The State of Canadian Charities: F2024 in Numbers

Sector at a glance

Where the money goes

“Cents to cause” is program spend (line 5000) divided by total spend (line 4950) — the share of each dollar spent that went to programs rather than administration or fundraising. It's computable for 60,998 of 83,761 charities (73%). Of the rest, 21,552 reported no program-spend line at all and 1,211 reported one but no usable total-spending figure to divide it by.

Overhead

Overhead is management, administration, and fundraising (lines 5010 + 5020) as a share of total spending (line 4950). Charity Compass treats 5–35% as the typical range for operating charities — not a pass/fail line, since a charity below 5% is often under-reporting real administrative cost rather than running unusually lean. Both counts below cover operating charities only: a foundation gives its money away on line 5050, which this ratio does not count as spending, so including foundations would overstate the high-overhead count by roughly half.

Reserves

“Runway” is cash and investments on hand (lines 4100 + 4140) divided by annual program spend (line 5000) — how many years of programs current reserves could cover, not netting out liabilities or restricted funds. Computable for 42,874 of 83,761 charities (51%).

Largest reported reserves

Operating charities that spend over $5M a year, holding the most years of program spend in reserve. Not a criticism — some of this is restricted or endowed funding a charity can't simply spend down. The threshold is on spending rather than revenue because a dormant endowment that spends almost nothing divides to a runway in the hundreds of years, which measures nothing.

• 1
  Future Generations Foundation

  Not rated by Charity Intelligence·revenue $39.1M

  42 yr of reserves71¢ to cause

• 2
  Great Wisdom Buddhist Institute Inc.

  Not rated by Charity Intelligence·revenue $17.1M

  34.3 yr of reserves50¢ to cause

• 3
  David Foster Foundation

  ★ T2·revenue $12.8M

  32.3 yr of reserves26¢ to cause

• 4
  Great Enlightenment Buddhist Institute Society

  Not rated by Charity Intelligence·revenue $28.7M

  22.8 yr of reserves96¢ to cause

• 5
  Le Repos Saint-Francois D'assise

  Not rated by Charity Intelligence·revenue $30.7M

  21.5 yr of reserves30¢ to cause

Funding mix

Foundations: a different yardstick

Foundations grant money to othercharities, so cents-to-cause doesn't apply to them. Charity Compass instead ranks them by the share of spending disbursed to qualified donees (line 5050 ÷ line 5100), among the 494 foundations with total spending of $5M or more. Read the five below as a sample, not a podium: 38 of those foundations report 99.5% or higher, and 18 of them report no administration or fundraising cost at all, which is a blank line on a form rather than a measured absence of overhead. What's the difference?

• 1
  The Taylor Family Foundation

  Public foundation · spending $23.7M

  100%

• 2
  The Borealis Foundation

  Private foundation · spending $17.8M

  100%

• 3
  CIBC Foundation

  Private foundation · spending $12.5M

  100%

• 4
  Building Our Future Trust

  Private foundation · spending $8.7M

  100%

• 5
  Avanti Foundation

  Private foundation · spending $5.4M

  100%

Highest-scoring charities, by cause

Charitable organizations, scored on three things: the Charity Intelligence rating where one exists, how little reserve a charity holds, and whether overhead sits in the healthy 5–35% band. Cents to cause is not part of the score, so a charity can rank well on a low figure. Holding fewer reserves raises a charity's rank, on the reasoning that it has a more immediate need for a donation, so this is not a ranking of financial strength. Causes are the charity's own CRA category code, rolled up. Only charities with revenue above $250,000 are included, which leaves out roughly three-fifths of the register (see methodology). This ranks the dataset we could compute — it is not an endorsement or a claim about which charity does the most good.

Search all 83,761 charities

What the data cannot tell you

• Self-reported, not audited. Every T3010 line here is what the charity itself filed with the CRA — Charity Compass does not independently verify it.
• 21,552 charities (26%)didn't report enough on their T3010 to compute a program-spend figure at all, and a further 1,211 reported one with no usable total-spending figure to divide it by.
• 1,200 charities reported a cents-to-cause figure outside the valid 0–100% range (2% of those with a computed figure) — a filing error, so we exclude them from rankings rather than guess at the intent.
• Last-reported, not live.The CRA's filing and processing lag means a charity's current-year activity isn't reflected until it files and is processed.
• A low overhead or high cents-to-cause figure is not proof of effectiveness, and a Charity Intelligence rating reflects that organization's own analyst review, not ours. Charity Intelligence is itself a registered charity and appears in these lists carrying the rating it gave itself. Charity Compass has no affiliation with it and no say in its ratings.

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