News

Club Affiliation and Athlete Registration Fees for 2019 - 2020

We would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued support and for all the work that you undertake week in, week out, to develop our great sport, and to create opportunities for all participants, whatever their aspirations and abilities.

We are pleased to see a continued growth in our sport with 172,000 registered club athletes and runners, from the age of 5 up to 91, taking part in 1,350 member clubs and through activities offered by some of the other 350 affiliated bodies. This number has increased significantly during the last few years, but most of this growth has come from the off-track road running community thanks to the boom in social running. Track and Field competition is enjoyed by 40,000 people in clubs across England, but the major growth area of the sport is in running with significantly more women taking part than they did some years back.

There are now more than 7.2 million people who run each month in England and your work, as our member clubs, is fundamental to this success story. More clubs are organising licensed road races too with 3,225 races being licensed in the last 12 months in total.

This is something we are extremely proud of, but we also mindful of when considering our pricing structure for registered club athletes and runners.

We are also mindful of the need to continually listen to our member clubs and participants and to evidence where we are spending your affiliation fees to support and develop the sport. As a membership organisation we want people to trust the decisions that we make and to feel pleased to be a part of the England Athletics family.

As a result of our deliberations, the affiliation and registration fees for 2019-2020 will therefore be as follows in order to meet our strategic priorities to grow our sport:

  • Athlete registration fee will remain at £15 per person.  We will next review this in September 2019.
  • Club affiliation fee will increase to £150 per club/member body.  This fee has remained unchanged since 2015-16 and we feel that this increase, as the focus on this occasion, is the right one to make.

Affiliation and athlete/runner registration fees in England are among the lowest of comparable National Governing Bodies for other sports, and England Athletics will continue to listen to views expressed by those involved in the sport to ensure fair and effective provision across athletics and running.

We are able to fund opportunities to develop our sport as your membership body through, in part, valuable funding from our partner Sport England, but our reliance on this is decreasing year on year thanks to your support and thanks to commercial partnerships with sponsors such as DW Fitness First. As a not-for-profit membership organisation, the sources of our overall annual income for the last year were broken down as follows:

  • Membership and registration 36%
  • Sport England 30%
  • Courses & Workshops 14%
  • Other Grant Funding 8%
  • Road Race Licencing 6%
  • Commercial Partnerships 3%
  • Other Income 2%
  • Event/Competition Income 1%

To give you a clearer view of where we spend our income, the following high-level information may be helpful. Our total expenditure, at a headline level, during the year 17-18 was as follows:

graph showing England Athletics expenditure by funding source

Your continued support is invaluable to developing grassroots athletics and running across England. That support has enabled us to:

  • introduce a new volunteering support and development programme aimed at our member clubs
  • employ a team of local Club Support Managers and Education Coordinators to help you as our members to develop your club and to qualify more coaches, leaders and officials.
  • expand our free Club Run coaching programme for road running clubs across England.
  • grow our social running programme RunTogether, through clubs and partners, to more than
  • 1,700 groups with qualified EA run leaders offering weekly runs for 75,000 people across England.
  • help thousands of club runners to enjoy safe, well organised road racing through the 3,225 England Athletics licensed events across England.
  • employ a team of specialist Coaching and Athlete Development Managers to organise development activities such as conferences, workshops and training weekends across all events and across different parts of the country, aimed at enhancing the performance of club athletes and runners.
  • introduce a new masters road running competition programme at marathon, half marathon and 10k distance.
  • organise National Championships for talented club athletes and runners and has also ensured that we are able to continue our investments in important competitions organised by the English Schools Athletic Association, Area Competition Associations and other bodies.
  • take the Commonwealth Games team to the Gold Coast in April this year to compete for medals against some of the finest athletes in the world.
  • take club athletes and runners to 40 international competitions to compete for England as part of their ongoing development.

Thank you once again for the contribution that you all make to our sport and we are looking forward to a successful 2019 for everyone involved in athletics and running as part of the England Athletics family across the country.