Canada's donor-advised funds grant $2.2 billion a year. Here is how it flowed.
Every grant that 157 DAF sponsors reported in their latest filings, three ways: across the country, by cause, and grant by grant. Each moving dot is $1 million.
Guess how DAF dollars flow
Three questions. Slide to your best guess, then reveal. The answers come from every grant Canada's DAF sponsors reported in their latest CRA filings.
What is the typical (median) grant from a DAF sponsor to a charity?
What share of DAF sponsors' grant dollars leave the province the sponsor is based in?
How many different charities receive a grant from a DAF sponsor in a year?
Same money, three ways. Watch the big cheques move.
Every dot is $1 million of the $2.20 billion DAF sponsors grant in a year. The orange dots are the 278 grants of $1 million or more. Sort the same dots by grant size, then by the size of the charity, then by cause, and the orange stays together. Then count grants instead of dollars, and see how few they are.
1 · By grant size
278 grants of $1 million or more carried 41% of the dollars. Half of all grants were under $5,000. Put together, that half came to about 2% of the money.
2 · By charity size
Follow the orange. 86% of those big-cheque dollars landed at charities with revenue over $5 million, and 59% at the 4% of recipients over $25 million. Charities under $500,000 are 47% of recipients and received 8% of the money.
3 · By cause
Healthcare and education are 39% of everything granted, and 45% of the big cheques. Hospitals, universities and the foundations that fundraise for them are where many of the large grants go. Religion is the reverse: 25% of all recipient charities, 15% of the dollars.
Healthcare receives 21% of all DAF dollars. Religion has 25% of the charities, and 15% of the money.
Healthcare is the top cause: $458M, 21% of everything DAF sponsors grant in a year. Education is second at $391M. Together they are 39% of the dollars.
Religion is the reverse shape. 5,425 religious charities received a grant, 25% of all recipients, but they received 15% of the money. Many small gifts to many congregations.
Below the big three, the money thins quickly: poverty alleviation 8%, community development 6%, arts and culture 6%, environment 6%. 10 smaller categories share 15%.
Categories are WellFunded's, assigned to each recipient charity. Click a category to see the impact areas inside it.
Inside Healthcare
3,125 charities · 10,388 grants · 14.6%% of recipients65% of DAF grant dollars go to charities running programs. Here is how the dollars break down.
Canada's DAF sponsors grant $2.20 billion a year. Here it is leaving, dot by dot, and landing by the kind of organization that received it. Each dot is $1 million. Choose a sponsor type to see how their grants split.
Reading the split
The foundations are mostly fundraising arms. Of the 22% that lands at foundations that fundraise for institutions, 9% goes to hospital and health foundations, 4% to United Ways and community federations, 2% to university and school foundations. A gift to a hospital foundation is on its way to a hospital.
Private foundations receive 5%, about $113M across hundreds of family and corporate foundations. Bank-affiliated sponsors do it most, community foundations almost never. There is a plain reason it happens at all: a DAF can receipt gifts a private foundation cannot, such as private company shares, so the DAF is often the front door and the family foundation the back office.
And what came back in
Private foundations granted $440M into DAF sponsors in their latest year, from 895 foundations, 9.4% of everything private foundations granted. That is 3.9 times what DAFs sent to them.
Not all of it is a DAF deposit. $134M went to hospital-type sponsors like UHN Foundation. The cleaner figure for money moving into DAF platforms is about $305M. Toggle “Show money flowing into DAFs” to see it against the outflow.
Every sponsor type lands between 55% and 87% at program charities. The filings show the movement, not the reason. Contributions and flows both use each sponsor’s most recent filing.
Two economies. Half of all grants are under $5,000. Just 278 grants carried 41% of all DAF dollars.
DAF sponsors make 53,070 grants in a year. 38% are under $2,500. Together they add up to 1% of the money.
278 grants of $1 million or more carried 41% of all the dollars. Add the 3,047 grants between $100,000 and $1 million, and 6.3% of grants account for 75% of everything granted.
Both economies are real. The small one is how 21,472 charities hear from a DAF sponsor in a year. The large one is where the money is.
The 278 grants of $1M or more, 0.5% of all grants, carried 41% of the money.
How does one sponsor give? Pick it and see.
The nature of each sponsor’s most recent year of granting, beside the median for its type: how many charities, how large the grants, straight to programs or through foundations, big charities or small, and where. The charities themselves are named in the next dashboard, in November.
Charitable Gift Funds Canada Foundation / Fonds de Bienfaisance Canada
Bank affiliated · Kingston, ONWhere the dollars went first
This sponsorPeer medianSize of the charities it funded
This sponsorPeer medianWhere the money landed
Top causes
Median of the 6 bank affiliated sponsors. Every figure is from this sponsor’s own most recent CRA filing. Recipient charities are not named here; the charity dashboard in November will have them.
The report, in four parts
Where it flows
Three findings on where DAF dollars go.
You are hereDAF sponsors: how their assets are held
The DAF market by sponsor type, and the balance sheet behind the $18.6 billion in DAF assets.
ComingDAF dollars and charities
A more in-depth look at how DAF dollars flow to charities, plus a lookup tool for any charity.
ComingHow to read this report
Why 157 sponsors, not 205
205 registered charities report holding donor-advised funds. This report traces the 157 whose CRA filings list their gifts. Together they hold 97% of all DAF assets and account for 89% of the money reported leaving DAF accounts, so the patterns here reflect most of the market.
- 37 have never listed a gift to another charity. Most (31) are universities, colleges and other charities that run their own programs. Together they hold 2.5% of DAF assets.
- 9 are left out because most of what they give is not DAF money: their gift list is more than 6 times what left their DAF accounts. Most are hospital foundations and United Ways. Together they hold 0.8% of DAF assets.
- CanadaHelps' DAF arm (Canadian Online Giving Foundation) is left out. It's a DAF at law, but it works as a giving platform: 17,902 accounts holding $28M, with $175M a year passing through. Counting it would turn this into a picture of one-off online donations.
- One sponsor lists gifts with no dollar amounts on its latest filing.
- Every figure comes from the CRA's T3010 return and T1236 gift list, as filed by each sponsor. “Grants from DAF sponsors” means every gift a sponsor reported, not only those from DAF accounts; the CRA form does not separate them.
- Each sponsor is shown at its most recent gift year on file: 117 on 2025, 36 on 2024 and 4 on an earlier year. One year per sponsor, never mixed. Traced grants ($2.20B) line up with the $2.18B reported leaving DAF accounts.
- A blank line on a filing is shown as “not reported”, never as zero.
- Recipient categories, impact areas and revenue come from WellFunded's database, matched by registration number. Recipients outside the CRA registry have no category.
- Money “flowing into DAFs” counts foundation-to-sponsor grants in the same year. The filings do not follow an individual dollar.
- Sponsor type is WellFunded's classification. Dataset stamp 1790192956, generated 2026-10-05.
- Spot an error, or missing something? Email us and we'll look at it.
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