Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2023-2024/Finances

The world is currently in a period of increasing financial instability. The instability of our global economic outlook (including inflation and other concerning financial signals) creates uncertainty for the future financial projections of the Foundation. Currency fluctuations are also adding some unpredictability to the Foundation's finances as it raises and spends funds in multiple currencies.

Slowing budget growth. The Foundation's budget grew dramatically over the past five years, fueled in part by the creation of an ambitious Movement Strategy. Since last year, budget growth has been flattening; for this upcoming fiscal year (2023−2024), the growth flattened even more, to the point that it will not easily keep up with inflation and other unavoidable cost increases. What this means is that the Foundation had to reduce internal expenses in some areas to fund cost increases in other areas, including keeping our grants programs at similar levels to last year. Based on the information we have now, we expect to maintain an effectively flat budget for the next few years.

Most expense categories are affected by things like inflation, cost of living adjustments, and other unavoidable year-on-year cost increases, which means that the budget grows even if nothing else changes. To maintain current staffing levels (no additional overall growth in staff), the Foundation's annual budget would need to increase by 6−7% annually. We are looking instead at annual budget increases of about 3-5%, which has meant that we needed to actively reduce expenses to make up for those types of increases.

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