The Church Commissioners for England endowment fund delivered an 8% return on investments this year, marking the 17th consecutive year of positive returns.
Poppy Allonby, chief investment officer at the £11.6bn (€13.4bn) in-perpetuity endowment fund, said last year’s performance was primarily due to strong absolute performance in public markets.
“At the same time, we were able to successfully manage portfolio liquidity in order to fund near term distributions,” she added.
As at the end of 2025, Church Commissioners had a 29.5% allocation to public equities, which delivered 13.7% in returns over the year. This was a modest underperformance of the MSCI ACWI, which has a higher weight to large cap technology stocks than Church Commissioner’s portfolio.
The endowment fund’s investment policy does not permit full currency hedging, but the permissible programme mitigated a sizeable part of the impact of the strength of the sterling versus the US dollar.
The absolute return portfolio and defensive equity portfolio, representing approximately 15% of the fund, posted 2025 returns of 5.8% and 8.6%, underperforming equities but fulfilling the defensive mandate.
Fixed income represents 7.5% of Commissioner’s total portfolio, with the endowment fund reporting that holdings of sterling fixed income returned solid mid-single digit returns in 2025 while emerging market and credit sensitive funds also posted solid gains.
The private markets and real asset portfolios contributed more modestly to overall returns, gaining 5.1% and 5.9%, respectively, Church Commissioners reported.
In private markets, it said, venture capital performed strongly, benefitting from the artificial intelligence boom and coming in strongest with a gain of 7.8%, followed by prviate credit at 4.3%, private equity at 4.0% and infrastructure at 2.5%.
The investor said that in 2025 performance across all private markets portfolios was impacted by foreign exchange headwinds, coming on top of the perfornance drag in previous years stemming from valuation adjustments and a slow exit environment.
Real estate delivered positive returns, with key contributions coming from strategic land and commercial property. The overall real assets portfolio delivered a positive return of 5.9% during 2025.
