Bank of England FAQs

We are the central bank of the United Kingdom. We are a public body and our job is to maintain monetary and financial stability for the country.

This includes making sure prices are stable, banking services are safe and the UK's financial system is sound.

Our job is to make sure the UK’s monetary and financial system is stable and secure. Our work includes: 

• providing ways to pay for things safely: we produce banknotes that are hard to forge, so you can trust them, and run the UK’s electronic payments system, so you can pay for things easily
• making sure banks are well run: we keep a close watch on banks and other financial companies, setting the rules for how they do business and making sure they follow them; if a bank goes bust, we make sure it doesn’t cause problems for their customers, taxpayers or the economy
• keeping price rises (inflation) low and stable: the Government sets us a target of keeping inflation at 2% – this is low enough to keep price rises small but high enough to avoid the problem of deflation

Find out more about what we do.

The Bank was established in 1694 to act as banker to the Government. You can explore a timeline of our history. 

The British government.

The Treasury solicitor, on behalf of HM Treasury, holds our entire capital (around £14.6 million). This figure refers to capital under its accounting definition, not our overall net worth, which includes profits we have made over time and kept.

The £14.6 million is the current value of the shares (known as ‘bank stock’) that the Government bought from private ownership when the Bank of England was nationalised in 1946. The Government compensated former stockholders with new stock the Treasury created called ‘3% Treasury stock 1966 or after’.

In 1997, the Government gave the Bank greater independence to carry out our mission. 

Find out more about who owns the Bank of England.

As a public body, we are answerable to the people of the UK through Parliament.

In Parliament, the House of Commons Treasury Committee holds us to account. They regularly question our senior members of staff, including the Governor. When this happens, you can watch it live on Parliament’s website or read a transcript of it later. 

Find out more about how Parliament holds us to account.

Although we are a public body, we do not get a budget from the Treasury. Instead, we generate the money we need for our work through:

• the Bank of England Levy, which funds the costs of our monetary policy and financial stability operations – it replaced the Cash Ratio Deposit scheme in March 2024
• charging a fee to the firms we regulate
• providing banking services to our customers, who include overseas central banks
• charging for the cost of producing banknotes
• charging a management fee for services we provide to government agencies
• investing the money we have built up over 300 years

We generate more income than we spend, so each year we give millions to the Treasury. 

Read our short guide on who pays for the Bank of England.

You can also find more information about our sources of funds in the financial review section of our Annual Report (page 46).

All the profits we make from printing banknotes go to the Treasury.

Each year, a proportion of any profits we make from our other activities goes there. The exact proportion depends on how much capital we need to hold to absorb any losses. The profits we don’t pay to the Treasury go into our reserves.

Read more in the Financial relationship between HM Treasury and the Bank: memorandum of understanding document. 

In 2019, we made about £80 million from printing banknotes and all the profits went to the Treasury. We made a profit of £110 million from our other activities – £55 million of this went to the Treasury and £55 million into our reserves.

Each year, we must submit our annual report and accounts to Parliament.

The monarch appoints the Governor after a recommendation from the Chancellor.

Andrew Bailey is the Governor of the Bank of England. 

The Government announced Bailey's appointment on 20 December 2019. He began his term on 16 March 2020.

The Governor serves for a single term of eight years. This is set out in the Financial Services Act 2012. 

Our offices are closed to the public but you can visit our our museum.

Entry to our museum is free. It is open Monday to Friday, from 10am to 5pm. 

It is also open every third Thursday of the month until 8pm. Please note, it is closed on bank holidays.

The Bank of England Counter at Threadneedle Street, London, EC2R 8AH, is open from 9.30am to 3pm on Monday to Friday. It is closed during the weekend and on bank holidays.