Charitable donors in Canada 2023
Statistics Canada recently released data for Charitable Donors 2023, based on income tax filings. This post examines four aspects of the data:
Number of donors - 17% of Canadian tax filers claimed charitable receipts
Size of donations - the median donation total is $390
Age of donors - old!
Income level of donors - complicated.
Number of donors
More donors in 2023 than in 2022. Good, I guess? But fewer donors than in 2019. When you live and work in the charitable sector, it’s easy to think that everyone gives. But they don’t. Only 17% of Canadian taxfilers in 2023 had charitable receipts. They can pool receipts with their partner, save them for another year etc. Still, most people don’t give in a receiptable way.
Size of donations
Of those 17% of taxfilers who claimed charitable donations, the median donation amount was $390. That’s the midpoint: half of people gave less and half gave more. Donors who give $20 weekly to their place of worship ($1000/yr) are way above that and people who give thousands are in the stratosphere. An ordinary congregation is anything but ordinary from a statistical perspective, it’s full of extraordinarily generous people.
Age of donors
Donors are older than Canadians generally. The median age of a Canadian donor is 56, whereas the median age for Canadians generally is 41. That’s a really large difference. Older donors give the most.
For every $100 of charitable giving in Canada in 2023, $69.70 came from donors aged 55+.
50% of the total amount donated comes from people 65 and up. 69.7% of the total amount donated comes from donors 55 and up. (Derived from some basic math using this donor age table and “Charitable donations increasing with age” section of the news release on April 1, 2025.)
Income of donors
Philanthropy concentrates on getting large gifts from high-income people. Higher income people give bigger amounts, but they are not the most generous based on proportional giving.
The StatsCan data shows that the biggest number of donors—1,048,780 to be precise—are in the $40,000 to $59,999 income bracket. That’s not the biggest pot of money, but the most donors. As a proportion of income, they are more generous than anyone else - except people reporting less than $40,000 in annual income. Are they older people continuing their generosity journey, or younger people starting out? I suspect it’s older people, given the age data.
David Lasby’s recent analysis for Imagine Canada notes that many higher-income donors didn’t start out as higher-income donors; they began as middle-income donors and kept giving as they moved into a higher income bracket (p.20.) This rings true to the many testimonies I’ve heard from older donors who began giving when times were tough, and never stopped. I worry about the impact on the charitable sector as these donors are not replaced.
Income inequality
I was struck by the income inequality as I looked at income and donation levels. Almost 7 million taxfilers had incomes under $20,000. Another 7 million people had incomes over $20,000 but less than $40,000. Huge demands on food banks attest to a structural inequality that no amount of food banks will solve.
Summary
Canadian donors are older and only 17% of Canadian taxfilers claimed donation receipts. The typical Canadian donor donated $390 in 2023. While higher income Canadians donate larger amounts, as a proportion of income Canadians with incomes under $60,000 are the most generous.