Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027/Budget Overview
How people consume and contribute information online is changing quickly. We are seeing these trends affect Wikipedia's readership and they pose a long-term challenge to our contributor model and our mission. At the same time, we are dealing with an increase in bot traffic and scraping that is straining our infrastructure.
With our Fiscal year 2026-27 (FY26-27) Budget and Annual Plan, we aim to respond to and meet the challenges presented by the changing landscape by prioritizing targeted investments in the annual plan objectives: Reach, Engage, Protect and Enable.
This year's budget aligns our resources to these changing needs while remaining prudent, sustainable, and future-facing to advance our mission. As in recent years, technical infrastructure is the largest part of our budget followed by direct support to our communities.
| Area | Budget ($M) | Percent (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Investment in Technology | $116.5M | 48% |
| Support for Volunteers | $68.8M | 29% |
| Allocation to Fundraising Efforts | $29.2M | 12% |
| General & Administrative Expenses | $25.4M | 11% |
| Annual Budget | $240.0M |
Investment in Technology remains the largest part of our budget, receiving 48% of total funding.
The Investment in Technology funds a wide range of work in support of our mission, including: enhancing bot detection and defense mechanisms to manage the increased load from scraping; evolving our API services to ensure responsible content reuse and clear brand attribution; implementing new product experiences and exploring new formats and content experiences to deepen reader and donor engagement; strengthening platform resilience through enhanced supply chain security and offline backups; boosting developer productivity by standardizing data pipelines; and automating manual processes to significantly accelerate software delivery speed. It includes work to support our contributors including empowering our most trusted volunteers with high-certainty signals and centrally managed automated systems to detect bad-faith activity as well as product experiences across mobile, desktop, and apps that enable editing, collaboration, and translation. It includes the costs of all teams that do this work, the costs of running our data centers, and all other costs needed to run one of the top 10 most visited websites in the world.
Support for Volunteers accounts for 29% of our budget. This area of work encompasses the work we do to support our volunteers. For example, this year's annual plan includes initiatives to amplify the joy of contributing to the Wikimedia projects. We will make it easier for volunteers to discover opportunities and grow through a modular, personalized dashboard that connects them with the right tasks at the right time. We will also work to make the contributor experience more meaningful, for example by highlighting recognition, celebrating milestones, and enabling collaboration. We'll celebrate our most impactful users and our collective milestones (e.g. Wikimedians of the Year and large-scale virtual events) to make participation rewarding and fun. It also includes initiatives that directly support contributors (e.g. convenings for users with extended rights, scaling the books for editors pilot). We will be working to attract and retain contributors through outreach, community-led campaigns, partnerships with educational and cultural institutions, and affiliate-led initiatives.
We'll continue to support our existing communities through global collaboration and governance, celebrating and supporting users with extended rights, trust and safety, direct funding and support, defending human rights, and addressing legal challenges to our mission.
Allocation to Fundraising Efforts makes up 12% of our budget. We aim to generate $230M for the annual fund and $10M for the Endowment by upgrading fundraising infrastructure for enhanced automation and analytics. To mitigate traffic declines, we are diversifying donor pathways through paid media, SEO, and direct email/SMS outreach. We are growing Wikimedia Enterprise revenue through new datasets and commercial functionality to ensure that large-scale reusers contribute to the sustainability of the open knowledge ecosystem.
General & Administrative Expenses represent the final 11% of our budget. General & Administrative expenses are focused on strengthening the Wikimedia Foundation's internal capacity. This includes all of our work to maintain our financial sustainability, manage risk, and improve operations to make us more agile, efficient, and resilient.
Working Capital Reserve
[edit]Part of ensuring our long-term financial sustainability and managing risk includes maintaining a healthy working capital reserve aligned to industry best practices.
In this budget, we will spend a portion of our reserve, up to $10 million (3% of our reserve), to make the investments in our objectives that will help us respond to the trends that we're facing. Using reserves for a limited time helps fund key investments while staying aligned with nonprofit financial best practices. Additionally, we will continue this year to identify ways to deliver impact more cost-effectively.
We'll remain in a financially stable and sustainable position, staying well within our board-approved target of 12 to 18 months of operating expenses. We will continue to have the flexibility to respond to unplanned or unexpected changes in the economic, regulatory, or policy environment.
Supporting Volunteers and the Movement
[edit]We are growing our funding and support for the movement. We provide support to volunteers and our movement in a variety of ways, including by giving out direct funding to affiliates and movement partners to support their work.
Grants and direct movement funding will increase by nearly 9% next year. This provides additional funding for contributors, affiliates, and participation in events and conferences.
Our work this year includes continuing to support the work of updating our grant strategy by the Global Resource Distribution Committee, which will provide a recommendation for the future grants strategy. We also support community governance through movement committees like the Arbitration Committees and the Affiliations Committee, in connection with the ongoing update of the Movement Ecosystem strategy.
The Foundation also provides direct financial support to the movement in other ways, in addition to the grants and direct movement funding listed above, including funding scholarships and organising events like Wikimania, the Wikimedia Hackathon, Regional conferences and more ($2.9M), and legal defense for volunteers.
Maintaining Industry Best Practices
[edit]In 2026-2027, 77% of the Foundation's budget is planned to go toward programmatic expenses, which represent 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. Charity Navigator gives top marks in their ratings to organizations our size with over 70% programmatic expense.
Appendix: staffing overview
[edit]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 December 31, 2025.
| Our total headcount | 685 | 685 total Foundation staff on 31 December 2025.
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 | 44 | People are located across 44 countries and all continents except Antarctica. |
| Growth in headcount | 4.21% | Headcount has grown by 4.21% in the past 12 months (Dec 2024 – Dec 2025). |
| Global/Non-US Workers | 47% | 47% of the Foundation's people are located outside of the United States. |
| Tenure in years | 5.7 | Staff members are staying on the average for about 5.7 years. |