The newest charity figures in Canada are about two years old

Every figure on this site carries a filing year, and right now that year is 2024. It is August 2026.

That two-year gap is the single most important thing to understand about Canadian charity data, and it is not a shortcoming of this site or of the CRA. It is the arithmetic of how the returns are collected.

Where the two years go

A charity's return covers its own fiscal year, and fiscal years end all over the calendar — in the 2024 data the year-ends run from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024. A charity whose year ended in December 2024 was still operating in December 2024.

From there:

• The charity has six months after its year-end to file. A December 2024 year-end becomes a June 2025 deadline.
• The CRA processes returns and publishes the year as a complete package.
• The package is released, and sites like this one load it.

Add those up and a December year-end filed at the deadline surfaces publicly around eighteen months to two years later. That is the normal case, not the slow one.

What that means for a decision you are making today

These figures describe what a charity did, not what it is doing. A charity that has since grown, shrunk, merged, changed leadership, launched a programme or closed one looks exactly as it did in the year it filed. Nothing on this site will tell you about 2025 or 2026, because nothing published will.

This matters most in the cases where you would most want current information:

• A charity responding to a disaster that happened this year has no filing that reflects it.
• A charity that had a hard year in 2024 and has since recovered still shows the hard year.
• A newly registered charity may have no filing here at all, which says nothing about it beyond that it is new.

And presence in this data is not proof of current registration. The open data tells you a charity filed a return for 2024. Whether its registration stands today is a separate question the open data does not answer — which is why every charity page here shows an Unverified status badge and links to the CRA's own listing rather than asserting one.

Why we show the year on everything

It would be easy to write "revenue: $84.6M" and let a reader assume that is current. Every money figure on this site carries the year it was filed for — including in search results, share cards and the API — because a financial figure without a date is not checkable, and a two-year-old figure presented as current is a small lie that compounds every time it is quoted.

If you need to know how a charity is doing now, the answer is not in any open dataset. It is in the charity's own annual report, or in asking them.

Sources

• Filing years and fiscal period ends computed from the CRA's List of charities open data, under the Open Government Licence – Canada. The 2024 package contains 83,578 filings with year-ends between 1 January and 31 December 2024.
• Filing obligation and deadline: Filing a Registered Charity Information Return (T3010) — "File your return within six months of your fiscal year end." — Canada Revenue Agency.