IFR Levy Explained: How Much English Football Clubs Will Pay
England’s football regulator wants £20.3m a year from 116 clubs from 2027/28. Premier League sides pay about £600k, League One clubs around £9k.
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English football now knows what independent regulation will cost it. The Independent Football Regulator (IFR) has proposed a £20.3 million annual levy on the 116 clubs it oversees, with bills ranging from up to £1.8 million at the biggest Premier League clubs to less than £600 in the National League. The total is roughly double what the government told the industry to expect, and clubs now have six weeks to push back.
The levy replaces the government funding that has carried the regulator since it was created under the Football Governance Act 2025 . Clubs in the top five divisions of the men's game will start paying from the 2027/28 season, according to details published by the regulator this week .
What the £20.3m pays for
The budget breaks down into three parts: £18.3 million of operating costs, around £1 million held back for potential litigation, and a further £1 million to start recovering the cost of setting the regulator up. The IFR puts the total at about 0.2% of English football's £9 billion in annual revenue.
That headline number has already drawn attention. Bloomberg reported that it is twice the government's earlier estimate, which put annual running costs at up to £10.2 million over the regulator's first decade. Back when the legislation was first introduced, the regulator had been given an indicative budget of £10 million .
How the bill is split down the pyramid
The law requires the regulator to take each club's financial resources into account, and the proposal leans heavily on that principle. Most Premier League clubs are expected to pay around £600,000 a season. The highest earners could face up to £1.8 million, with surcharges triggered by playing in UEFA or FIFA competitions, receiving parachute payments, or generating commercial revenue above £150 million.
Below the top flight, the numbers fall sharply. Championship clubs without parachute payments are looking at roughly £45,000, with an extra charge for those still receiving them. League One clubs would pay about £9,000, League Two clubs around £6,000, and National League clubs less than £600.
IFR chief executive Richard Monks described the levy as a modest investment in a more sustainable game, and said the structure means most clubs will pay around 0.1% of their annual revenues.
The regulator has been quick to compare its budget with the rest of the game's administration. It points to Premier League administrative expenses of more than £200 million in 2024/25 and roughly £35 million at the EFL over the same period. On those figures, the IFR would cost the game about a tenth of what the Premier League spends running itself. For a club like Brighton, which reported £222 million in revenue in 2024/25, a bill in the region of £600,000 is a rounding error. For a club operating on the margins in League Two, £6,000 is not nothing, but it is a small fraction of what a single failed season can cost.
Why clubs are uneasy anyway
The levy is small relative to club turnover, but the way it grew has caused friction. Premier League and EFL clubs had repeatedly pressed the regulator for an updated budget before this week's announcement, with some of the frustration focused on the IFR's appointment of Boston Consulting Group.
There is also a principle at stake. A regulator that doubles its expected budget before it has issued a single licence invites questions about where costs go next, particularly once licensing, monitoring and enforcement are all running at full scale. The six-week consultation is the clubs' chance to test those assumptions before the bills start arriving.
The case the regulator is making
The IFR's answer is that the cost of doing nothing is far higher. Its first State of the Game report , published earlier this month, found that 94% of clubs were loss-making and warned that more than a quarter could struggle to survive 30 days if their owners stopped funding them. The collapse of Bury in 2019 remains the reference point for what happens when that funding disappears.
In its first year, the regulator says it has run suitability checks on 40 owners, directors and senior executives, reviewed proposed changes to club crests and other heritage assets, and published 10 consultations. Its next job is the big one: rolling out a licensing system for all 116 clubs, designed to flag financial risk early enough to act on it.
The levy lands alongside the regulator's other live pressure point: the long-running negotiation between the Premier League and EFL over how money flows down the pyramid. If the two sides cannot agree, the IFR has backstop powers to impose a settlement. Chair David Kogan has said using them would represent a failure by the game's leadership, as Sky News reported . How clubs respond to the levy consultation will be an early signal of how cooperative that relationship is going to be.
What happens next
Clubs have six weeks to respond to the consultation. After that, the regulator will finalise the levy ahead of the switch from government funding at the start of the 2027/28 season. The money itself is unlikely to change any club's fortunes. What the debate will settle is whether English football accepts paying for its own oversight, and how much say it gets over the price.