Median Charitable Donation

Definition:

Median charitable donations by donors (Current Dollars)

Methods and Limitations:

A charitable donor is defined as a tax filer reporting a charitable donation amount on line 34000 of schedule 9 of the personal income tax form. These data may include donations that might be denied by the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) after an audit.

Tax filers are people who filed a tax return for the reference year and were alive at the end of the year. Data is based on a version of the T1 file produced 9 months after the reference year. Later versions of the T1 file will contain some additional records.

For the 2019 tax year, the extension of the filing and payment deadlines of income taxes had a small impact on the number of tax filers included in the preliminary tax data. Therefore, caution should be used when interpreting moderate changes in counts and aggregate amounts between 2019 and other years. 

A charitable donation is the allowable portion of total donations, as reported on the income tax return.

Median is the middle number in a group of numbers. Where a median charitable donation, for example, is given as $500, it means that exactly half of the charitable donations reported are greater than or equal to $500, and that the other half is less than or equal to the median amount. Starting in 2007, median incomes in the data tables are rounded to the nearest ten dollars (prior to 2007 they were rounded to the nearest hundred dollars). Zero values are not included in the calculation of medians for individuals.

Source:

Statistics Canada. Table 11-10-0002-01  Tax filers with charitable donations by sex and age