The short answer is your annual conference budget.
An apportionment is the amount of your conference budget as adopted by your annual conference that has been apportioned (divided out) to your local church based on a formula also adopted by your annual conference. Your annual conference—the clergy members of the conference plus the lay members sent by every local church—thus have a say in what the apportionment for your local church will be each year.
Every year, your conference’s Committee on Finance and Administration (CFA) meets to develop a proposed budget for the following year. They present that proposed budget to the annual conference session. The annual conference has the opportunity to ask questions and make changes before approving a budget in final form. The final form of the budget is published in your conference journal. Most annual conferences publish their conference journal in electronic format (usually .pdf or ISSU) on their website. The 2026 budget of the Mountain Sky Conference, for example, appears beginning on page 427 of the file of its 2025 conference journal.
If you want to know what the proposed budget will be for the coming year, most annual conferences typically publish this with pre-conference materials on their website as part of the report of the conference CFA. Here, for example, is the report from the Mississippi Conference CFA, including information about the approved 2026 budget year and the proposed spending plan for the 2027 conference year. Some annual conferences include the audited reports of income and expenses for the previous conference year in their pre-conference reports as well.
Additional information from GCFA
As you look at your conference budget, you will see that some items are designated for the churchwide budget adopted by the General Conference. The churchwide budget is itself apportioned to (divided up among) the annual conferences based on a formula adopted by the General Conference. The voting members of the General Conference consist of the lay and clergy delegates elected by each annual conference. This means the lay and clergy members of your annual conference have at least an indirect voice in determining both the churchwide budget and the formula used to apportion it to the annual conferences, just as each local church has, through its lay and clergy members of the annual conference, voice and vote in the annual conference budget and its apportionment formula. Your annual conference does not have the authority to alter the churchwide funding apportioned to it, just as the local church does not have the authority to alter the amount of the annual conference budget apportioned to it.
If you want to know more about the churchwide budget and how it is scheduled to be collected throughout the four years of this quadrennium (2025-2028), you may read The United Methodist Church Budget Handbook, published by the General Council on Finance and Administration (GCFA).
If you want to find out what the churchwide budget does and does not pay for you may find these resources helpful: “Does The UMC fund…?,” “Apportioned Funds,” “Apportioned Funds Resources,” and, though some specifics were altered by action of the 2024 General Conference, “What’s new for GC 2024, Part 1: Budget.”
And if you want more specifics on the line items in your conference budget, you may contact your conference treasurer’s office, which you will find on your conference’s website.
When you wonder what your local church is paying for when you pay your apportionment each month, you have no need to rely on your memory or what someone may have told you. You can go directly to the most up-to-date sources through your conference's website, United Methodist Communications, GCFA, and your conference treasurer.
Burton Edwards serves as Lead for Ask The UMC, the information service of United Methodist Communications.
