Fringe artist fund falls to £40,000 and comics top up the prizes

The Keep it Fringe fund paid 180 Edinburgh artists £2,500 each in 2025, a total of £450,000. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport put £1 million behind the scheme across the 2024 and 2025 festivals. This August it made 16 awards. The people topping up the pot were Miriam Margolyes, a family called Williamson, the theatre producer James Seabright and a cheese biscuit.

The biscuit is Cheez-It, which the Fringe Society lists as a supporter through a fundraising partnership with the Co-op. I’m not being sniffy about any of them. Every one of those donors put real money into a scheme that had run out of government cash. That £2,500 goes on venue hire and a shared flat in Marchmont rather than on a plaque. But the arithmetic of comedy funding in Britain has flipped inside about eighteen months. It’s worth setting out with the actual figures rather than the press-release adjectives.

180 bursaries became 16 in twelve months

The 2025 round was the high-water mark for comedy funding at the Fringe, and the Fringe Society’s own announcement puts it without decoration: “180 x £2,500 awards. Total value: £450,000.” There were 850 applications that year, read by 28 independent assessors, so roughly one applicant in five got paid. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the money would “ensure that artists from all backgrounds have the opportunity to put on a show”. The audiences she meant were the international ones, and the industry professionals who gather in Edinburgh each summer.

For 2026 the fund opened with £30,000. Donations pushed it to £40,000, which at £2,500 a head buys 16 bursaries, and 402 artists applied for them. That’s a success rate of roughly four per cent, against roughly 21 per cent the year before. Those percentages are mine, worked out from the published application and award counts, and neither body printed them. The Society also notes that 43 per cent of the successful applicants identify as disabled or have a health condition. More than 30 per cent come from a working-class background. Both proportions are describing a group of sixteen people.

Tony Lankester, chief executive of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, phrased it carefully. “We recognise the significance of the Keep it Fringe fund and the number of applications this year demonstrates how important it has become.” Four hundred and two applications for sixteen envelopes is certainly one way of demonstrating importance, and 386 of those artists got a no.

How much is the Keep it Fringe fund worth in 2026?

£40,000, handed out as 16 bursaries of £2,500 each, from 402 applications. It started the year at £30,000 and was topped up by private donations. The Fringe Society names Miriam Margolyes, the Williamson family, James Seabright and Cheez-It as supporters. The 2027 round opens for applications in January 2027. The bursary stays at £2,500, a number that has not moved while Edinburgh August rents have.

It’s worth remembering where the fund came from, because the loop closes neatly. Keep it Fringe launched in 2023 under the Fringe Society’s honorary president Phoebe Waller-Bridge. It was funded by the Fleabag for Charity campaign, alongside money donated to the Society by Edinburgh Gin. So it began as one performer’s charity money, spent two festivals as government policy, and has gone back to being charity money again. The DCMS million covered 2024 and 2025 and then simply ended.

Rhod Gilbert paid for the panel prize, Elf Lyons for the tech award

The same handover has happened faster at the prize end, and more cheerfully. The ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards, run by Nathan Cassidy as an open alternative to the main awards, carried a prize fund of £12,500.01 in 2025. That was £4,000 each for best show and best newcomer, plus a £3,000 panel prize sponsored by Rhod Gilbert. Elf Lyons sponsored a £1,000 tech award, and TakeOver Radio 106.9FM put up £500.01 for best joke. Two working comedians and a community station, funding the categories a sponsor would never bother with. Somebody paid a grand for the person on the lighting desk.

This year Sarah Millican put £4,000 into the newcomer prize, having won best newcomer at the main Edinburgh Comedy Awards herself in 2008. Her explanation is the least varnished thing anyone has said about comedy funding all year:

I won a Newcomer award once and as well as the career lift and confidence boost, it enabled me to pay off my car loan. Very happy to help some new funny person kill off a bit of their debt and give them a comedy pat on the back.

In August, Garry Starr donated £1,600 so that all 10 best show nominees and all five best newcomer nominees took home £100 each. Another £100 went to a show that hadn’t made the longlist at all, awarded as the Garry Starr Very Very Silly and Not-Longlisted Prize. There was a condition attached: you had to be at the ceremony on the Friday night to collect it. “Awards are lovely and silly and let’s reward the lovely and silly,” Starr said. That is a better funding rationale than most Arts Council application forms manage. Chortle put the running total at £17,600.01 on 24 August. The awards’ Sarah Bowles pointed out they “only need another £2,400 to be the most valuable Edinburgh Comedy Award ever”.

£80,000 for 2027, and only if you live in England

Then in August, Arts Council England donated an initial £80,000 to Keep it Fringe for 2027. It’s the biggest single injection since the government money stopped. It arrives with a border drawn through it: the funding supports artists based in England. Neil Darlison, ACE’s director of theatre, said they were “delighted to be able to mark the Fringe’s 80th year through Keep it Fringe”. The money is “directly supporting artists and companies based in England taking their work to the 2027 festival”.

Which is precisely what an Arts Council of England exists to do, and is not a criticism of ACE. It does mean something at a festival held in Scotland. An act from Salford and an act from Springburn take the same financial risk on the same 40-seat room, but now apply into different pots. One of those pots is £80,000; the other is whoever the Society can find. Lankester’s line on the ACE money was that they were “overjoyed” about it. The Society says it is actively seeking additional partners to support artists across the rest of the UK.

Audible pays £10,000, the BBC pays in shadowing

Corporate comedy funding hasn’t gone away, it has just moved to the parts of the business that come with a logo position and a camera. Audible signed a three-year deal to sponsor the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, now in their 46th year. It is worth £10,000 for the Audible Best Comedy Show, plus £5,000 each for the Taffner Family Best Newcomer and the Audible Panel Prize. Nica Burns, who directs the awards, said of the sponsor: “It is clear to us that they are committed to live comedy and the pleasure that it brings to so many people.”

The BBC’s scheme is more generous per head and points somewhere else entirely. Each of the 10 Comedy Collective recipients gets up to £10,000 worth of paid shadowing on a BBC comedy production, with an allocated production mentor. There is also a £5,000 development grant. That is a properly useful year for a writer or an editor. It is also explicitly for scripted comedy – television – and none of it lands in a Tuesday room above a pub in Sheffield.

When something breaks at the grassroots, the whip-round is comics again. The hardship fund for Leicester’s unpaid acts had raised just under £4,000 of a £30,000 target by Chortle’s 22 August report. The Live Comedy Association handles applications and verification. The money for that is coming from a workforce whose average turnover was £21,143 last year, down from £26,778.

Next August the pot starts at zero again

None of this is a scandal, exactly, but it is a transfer, and the transfer is measurable. £450,000 of largely public bursary money in 2025; £40,000 of largely private bursary money in 2026; £80,000 pledged for 2027 on the condition of an English postcode. Prize funds that grew in the same window grew because Millican, Gilbert, Lyons and Starr wrote personal cheques, and their generosity is not a policy. Nobody can put it in a business plan, because it depends on individual comedians having a good year and feeling like it in August.

The question for 2027 is what the Fringe Society finds for the artists ACE’s money can’t reach. The other is whether anyone in government notices that a scheme they part-funded for two years now runs on donations from actors and a snack brand. In the meantime, there’s a queue of nominees at a late-night ceremony waiting for a man in a leotard to hand them £100 in cash, because he’d said he wouldn’t post it.

Sources

• Keep it Fringe 2026: recipients announced – Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
• Keep it Fringe 2025: 180 award recipients announced – Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
• Keep it Fringe fund returning for Fringe 2027 – Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society
• Garry Starr boosts ISH award coffers – Chortle
• Sarah Millican backs ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards 2026 – Beyond The Joke
• Audible to sponsor Edinburgh Comedy Awards – Chortle
• BBC Comedy Collective 2026 announced – Chortle