Are charity shops open on Sundays?

Why Sunday hours are shorter

Large shops in England and Wales are held to Sunday trading rules, which cap the bigger units at six hours. Most charity shops are also staffed by volunteers, whose weekend availability is thinner than their weekday availability. Scotland has no equivalent trading restriction, so Sunday hours north of the border tend to look more like the rest of the week. Everywhere, the window is narrower and varies more from one shop to the next than on any other day.

Sunday is a good day to hunt anyway

Saturday is when the week's donations arrive and the sorting room fills up. A fair amount of it reaches the shelves for Sunday, and Sunday footfall is lower than Saturday's, so the shelf you are reading has been picked over less. Shops that restock on a Monday morning will be at their thinnest. If you only get one weekend outing, a late Saturday or an early Sunday tends to beat a Sunday afternoon.

Check before you go

Opening hours change often and are recorded unreliably. Our town pages list the hours each shop has given and mark the ones known to open on Sundays, which is the closest thing to a straight answer without ringing round. Where a shop has no hours recorded, treat that as unknown rather than closed: plenty of shops simply have not been added to the map yet.

Bank holidays are not Sundays

A shop that opens every Sunday may well close on a bank holiday Monday, and a shop that shuts on Sundays may open for one. Christmas and Easter close almost everything. If you are planning a trip around a long weekend, the shop's own page or a phone call beats any general rule.