Flexible funding
Flexible funding
This page offers up-to-date information on unearmarked and softly earmarked contributions, including donor details.
Looking for information about flexible funding in 2025?
Explore how we used flexible funding resources — both softly earmarked and unearmarked — to respond to needs of forcibly displaced and stateless people around the world in our dedicated page.
Find more information
What is flexible funding?
- Unearmarked funding: Contributions provided without restrictions on their use. This gives UNHCR maximum flexibility to allocate resources where needs and risks are greatest, ensuring timely protection and assistance for people forced to flee and stateless people.
- Softly earmarked funding: Contributions that allow UNHCR to allocate resources across countries, regions or situation, or thematic areas (e.g., a Pillar or sector), in line with identified priorities. This offers a balance between donor preferences and operational flexibility.
Furthermore, multi-year funding (i.e., contributions pledged for 24 months or more), while not always flexible, provides vital predictability, enabling UNHCR to plan and allocate resources more effectively from the outset.
Why does UNHCR ask for flexible funding?
UNHCR’s mission is supported by dozens of States, hundreds of companies, and millions of individual donors. What they share is compassion, generosity, and a desire to improve the lives of people who have been forced to flee or who are stateless. Many donors are motivated by a particular cause, something that touched them and spurred them to contribute, and they ask UNHCR to put their funds to good use in relation to that cause. In this way, many of the funds that UNHCR receives are “earmarked”, or dedicated to a particular country or a specific project. This is a vital lifeline for millions of people who are in need.
But instead of earmarking their support to an emergency or operation or theme, many donors contribute “flexible funding” to UNHCR and its mandate as a whole: this is funding as an expression of trust in the Office; as an expression of solidarity with the people the Office serves; and funding which is reflective of good humanitarian donorship and other international principles and commitments. It allows UNHCR critical flexibility in how it responds to needs and where.
How does UNHCR allocate flexible funding?
UNHCR allocates flexible funding through a structured prioritization process that considers vulnerabilities and risks, the scale of displacement, operational capacity, and gaps in earmarked funding. This ensures that resources are directed to operations where funding shortfalls would otherwise hinder life-saving responses, undermine the delivery of core mandate activities – including solutions – or constrain underfunded and less visible operations.
Within this framework, a distinction is made between different degrees of flexibility:
- Unearmarked funding is allocated at the global level and provides the highest degree of flexibility. It allows UNHCR to respond rapidly to emerging crises, sustain essential operations that receive limited visibility or donor attention, and address systemic funding gaps across operations. Its allocation is guided by comparative priority across all contexts, ensuring a balanced and needs-driven distribution of resources.
- Softly earmarked funding is allocated within the parameters of a specific situation or regional crisis. While more flexible than tightly earmarked contributions, softly earmarked funding is strategically directed to priority needs within the defined context, based on evolving operational requirements and funding gaps across affected countries. For example, funding earmarked at the situation level can be used to support activities across any of the countries affected, based on where needs are greatest. If a specific activity in one of these countries is already covered by a tightly earmarked contribution, situation-level funding is redirected to address other unmet needs within the same situation.
In all cases, flexible funding is allocated in a complementary manner and does not duplicate other sources of funding. Allocation decisions are made with full visibility over existing tightly earmarked and other contributions, ensuring that flexible resources are used to fill unmet needs rather than overlap with activities already funded.
This process builds on UNHCR’s broader budgeting approach, which is needs-based and developed from the bottom up. Programmes are designed based on the humanitarian and protection needs of displaced populations, rather than on available funding. Flexible funding is then used, throughout the year, to address the most critical gaps in this needs-based planning, as well as to respond rapidly to emergencies.
The value of flexible funding: mandate, emergencies and global reach
Flexible funding allows UNHCR to deliver on its mandate. As a humanitarian agency mandated to provide protection and assistance to forcibly displaced and stateless populations, UNHCR’s impact is dependent on its ability to respond swiftly and flexibly. If UNHCR has to wait until resources are raised to respond, precious time and opportunities to make a difference and save lives would be lost. As a rights-based agency, UNHCR’s ability to protect those most affected is core - and is deeply linked to its informed understanding of those who are most vulnerable and most at risk.
The funding information displayed on the dashboards below is updated every two weeks, while the indicative flexible and unearmarked funding allocations are updated monthly.
Indicative flexible funding allocations | 2026 (USD)
A snapshot of how UNHCR delivered protection and assistance in the top ten countries receiving the largest flexible funding allocations in the first quarter of 2026:
Indicative unearmarked funding allocations | 2026 (USD)
Previous Flexible Funding Reports
The Flexible Funding Reports contain an overview, financial tables, and case studies of how and where flexible funding made a difference. You can find the previous years' versions of the reports in the dropdown below.
Please note that from 2022 onwards, the report is fully accessible online, and no full PDF version is produced; nevertheless you can find case studies available as PDFs.