Chancellor of the Exchequer
Minister for Finance in the United Kingdom and Head of Treasury
The chancellor of the exchequer (formally chancellor and under treasurer of His Majesty’s exchequer), often abbreviated to chancellor, is a senior minister of the Crown within the Government of the United Kingdom, and the head of His Majesty's Treasury. As one of the four Great Offices of State, the chancellor is a high-ranking member of the British Cabinet.
Responsible for all economic and financial matters, the role is equivalent to that of a finance minister in other countries. The chancellor is now always the second lord of the treasury as one of at least six Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, responsible for executing the office of the Treasurer of the Exchequer – the others are the prime minister and Commons government whips. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was common for the prime minister also to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer if he sat in the Commons; the last chancellor who was simultaneously prime minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer was Stanley Baldwin in 1923. Formerly, in cases when the chancellorship was vacant, the Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench would act as chancellor pro tempore. The last lord chief justice to serve in this way was Lord Denman in 1834.
The chancellor is the third-oldest major state office in English and British history, and in recent times has come to be the most powerful office in British politics after the prime minister. It originally carried responsibility for the Exchequer, the medieval English institution for the collection and auditing of royal revenues. The earliest surviving records which are the results of the exchequer's audit date from 1129 to 1130 under King Henry I and show continuity from previous years.
The public source identifies “Chancellor of the Exchequer” as minister for Finance in the United Kingdom and Head of Treasury. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chancellor, Exchequer and Minister.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q531471. The first chronological checks are 1923, 1834, 1129 and 1130.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chancellor of the Exchequer” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.