Canadian charity data for researchers and journalists
Charity Compass turns the Canada Revenue Agency's public T3010 filings into something you can search, compare and cite. It covers 83,761 registered charities from the F2024 release. Everything here is free to use, and every figure names the filing line it came from.
Three ways to use it
- Look up one organisation. Search by name or registration number for a profile showing what the charity says it does, its spending and reserves, its directors, and links to the CRA record. Useful for checking a single organisation before you write about it.
- Pull the same figures as JSON. The endpoints below return exactly what the pages show, including the provenance tier and source link on every figure.
- Download the whole dataset. The full release is archived with a DOI at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22771438: every charity with its filed lines and derived ratios, six years of financial history, the programme text as written, and the grants charities made to one another. Four CSV files, about 121 MB. Director names and third-party ratings are not in it, for the reasons set out there.
- Cite sector-wide statistics. The State of Canadian Charities report carries totals and distributions computed across the whole register, with the arithmetic stated.
JSON endpoints
Read-only, no key, no account. Please keep request rates reasonable; this runs on one small server. For bulk work, take the source data from the CRA directly rather than crawling this site.
One charity
GET https://charitycompass.ca/api/charity/119304855RR0001Search
GET https://charitycompass.ca/api/search?intent=food%20banks%20in%20Toronto&limit=5| Parameter | Meaning |
|---|---|
| intent | Plain-language description of the work, matched against charities' own filed program text |
| name | Charity name or 15-character registration number |
| cause | One of the nine cause themes, e.g. health, environment |
| province | Two-letter code, e.g. ON |
| city | City name; accents and case are ignored |
| designation | org, foundation, or all |
| minStars | Minimum Charity Intelligence star rating (3, 4, 5) |
| minRevenue / maxRevenue | Revenue bounds in dollars |
| website | 1 to return only charities that filed a website address |
| detail | 1 to exclude charities that filed the simplified return |
| sort | score, cents_to_cause, runway, overhead, revenue, disbursed |
| limit | Results to return, up to 100 |
Every figure arrives in an envelope carrying its value, its tier (T1 computed by us from open data, T2 a Charity Intelligence analyst rating), the T3010 line behind it, a source link, and the caveat that applies. Nothing is returned as a bare number.
Go to the source instead
For a full dataset, skip this site and take the CRA's own release: the List of charities open data on the Open Government portal, under the Open Government Licence – Canada. That is where our figures come from. Our methodology names the filing line behind each computed figure so you can reproduce any of them.
Before you publish a figure
T3010 data is self-reported by each charity and is not audited by us. It is last-reported rather than live, so it describes a fiscal period that ended a year or more ago. 21,552 charities file a simplified return, so some figures cannot be computed for them, and we show nothing rather than an estimate. A spending ratio describes money, not whether a programme worked. The full list is on limitations.
Citing and getting help
If you are citing the dataset, use the DOI, which is permanent and always resolves to the newest release:
Gomez, J. D. (2026). Canadian Registered Charities: F2024 Filings and 2019–2024 History [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22771438
That is the concept DOI. To pin this exact release rather than the newest one, cite 10.5281/zenodo.22771439. If you are citing a figure for a single charity instead, link its profile or the relevant report section, which keeps the tier, filing line and caveat attached to the number. Either way the underlying information comes from the Canada Revenue Agency List of Charities (T3010), F2024 release, under the Open Government Licence – Canada.
If you need a cut of the data we do not publish, or want a figure checked before you print it, write to jdavidgomezca@gmail.com. Corrections to our own errors are published, dated, on the corrections log.
Last reviewed September 15, 2026. Charity Compass is not affiliated with the Canada Revenue Agency or Charity Intelligence.