The CRA has recently begun collecting information on donor advised funds (DAFs) in Canada. We have blogged about it here.
These are the questions that have been added:
- Line 5860 – Did the charity hold any donor advised funds (DAF) during the fiscal period?
- Line 5861 – Total number of accounts held at the end of the fiscal period
- Line 5862 – Total value of all accounts held at the end of the fiscal period
- Line 5863 – Total value of donations to DAF accounts received during the fiscal period
- Line 5864 – Total value of qualifying disbursements from DAFs during the fiscal period
We exported some data from the T3010 Version 24 for December 31, 2023, relating to DAFs. It is not complete yet and only covers Dec 31, 2023 charities (version 24) (not December 30 and earlier).
However, it may still be of interest to some. The chart below in PDF is sorted based on largest value of DAF assets (line 5862) held by the charity.
Some preliminary data from the 2023 T3010 on Donor Advised Funds (DAFS) in Canada – chart
Here are some of the larger DAFs by assets of the DAFS, not assets of the charity.
A few preliminary thoughts.
- There is often confusion when it comes to DAFs and people think a registered charity is a DAF. No, it is a registered charity that may have one or more DAFs. For some of these registered charities, the DAF part is 100% (or close to 100%) but for others it is quite small. For example, for the Vancouver Foundation they have total assets of $1.6 billion, but DAFs are apparently only $370 million. The other funds may be different types of restricted gifts or unrestricted gifts.
- Some of the biggest DAFs, such as the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal, are not included because their fiscal year is March 31. So they will not have filed their T3010 version 24 yet and will probably only do so before the end of September 2025. We will probably have to wait till about mid to late 2026 to have the complete set covering all DAFs with all fiscal year ends.
- Some big DAFs seemed to have skipped over the question – very embarrassing but not surprising as many large charities make big mistakes on their T3010 filings.
- About 400 groups are saying that they have DAFs so far and we have put in the largest ones in the chart. There will be more in a few months.
- Much of this material would be on our CharityData.ca website, but perhaps not all until it is further updated in a month or two.