Scottish Government and public bodies (including NHS healthcare organisations) corporate function data, 2023-24 and 2024-25
Data on the size and costs of corporate functions in core Scottish Government and public bodies, including NHS healthcare organisations. This data release includes information on spend managed by corporate functions, and funding passed to different groups by public bodies and core Scottish Government.
Introduction
This publication of corporate function costs is the planned update following from the provisional data release in March 2026, to include core Scottish Government and NHS healthcare organisations.
Within this publication, references to Scottish Government refer to the core Scottish Government. The costs (and FTE) contained herein therefore reflect the centralised corporate functions costs and may exclude people who work in professions associated with the function but are not directly situated within the central function.
NHS healthcare organisations refer to health boards and other associated health care public bodies, who were not commissioned for data for the provisional publication. The full list of these can be found on their website.
As part of the data commission, core Scottish Government and public bodies, including NHS healthcare organisations, were asked to provide information across a broad set of areas. This included the costs of delivering corporate functions, spending managed by these functions and, at an organisational level, funds passed through to other organisations. Data was requested for the years 2023-24 and 2024-25.
The six corporate functions in scope were: Human Resources, Finance, Digital and Data, Commercial, Property, and Communications; the full definitions of team and activities for these categories can be found in Annex A. Public bodies with less than 40 full‑time equivalent (FTE) staff were given the option to submit aggregated data rather than apportioning costs across all six functions.
There are 108 public bodies (excluding NHS healthcare organisations). Of these, 90 were deemed in scope of the exercise, with exclusions including bodies and offices that are accountable to the Scottish Parliament and not to Scottish Ministers (such as Parliamentary Commissioners) and organisations with public body status where Ministers’ intention is to return these to private ownership (e.g. Ferguson Marine Port Glasgow). Three public bodies in scope have not provided data for this release. Of these, Scottish Prison Service and Quality Meat Scotland were omitted from this iteration following agreement by Scottish Government.
Additionally, a further 22 NHS healthcare organisations (consisting of 14 regional NHS Boards, 7 Special NHS Boards and 1 public health body) were deemed in scope for the updated release. Data which relates to corporate function costs for core Scottish Government has also been included in this update.
The summary statistics presented here therefore reflect the responses of the core Scottish Government and 109 public organisations but should not be viewed as a complete picture of corporate spend across the whole public sector. The public sector is varied, with organisations carrying out different roles and functions. League tables should not be made between organisations due to the distinct nature of each – for example, differences in size, budgets, structure, functions. Additionally, some organisations raise revenue and fees, which may cover expenditure to different extents.
Contact
corporatefunctiondata@gov.scot