Every figure Owl Impact produces carries its method, its source and its date. This page is the whole of it — what each rate is, where it comes from, why we chose it, and the one rule that stops a number being counted twice. If you are an evaluator, a funder or a finance lead, start here.
An hour of work can be described three different ways, and each answers a different question. Most confusion in this field comes from mixing them up.
Paid staff doing the work they are employed to do. This is your investment — what the programme costs to run.
Rate: actual salaryHours contributed over and above what anyone paid for. A recognised proxy puts a figure on the contribution.
Rate: recognised proxyVolunteers, trustees and professionals giving time without charge. Valued at what it would cost to buy that time.
Rate: replacement costThe three figures never combine into one total. They sit side by side, each with its method shown. Lens 1 and lens 3 can describe the same hour from opposite directions; lens 2 answers a different question altogether. Any platform that hands you one merged number is hiding one of these three.
A social value proxy applies only to time given beyond what someone paid for.
Hours a funder or a contract already paid for are cost, not contribution. Costing funded delivery at a social value proxy and reporting the result as social value counts the same money twice — once as the grant, once as the value it supposedly created.
So funded delivery hours go in at actual salary, and they belong in the investment line of an SROI calculation, not the return. That is the denominator, not the numerator.
This is why the tools ask whether an hour was paid for. It is not an administrative question — it decides which lens applies, and getting it wrong is the single most common way a social value figure falls apart under scrutiny.
If you are unsure, this table settles it. Every tool also carries a switch so you can change your answer without starting again.
| Who gave the hour | Which lens | Which tool | Rate applied |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid staff, delivering work a grant or contract funded | Cost | Log your time | Actual salary |
| Paid staff, on activity beyond what was funded — an employer going into a school, a talk given on the firm's time | Social value | Log your time | Proxy · see below |
| General volunteer — no specialist skill required for the task | In-kind | In-Kind | National Living Wage |
| Skilled volunteer — a task needing a particular competence | In-kind | In-Kind | Median hourly pay |
| Professional working pro bono — accountant, solicitor, consultant giving expertise | In-kind | In-Kind | Their charge-out rate |
| Trustee or board member — governance time | In-kind | In-Kind | Set by your organisation |
The same switch sits inside each tool.
These are the rates the tools use today. Each one is published with its source and the year it refers to, because a rate without a date is not evidence.
| Basis | Rate | Source, and why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Paid staff delivering funded work | Actual salary | Your own payroll. The most defensible figure available, and the only honest one for work that was paid for. |
| Social value proxy contribution beyond funded delivery |
£16.93 / hr | National TOMs 2022, measures NT8, NT17 and NT29, all at £16.93. Derived from the ONS hourly value of volunteering — a replacement-cost basis — adjusted to 2021 prices. Used because it is the figure Welsh and English public bodies score procurement against, so a funder or buyer recognises it without explanation. |
| General volunteer | £12.71 / hr | National Living Wage for workers aged 21 and over, from 1 April 2026 (up from £12.21). Used because replacing a general volunteer means employing someone at the legal minimum — that is the true replacement cost, and it is impossible to argue with. |
| Skilled volunteer | £19.67 / hr | ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings, April 2025: median gross hourly pay excluding overtime for full-time employees. Used because a skilled task needs someone of average earning power to replace, not a minimum-wage worker. |
| Professional, pro bono | Charge-out rate | The rate the firm actually bills. Charities SORP treats donated professional services as measurable precisely because they have a market comparator — the firm's own price is that comparator. On the tester, the time is valued at the ONS ASHE April 2025 median for the occupation; on a licence you set the firm's own charge-out rate, and the report records what you set. |
| Trustee and board time | You set it | We do not publish a national trustee rate, because we have not found one we can cite exactly — and we will not invent one. Your organisation sets it, and the report records what you set and why. On the tester, where no rate has been set, trustee time is valued at the ONS ASHE median for the occupation and the report says so; a licence records your own rate. |
| Tool | What it produces | Rate it uses |
|---|---|---|
| Log your time | Costed delivery, or costed contribution | Actual salary for funded work; the proxy for hours beyond it |
| Outcomes | Counts of what happened — referrals, starts, qualifications | No monetary rate. Counts stay counts. |
| Distance travelled | Before-and-after change | No monetary rate. A shift in a measure, not a price. |
| In-Kind | Donated time, costed | NLW, median hourly pay, or a charge-out rate, by who gave it |
| SROI & returns | Return against investment | Investment uses cost, never the proxy. Using both would double-count. |
| Reports | The three figures side by side | Each with its own method and date shown, never summed |
Funders do not agree with each other, and they do not have to. The National Lottery Heritage Fund, for example, has valued volunteer time as match funding at £50 an hour for a professional, £20 for a skilled volunteer and £10 for a general one in its £10,000–£250,000 guidance, while its current £250,000–£10m guidance uses a flat £20 an hour — and requires a log kept as the project progresses (National Lottery Grants for Heritage £10,000–£250,000 Application Guidance, “Your contribution”). None of those match the ONS-derived national figures above.
Neither basis is wrong. They answer to different rules. So the rate that is correct for you is the one your funder recognises.
The tester uses the recognised national rates on this page, so you can see the method working. On a licence you set your own — per role, agreed once at onboarding and applied to every log from then on — because your funder's rules, not ours, decide what a donated hour is worth to you. Change the rate card later and your history stays intact; we do not retrospectively rewrite what was already reported.
| Contribution | Treatment under Charities SORP |
|---|---|
| General volunteer time | Must not be recognised as income in the accounts. The role volunteers play is described in the notes instead. A costed figure is still valid for funder reporting and match-funding claims — it is simply not accounts income. |
| Donated professional services | Where they can be reasonably quantified, they must be included. Services given as part of a trade or profession have a market comparator, so they are measurable — which is exactly why a pro bono figure carries weight. |
Reference: Charities SORP (FRS 102), Module 6 — donated goods, facilities and services, including volunteers, paragraphs 6.17 to 6.21.
The social value proxy above is not ours. It comes from the National TOMs framework, which is maintained commercially and whose documentation is under copyright. We use the published figure because it is the number public buyers and funders already recognise, and we tell you that rather than presenting it as our own work.
We are building our own proxy set. The reasons are practical: a framework built for construction procurement does not describe a youth drop-in or a wellbeing programme well, its measures come with scopes that do not always fit, and depending on someone else's licence is not a foundation to build a product on. Until ours is ready and published with its own workings, we use the recognised figure and name where it came from.
What we will not do: invent a rate to make a number look better, apply a measure outside the scope it was written for without saying so, or publish a figure we cannot point you at the source of. If we ever cannot cite something, we will say that too — as we have above for trustee time.
Something here look wrong to you? Tell us. Challenge a figure and we will either show you the source or change it.
The free demo shows the method above on a fully worked example — every figure carrying its rate, its source and its date.
See the free demo →