CRA list of charities: look up a registered charity

You want to check that a charity is registered with the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA), find its business number before you donate, or build a list of registered charities in your city or in a category. The CRA publishes the List of charities as open data, one dataset per year, compiled from the annual return (form T3010) every registered charity files. This guide uses the 2024 List of charities; CanQuery offers its files as live tables you can search in the browser.

At a glance
Publisher	Canada Revenue Agency (CRA)
What it lists	Registered charities, compiled from the annual T3010 return
Edition in this guide	2024 List of charities: about 84,000 charities in the Identification table
Search by	BN, Legal Name, Account Name, Category, City, Province
Earlier years	One list per year, back to 2011
On CanQuery	A live table you can search, filter and chart, with CSV export of up to 10,000 rows
Current status	Confirm it in the CRA's online charities listing

Look up a charity

1. Open the Identification table in CanQuery. It lists about 84,000 charities with BN (the business number and registration suffix), Legal Name, Account Name, Category, Sub Category, Designation and the address fields City, Province, Postal Code and Country.
2. Type the charity's name in the search box. Names are recorded as the charity registered them, so try a shorter form or the account name if the legal name does not match.
3. To list charities in one place, filter the City column with an exact value such as =OTTAWA. The leading = selects equality using the CRA's spelling (city names are in capitals); a plain word requests a contains filter.
4. Export the filtered rows as CSV, up to 10,000 rows per export. For a province-wide list, filter by Province and Category together to stay under the limit.

The table is read live from the Government of Canada's DataStore, so it needs no preparation step.

Read the other files

The 2024 dataset has 19 CSV tables that share the BN column, so you can join them in a spreadsheet. General information holds the fiscal period end and the programme codes from the return; Financial data carries the T3010 financial lines; Charities Businesses Directors/Officers, Compensation, Disbursement Quota and Charitable Programs cover the other sections. The column names of the financial tables are the T3010 line numbers, such as 4700 for total revenue, so keep the CRA's data dictionary and code lists, published as PDFs with the dataset, next to your work.

Each table is a live table on CanQuery with the same search, filter, chart and export tools.

What the list does and does not confirm

A row in the Identification table shows that the CRA recorded the charity in its 2024 list; it does not show the charity's status today. The CRA's online charities listing is the authoritative place to confirm current registration, revocation or annulment before issuing or claiming a receipt. The data reflects what each organization reported on its return, and the CRA publishes it as provided.

The CRA publishes a list for each year back to 2011. Compare the same charity across years using the 2023 and 2022 lists, but read the fiscal period end in General information rather than assuming a calendar year.

Check the official source

The Government of Canada's dataset page carries the CRA's description, the data dictionary and the code lists. The catalogue date describes a change to the listing, not the date a charity's information was verified. Questions about a specific charity belong with the CRA.

When you share a finding, include the CanQuery dataset page, the year of the list, the table and the date you consulted it.

Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Canada.