Sober October has changed hands. Alcohol Change UK, the charity behind Dry January, has been named the UK charity partner of the 31 day abstinence challenge for 2026 and has said it hopes to raise £30,000 next month, roughly a quarter of what its January campaign brought in earlier this year. Macmillan Cancer Support, which launched the challenge as Go Sober for October back in 2013, has ended its involvement.
Macmillan set the campaign up in partnership with the Australian fundraising drive Dry July and ran it every October since, but it dropped out of the list of the 25 largest charity owned mass participation events in the UK last year. Ownership and delivery of Sober October now sits with the Australian fundraising platform Ezy Raise, with Alcohol Change UK attached as the charity that benefits. The handover was first reported by Civil Society on 8 September.
Danielle Houliston, Alcohol Change UK's executive director of income and engagement, said the charity was "incredibly proud to become its new charity partner and work with the team at Ezy Raise on the fantastic fundraising legacy". Brett Macdonald, Ezy Raise's managing director, said the charity's "expertise in alcohol harm and behaviour change makes it a natural fit for Sober October". Ian Lulham, Macmillan's head of events, said his charity was grateful to everyone who had taken part and raised money over the years, and wished the new partners every success.
The two organisations are not remotely the same size, which is part of what makes the move interesting. Macmillan reported income of £246m and expenditure of £226m in 2024. Alcohol Change UK recorded income of £1.95m against expenditure of £3.54m in the year to March 2025. A campaign that was a modest line in one charity's accounts becomes a significant piece of fundraising for the other. Sign ups are still early. On Thursday morning the campaign's own leaderboard showed 597 people registered, twelve teams formed and £405 raised, with three weeks left before the challenge starts on 1 October.
Month long abstinence challenges are a more recent invention than most people assume. Ocsober, run by the Australian youth organisation Life Education, began in 2010, Dry July preceded it, and Dry January has since grown into far and away the best known of them in Britain. Sober October has always been the smaller autumn sibling, and this is the biggest shake up it has had since it started.
It lands against a genuine shift in how younger adults drink. Drinkaware's research, drawn from surveys of more than 5,200 people aged 18 to 24 between 2017 and 2023, found the proportion of young adults not drinking at all rose from 14 per cent to 21 per cent over that period. The same work found that four in five still drink, and that those who do are more likely to binge than older drinkers, which is a reminder that fewer drinkers and safer drinking are not the same thing.
Alcohol Change UK is careful about how it describes itself, saying it is not anti-alcohol but against the harm alcohol causes. The campaign also carries an important warning that is easy to skim past. People who are clinically alcohol dependent can be seriously harmed by stopping suddenly and completely, and are advised to speak to a GP or a local alcohol service about cutting down safely rather than going cold turkey for a challenge.
David Baddeley, who founded Boozy in Greater Manchester, said: "A month off is not a threat to anyone who sells drinks properly. What it actually does is make people notice how much they were having, and in my experience the businesses that get twitchy about that are the ones hoping nobody adds it up. We would far rather people knew exactly what was in the can and decided for themselves."
That is the argument for putting the numbers on the front rather than the back. Every Boozy can is 200ml with its strength printed on the label, so the maths is done before anyone pours. Elderflower Breeze, the brand's Hugo Spritz, is 8.4 per cent, which makes a can 1.68 units, and the Hugo Spritz recipe is on the site for anyone building one by hand. For serves poured at home, where the free pour is usually the thing that catches people out, the Cocktail ABV Calculator covers more than 100 recipes and returns the strength and unit count for each one.
Sober October runs from 1 to 31 October and sign ups are open at soberoctober.org.uk. Free advice on cutting down, tracking units and finding support is available at drinkaware.co.uk.
