About the ACNC Charity Register

The ACNC Charity Register contains information about Australia's registered charities. It is free to search and is available to everyone.

Each listing on the Charity Register shows details about a charity and its purposes, the names of the people involved in running the charity, as well as financial information and annual reporting. It also notes if the ACNC has taken any action against the charity for not complying with certain obligations.

The Charity Register can be used to check if a charity is registered, to find specific details about a charity's operations, or even to find charities to donate to or volunteer with. And for people involved in charities, the listing on the Charity Register is a great place to show the current details about your charity and demonstrate accountability and transparency.

Information on the Charity Register

By law, the ACNC can only publish certain information on the Charity Register. Read more about the information published on the Charity Register.

Some information cannot be published, and in other cases charities can ask to have certain information withheld from the Charity Register. If the ACNC agrees to withhold the information, it is not published on the Charity Register.

The ACNC uses the Charity Register to publish information about its use of enforcement powers or when it revokes a charity's registration. We may also publish a notice on the Charity Register if a charity is not meeting certain reporting obligations. We publish these notices and information on a charity's page on the Charity Register.

Read more about how the ACNC regulates charities and see our list of ACNC compliance decisions.

Charity programs

The ACNC asks charities to provide details about their programs - activities or services that charities run to achieve their charitable purposes for their beneficiaries - when they complete their Annual Information Statements.

Details that a charity provides about its programs through the Annual Information Statement will be displayed on its Charity Register page.

The publication of program information on the Charity Register is important because it:

allows members of the public - including potential volunteers, donors and partners - to learn more about charities, their work and ways they can support them, and
provides a higher level of transparency and information about charities' work in the community for the general public.

Download charity data

If you are a researcher or are otherwise interested in using the ACNC Charity Register data to look at the information of multiple charities, the most effective way is to download the datasets that the ACNC publishes at data.gov.au.

The ACNC publishes two main types of datasets at data.gov.au:

Information about charities that is found on the ACNC Charity Register. This dataset is regularly updated to reflect what is currently available on the Charity Register.
Information provided by charities in their Annual Information Statements. These datasets are published on an annual basis, and updated weekly.

In some situations, charities can apply to have some or all of their information withheld from the Charity Register. If the ACNC has approved for the information to be withheld, it won’t appear in these datasets from the date of approval onwards.

The ACNC also publishes the annual Australian Charities Report. The data analysed in this report is drawn primarily from charities' Annual Information Statements, but it may also contain data from additional sources (such as the Australian Business Register). This data is freely available to explore and interact with visually via the Australian Charities Report website.