Although mental health care has undergone substantial re-structuring processes, little attention has been paid to financing issues. The paper addresses distributional effects of mental health care financing systems in the UK, Germany and Austria against the backdrop of ongoing reforms and broader welfare state transformations. Distributional issues are studied a) on the macro-level related to the sectors ‘state’, ‘market’, ‘family´and ‘voluntary/community’ and b) on the individual level. The article is based on secondary data on mental health care reform processes and financing arrangements. Results show that shifts towards community care have resulted in a new division of financing responsibilities with a tendency to rising responsibilities for the ‘family’ and the ‘voluntary/community sector’. The study has been limited by the lack of precise data on resource allocation and expenditure for mental health care. More research addressing the relationship between financing and service provision is required in order to prevent new forms of social exclusion of people with mental disorders.