s, 2012

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It is striking how these other European monarchies have without exception become embedded in the democratic systems of their countries, in most cases constitutionally subservient to their parliaments. They operate on much smaller budgets, with much smaller numbers of working royals, and with even those behaving far more like ordinary members of the public. Alone in Britain the royals still see themselves as superior, entitled to be where they are through birth. In many areas of life, we have to take an oath to our unelected royals. In other European countries, the royals have to take an oath to serve the public and uphold the democratic structures.

In 2021, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, announced that the heir to the Dutch throne, Crown Princess Catharina-Amalia, henceforth would have the right to marry a person of the same sex, should she wish to, and still become queen. Royal marriages there require parliamentary approval. Times have changed, he said. Well, they have in the Netherlands.

In 2022, the same princess, then 18, announced that she would refund her annual €300,000 (£256,000) income while she was a student and forfeit €1.6 million in royal expenses until she incurred “high costs in my role as Princess of Orange”.

In Sweden in 2019, the king stripped five of his grandchildren of their royal titles. Denmark followed suit when, in 2022, Queen Margrethe abolished the royal titles of the four children of her youngest son, Prince Joachim, saying it was “for their own good”.

King Willem-Alexander, Queen Maxima and Princess Amalia of the Netherlands. Cost: £46 million

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I once attended a social event in Sweden and found myself chatting amicably to a woman I eventually discovered was a Swedish princess. In Denmark, King Frederik and his Australian-born wife, Queen Mary, can be seen on the streets of Copenhagen taking their children to state school by cargo bike.

Antiquated etiquette

Here, the fossilised rules still apply, even within the royal family itself, which has a hierarchy that members are expected to learn, such as who should bow or curtsy to whom, even behind closed doors. Meghan, for example, not only had to curtsy to the Queen at her own wedding, but etiquette dictates she must curtsy to Camilla and to Kate.

For the rest of us, you cannot sit down in the presence of a royal at a public event other than at a formal dinner. At such a meal, you should stop eating when the royal guest of honour does, even if you have been deliberately saving that tender morsel until last. At a royal event, you are expected to turn up a long time in advance to make sure that the royal is the last person to arrive, and generally the chosen guests are required to line up to enable the royal personage to pass down the line and ask them questions or indeed ignore them.

You are supposed to wait for the royal to speak and not start the conversation yourself. The standard question is first, “And what do you do?” If necessary, their second question is, “Have you come far?”

It is not just the informality of European royals that is different. More importantly, so is their position within their countries’ constitutions — and yes, they have without exception a written constitution, unlike Britain. Conventions are fine until someone decides no longer to respect them.

Monarchs due to ascend the throne in countries such as the Netherlands or Norway must first take an oath of allegiance to the democratic framework of their country. In Sweden, the new monarch has to vow to defend “the rights of the Riksdag [parliament]”, and in Belgium, he or she must take an oath in three languages (French, Dutch and German); it pledges the monarch to uphold the constitution and laws of the Belgian people and to protect national independence and territorial integrity.

In Britain there is no such subservience to democratic values. Being head of the Church of England, the only oath Charles took was to God. In that capacity, at the accession council that immediately follows the previous monarch’s death he read out a lurid passage condemning Catholics, also unchanged over centuries. Neither at the accession council nor at the subsequent coronation is there any mention of democracy, let alone any idea that the new monarch will pledge to serve the people of the country.

King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway. Cost: £24 million

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It might be asked why we still have coronations for new monarchs in Britain. Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II on September 8, 2022, within two days, the accession council took place at St James’s Palace. Here, privy council members met to certify Charles as the new monarch, although it would be more accurately described as members receiving notification of a fait accompli.

The coronation therefore had no legal purpose. It is not an event to install a king. The moment the Queen died, Charles was king. The coronation eventually took place on May 6, 2023, some eight months later. Nobody can argue that Charles was not already king, so what was the point of this later ceremony?

It is another example of fossilised tradition. No other European monarchy bothers with a coronation any more, each opting instead for a simple ceremony such as the new monarch taking an oath before the country’s parliament.

The last coronation in Spain took place in 1474, in Denmark in 1840, in Sweden in 1873 and in Norway in 1906. Belgium and the Netherlands never bothered with them in the first place. Only in imperial Britain does this creaky vestige of the past live on. Belgium does not even have a crown for the monarch’s head.

You can still find coronations in other parts of the world, however, with Britain aligned in this respect with Lesotho, Eswatini (Swaziland) and Tonga.

Coronations do not come cheap, and Charles III’s was particularly expensive. The king, it was reported, was “extremely conscious of the cost of living crisis”, but he rejected a “cut-price coronation” and any idea that he might personally contribute to the cost of the event.

Palace officials were said to have agreed with ministers that there should be virtually no meaningful changes to the coronation ceremony that took place in June 1953, despite spin from the palace that the ceremony was to be slimmed down. In the event, it was somewhat shorter but certainly not cheaper.

Subsequently, the government said that the coronation had cost the public purse at least £72 million. Republic put the total at up to £250 million, saying a whole swathe of costs to government departments and councils had not been included.

The King at his coronation — he rejected any idea that he might contribute to the cost

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Whatever the figure, it came on top of the £162 million bill for the Queen’s funeral. The so-called traditions associated with the death of a monarch, and the expenses that necessarily follow, are in fact quite recent. The first king to lie in state for the public to file past was Edward VII in 1910. George V was the first to have his coffin pulled by a gun carriage, in 1936.

There has been no shortage of other royal events that have run up a big bill for the public. Over the past ten years, significant funds were spent on Prince Philip’s funeral (2021), Eugenie’s wedding (2018) and Harry’s wedding (2018), as well as an estimated £28 million on the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.

There was some interesting polling around the coronation. A poll in 2022 showed 86 per cent wanted a less expensive ceremony. A YouGov poll before the event showed a majority of the population largely uninterested. Almost two thirds — 64 per cent — said they “do not care very much” or “do not care at all”. Only 9 per cent said they cared a great deal.

Respondents also told YouGov that public funds should not be used for the event. The poll, on April 18, 2023, had 51 per cent of people holding this opinion, while only 32 per cent were in favour. The rest were don’t knows. After the event, 50 per cent said too much public money was spent, compared with 33 per cent who had voiced this view before it took place.

This lack of public enthusiasm is nothing new. After the death of George VI in 1952, a Mass Observation survey revealed widespread non-deferential feelings. Referring to the endless maudlin music and reverence, one 60-year-old woman complained, “Don’t they think of the old folk, sick people, invalids? It’s been terrible for them, all this gloom.”

Nevertheless, the prevailing view from the palace and the prime minister at the time, Rishi Sunak, was that Charles’s coronation was a great opportunity to present “UK PLC” to the world, a UK apparently unchanged over centuries. It would be good for tourism.

Whether or not you think it sensible to base our constitutional arrangements on what tourists might like, it is worth pointing out to those who invoke tourism as an argument for maintaining the monarchy that the most popular European palace in terms of visitor numbers is Versailles, which attracts some 10 million a year, compared with around 550,000 through the doors of Buckingham Palace. The French abolished their monarchy in 1848.

Queen Mathilde and King Philippe of Belgium. Cost: £12.5 million

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The bloated bill for Buckingham Palace

A novel cost-benefit ratio applies to much expenditure associated with the royals: it costs the taxpayer and the royals benefit.

Back in 1858, the Truro MP Augustus John Smith observed in the Commons that the government “never heard anything about the rights of the Crown to a bed or river, or to land between high and low water mark on the shore of the sea, when there was anything to pay, but only when there was something to be received. If improvements were required, the public had to pay for them, but if advantages were to be had, the Crown claimed them.”

He might have been referring to the current ten-year, £359 million refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.

In general the Crown Estate returns an increased bottom line each year well in excess of inflation. Unsurprising, as it owns not just 615,000 acres of often highly valuable sites but also, among much else, the rights to the seabed around Britain. (This means, incidentally, that Britain’s huge expansion in offshore wind power is giving the royals a huge windfall — hundreds of millions of pounds that before 2012 would have gone into the public purse.)

Under the terms set in 2011, the monarch was to receive 15 per cent of the Crown Estate profits each year. In 2017, this was subsequently increased to 25 per cent to cover the costs of refurbishing Buckingham Palace (the maintenance of which fell to the monarch rather than the public purse until 1952).

According to the palace’s own figures from 2008, an estimated cost of between £32 million and £55 million should have been sufficient to deal with the property maintenance backlog and cover repairs to all royal palaces. By 2013, this had increased, but Sir Alan Reid, the treasurer to the Queen, suggested that the 15 per cent allocation from the Crown Estate would be adequate to enable repairs to be completed.

The Red Arrows fly over Buckingham Palace during Trooping the Colour

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Yet by 2016, that had somehow become a figure of £69 million, and Sir Alan’s view now was that “it is clear that these essential works cannot be delivered within a 15 per cent envelope without causing detriment to other areas of spend”. The 15 per cent would have to become 25 per cent.

The Sovereign Grant Review published in November 2016 had argued that this uplift reflected the completion and conclusions of a ten-year property maintenance plan. What had also changed within the previous year, however, was the arrival of a new prime minister and chancellor, respectively Theresa May and Philip Hammond, who apparently accepted the new figure without question.

Formally, the expenditure was agreed by a small committee of MPs meeting far away from the main chamber in an upstairs corridor in just 13 minutes. Only the sole SNP MP on the committee raised any issue at all.

Meanwhile, despite the huge increase in public funding for the palace, the late Queen quietly ensured that all the receipts from entrance fees from visitors went into royal coffers. This was “private” income, which amounted to £10.35 million in 2017 alone.

Nevertheless, in 2025 it was deemed necessary to have a 53 per cent increase in the sovereign grant that year to fund, yes, the refurbishment of the palace. The original 15 per cent take from the Crown Estate’s profits, which we were told would be enough to cover the Buckingham Palace refurbishment, had already been increased to 25 per cent in 2017. Now, the massive increase in payment to the royals in 2025 — up to £132.1 million — was also put down to the refurbishment costs. But if 15 per cent of the Crown Estate profit was enough in 2011 to cover the refurbishment bill, and 25 per cent of an even bigger profit enough in 2017, why in 2025 did yet more money have to be allocated to the Buckingham Palace works?

Royal Mint, National Debt: The Shocking Truth about the Royals’ Finances (Biteback, £22) is published on November 25. To order, go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Discount for Times+ members