Perpetual curate was a class of resident parish priest or incumbent curate within the United Church of England and Ireland (name of the combined Anglican churches of England and Ireland from 1800 to 1871). The term is found in common use mainly during the first half of the 19th century. The legal status of perpetual curate originated as an administrative anomaly in the 16th century. Unlike ancient rectories and vicarages, perpetual curacies were supported by a cash stipend, usually maintained by an endowment fund, and had no ancient right to income from tithe or glebe.

In the 19th century, when large numbers of new churches and parochial units were needed in England and Wales politically and administratively, it proved much more acceptable to elevate former chapelries to parish status, or create ecclesiastical districts with new churches within ancient parishes, than to divide existing vicarages and rectories. Under the legislation introduced to facilitate this, the parish priests of new parishes and districts, were legally perpetual curates.

There were two particularly notable effects of this early 19th-century practice: compared to rectors and vicars of ancient parishes, perpetual curates tended to be of uncertain social standing; and also be much less likely to be adequately paid.

Perpetual curates disappeared from view in 1868, after which they could legally call themselves vicars, but perpetual curacies remained in law until the distinct status of perpetual curate was abolished by the Pastoral Measure 1968.

Perpetual in the title meant that, once licensed, they could not be removed by their nominating patron; and could only be deprived by their diocesan bishop through the ecclesiastical courts. Curate meant they were licensed by the diocesan bishop to provide "cure of souls" for the people of a district or parish.

All incumbents in England could, technically, have been considered perpetual curates. However, following the Gregorian reforms of the 11th century, parochial cure of souls in England became the freehold property of the incumbent; whose income in the forms of tithe and glebe constituted a benefice, and who then carried the title of rector.

Parish churches in England originated in the 11th and 12th centuries as the personal property of (predominantly lay) patrons; who had the right to appoint and dismiss the parish priest, to receive an entrance fee on appointment, and to charge an annual rent thereafter. By the Gregorian reforms almost all these rights were extinguished for lay patrons, who were able only to retain the residual power to nominate the rector to a benefice, and many lay notables thereupon gave up parish churches into the ownership of religious houses, which were less inhibited by canon law from extracting fees and rents from rectors, and could moreover petition for exemptions by Papal dispensation. Initially it had not been unusual for religious houses in possession of rectories also to assume the capability to collect tithe and glebe income for themselves, but this practice was banned by the decrees of the Lateran Council of 1215. Thereafter, over the medieval period, monasteries and priories continually sought papal exemption from the Council's decrees, so as to appropriate the income of rectoral benefices to their own use. However, from the 13th century onwards, English diocesan bishops successfully established the principle that only the glebe and "greater tithes" of grain, hay and wood could be appropriated by monastic patrons in this manner; the "lesser tithes" had to remain within the parochial benefice; the incumbent of which thenceforward carried the title of "vicar". By 1535, of 8,838 rectories in England, 3,307 had thus been appropriated with vicarages; but at this late date, a small sub-set of vicarages in monastic ownership were not being served by beneficed clergy at all; monasteries having petitioned for papal dispensation from this obligation. In almost all such instances, these were parish churches in the ownership of houses of Augustinian or Premonstratensian canons, orders whose rules required them to provide parochial worship within their conventual churches; for the most part as chapels-of-ease of a more distant parish church. From the mid-fourteenth century onwards these canons were often able to extend this hybrid status to include vicarages in their possession, petitioning for papal privileges of appropriation allowing them to take the full tithe, while serving the cure either from among their own number or from secular stipendiary priests removable at will; arrangements which corresponded to those for their chapels of ease.

It is this latter small group of parochial churches and chapels without beneficed clergy that, following the dissolution of the monasteries constituted the initial tranche of perpetual curacies. At the dissolution, rectors and vicars of most former monastically owned churches remained in place, their incomes unaffected. But for these unbeneficed churches and chapels-of-ease, lay purchasers of the canons' tithing rights could not themselves fulfil the spiritual obligations of a parochial cure, and nor was it considered proper that they appoint stipendiary priests for the function, as the canons had done. Instead lay purchasers of appropriated tithes, termed 'impropriators', were required in these instances both to nominate a clergyman to the diocesan bishop to serve the cure, and also to provide a fixed stipend of appropriate annual value to support the new perpetual curacy. In practice, most of the nominated incumbents to the new perpetual curacies were the canons or stipendiaries who had been serving those cures before the dissolution. Over the years, the arrangement by which the impropriator acted as both patron and paymaster of a perpetual curacy proved liable to break down, especially as the original cash stipend could be reduced to a small part of its former value through inflation. In some cases continued appointment to the cure was possible if the diocesan bishop was able to assume the responsibility of paymaster, having been provided with an enhanced portion of the tithe income from the parish or other endowment to do so. Otherwise, the impropriator might nominate a neighbouring incumbent to serve the cure; taking advantage of the fact that, as the curacy did not then count as a benefice, there was no legal barrier to its being held in plurality. As was also the case for the much larger numbers of inadequately funded rectories and vicarages, the continued provision of incumbents to serve perpetual curacies now depended on the living attracting additional endowments, a process that became much easier when perpetual curacies were brought within the terms of Queen Anne's Bounty in 1704.