ACNC Australian Charity Register Scraper

Pulls registered Australian charities from the ACNC Register — the public register kept by the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission and published on data.gov.au (the "datadotgov_main" register file, refreshed weekly). No API key, no account, no browser automation. You get one flat JSON record per charity with its ABN, legal name and any other/trading names, ACNC-reported size, business address, website, the charitable purposes it pursues, the beneficiary groups it helps, the Australian states/territories and overseas countries it operates in, its registration and establishment dates, and its Public Benevolent Institution and Health Promotion Charity flags — filtered by registration-date window, size, operating state, name keyword and ABN. On 10 September 2026 the register held 66,303 charities, with about 170 registered in the last 90 days and 1,932 in the last year.

What you get

Every record contains:

Field	Description
id	The charity's ABN (same as abn) — the register's stable key
source	acnc, constant
url	https://www.acnc.gov.au/charity/charities?search={abn} — the ACNC Charity Register search, which resolves to this one charity (see Data source and licence for why this, not a profile URL)
abn	11-digit Australian Business Number, e.g. 42838700668
charityName	Legal name on the register, e.g. The Daffodil Chef Incorporated
otherNames	Other/trading names the charity is known by, as an array
status	Registered, constant — this open dataset contains only currently registered charities (see Limits and freshness)
size	Small, Medium or Large (ACNC size by annual revenue), or null when the charity has not reported one yet
registrationDate	Date the ACNC registered the charity, YYYY-MM-DD
establishedDate	Date the organisation itself was established, YYYY-MM-DD, or null
addressType	Type of the published address, e.g. Business
addressLine	Street address lines joined, e.g. 40 Cervantes Loop
town / state / postcode / country	Address components as published (state is the address state; country is free text and lightly cleaned)
website	The charity's website as published, or null
charitablePurposes	The charitable purposes the charity pursues, as full-text labels (e.g. Advancing health, Advancing religion), from the register's purpose flags
beneficiaries	The beneficiary groups the charity helps, as full-text labels (e.g. Children, Aged persons, People with disabilities)
operatingStates	Australian states/territories the charity reports operating in, as codes (ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, SA, TAS, VIC, WA)
operatingCountries	Countries the charity reports operating in, as ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 codes (e.g. ["AUS", "NZL"])
pbi	true when the charity is registered as a Public Benevolent Institution
hpc	true when the charity is registered as a Health Promotion Charity
numberOfResponsiblePersons	Count of responsible persons (board/committee) the charity reports, or null
financialYearEnd	Financial-year end as published, e.g. 30-Jun
fetchedAt	ISO timestamp of the run that produced the record

There is no free-text "main activity" field: the ACNC main register does not carry one (it lives in the separate Annual Information Statement datasets). The structured charitablePurposes and beneficiaries arrays are what the register publishes about what each charity does and whom it helps. The dataset has three views: Overview (dates, size, location, purposes, link), Names and location (ABN, other names, full address, website) and Purposes and beneficiaries.

Input

Input	Type	Default	Description
statuses	string[]	["Registered"]	The only value this open dataset can serve is Registered; it lists currently registered charities only. A request for anything else stops the run with a clear message.
daysBack	integer	90	Look-back window in days on the registration date, ending today. Ignored when registeredFrom/registeredTo are set, or when abn is given. Charities register slowly, so the default is 90. The register goes back to 1 July 2000.
registeredFrom	string	—	Start of the registration-date window, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive. Overrides daysBack.
registeredTo	string	today	End of the registration-date window, YYYY-MM-DD, inclusive.
sizes	string[]	all	Keep only Small (revenue under A$500k), Medium (A$500k–A$3m) or Large (A$3m+). A newly registered charity often has no size reported yet and is dropped when this filter is set.
states	string[]	all	Keep only charities that report operating in at least one of these states/territories (ACT, NSW, NT, QLD, SA, TAS, VIC, WA).
keywords	string[]	none	Case-insensitive terms matched against the legal name and any other/trading names. Terms are ORed.
abn	string	—	Return exactly this charity by its 11-digit ABN (spaces ignored). When set, it overrides the date window and every other filter.
maxItems	integer	1000	Stop after this many charities. You are charged per result, so this is also the cost cap. Newest registration first, so a value below the window's volume drops the oldest registrations in the window.

Example — new small charities operating in NSW or Victoria, registered in the last 90 days:

{ "daysBack": 90, "sizes": ["Small"], "states": ["NSW", "VIC"], "maxItems": 500 }

Example — every charity with "foundation" in its name registered in the last year:

{ "daysBack": 365, "keywords": ["foundation"], "maxItems": 2000 }

Example — one specific charity by ABN:

{ "abn": "59646743375" }

Bad input fails fast: an unknown size or state, a status other than Registered, a malformed ABN or a malformed date stops the run with the validation message as its status, before any request is made.

Output example

A real record from a live run on 10 September 2026 ({"daysBack": 180, "maxItems": 5}), unedited:

{
  "id": "42838700668",
  "source": "acnc",
  "url": "https://www.acnc.gov.au/charity/charities?search=42838700668",
  "abn": "42838700668",
  "charityName": "The Daffodil Chef Incorporated",
  "otherNames": [],
  "status": "Registered",
  "size": null,
  "registrationDate": "2026-08-27",
  "addressType": "Business",
  "addressLine": "40 Cervantes Loop",
  "town": "Yangebup",
  "state": "WA",
  "postcode": "6164",
  "country": "Australia",
  "website": "thedaffodilchef.org.au",
  "charitablePurposes": ["Advancing health"],
  "beneficiaries": ["Adults", "Aged persons", "Children", "Early childhood", "Families", "Females", "General community in Australia", "Males", "Other charities", "People with chronic illness", "Youth", "People of other gender identities"],
  "operatingStates": ["WA"],
  "operatingCountries": [],
  "pbi": false,
  "hpc": false,
  "numberOfResponsiblePersons": 3,
  "financialYearEnd": "30-Jun",
  "establishedDate": "2026-06-23",
  "fetchedAt": "2026-09-10T00:16:58.696Z"
}

A charity that works overseas looks the same but carries alpha-3 country codes, for example ABN 59646743375, "WOMEN'S FUND ASIA LIMITED" (Large, Melbourne VIC), operatingCountries ["AFG", "BGD", "BTN", "IDN", "LAO", "LKA", "MDV", "MNG", "MYS", "NPL"], charitablePurposes ["Promoting or protecting human rights", "Advancing social or public welfare"].

Every run also writes a SUMMARY record to the key-value store with the resolved registration-date window, the filters used, matchedTotal (how many charities match the filters in the source), pushed, and the two completeness flags limitReached and windowComplete, plus the source file's last refresh, the licence and the required attribution.

Pricing

Pay per result: US$0.002 per charity delivered (US$2 per 1,000 charities). You are charged only for records pushed to the dataset; a run that returns nothing costs nothing. Runs on the Apify free plan are limited by the platform's free-tier usage allowance.

Data source and licence

• Source. The ACNC Register of Australian charities on data.gov.au — dataset ACNC Registered Charities, resource "ACNC Register of Australian charities CSV" (datadotgov_main.csv, datastore_active). The Actor reads the resource's CKAN datastore through the public SQL endpoint POST https://data.gov.au/data/api/3/action/datastore_search_sql, which needs no key. The register's Registration_Date column is stored as text in DD/MM/YYYY form, so the Actor uses the SQL endpoint (which parses it server-side with to_date) rather than the plain datastore_search filters, which are exact-match only and cannot express a date range. Pages read at 1,000 rows, newest registration first. Read 10 September 2026.
• Licence. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia (CC BY 3.0 AU), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/au/ (read 10 September 2026). Commercial reuse is permitted with attribution. You must attribute the data as: "Source: Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, CC BY 3.0 AU".
• Why the url is a search, not a profile link. Each charity has a page on the ACNC Charity Register, but its URL uses an internal GUID that is not in this dataset (verified 10 September 2026: ABN 40169025879 resolves to /charity/charities/29f147b7-bd90-f111-8076-7ced8da2a7d2/profile), so a profile URL cannot be built from the ABN. The Charity Register search does accept an ABN and resolves to the single matching charity (verified 10 September 2026), so the Actor links there; the raw abn is on every record, so you can also open the charity on the Australian Business Register at https://abr.business.gov.au/ABN/View?abn={abn}.
• Personal data. This dataset is organisation-level: it does not publish responsible-person names, emails or phone numbers (only a numberOfResponsiblePersons count), and private ancillary funds have their ABN and name withheld (see below). The address published is the charity's registered business address. Where a charity is a sole operator its business address may be a home address, and any contact details you obtain elsewhere for a charity's people are personal information: using this data to contact charities — marketing in particular — is the buyer's responsibility under Australia's Privacy Act 1988, the Spam Act 2003 and the Do Not Call Register Act 2006 (which govern electronic marketing and telemarketing to Australian numbers).

Limits and freshness

• Volumes, measured 10 September 2026 by running this Actor and by counting the source: the whole register is 66,303 charities; by registration date, 17 were registered in the last 30 days, 170 in the last 90, 664 in the last 180 and 1,932 in the last year. By size: 43,279 Small, 9,304 Medium, 6,479 Large and 7,241 with no size reported. 43,703 charities publish a website. So {"daysBack": 40000, "maxItems": 100000} is a complete download of the register (about 65,700 records — see the exclusion below).
• Private ancillary funds are excluded. About 604 of the 66,303 rows (48 of them registered in the last year) are private ancillary funds whose ABN and legal name the ACNC withholds from the public register (their name reads as a placeholder such as PAF1779446-...). Because the Actor keys every record on the ABN and links by it, these ABN-less rows are filtered out at source, so matchedTotal and the delivered count stay in step and windowComplete is honest.
• Size maxItems to the window, and check windowComplete. maxItems counts records delivered and the stream is newest-registration-first, so a value below the matched volume drops the oldest registrations in the window — but never silently. The run stops on the cap, warns maxItems (N) reached; about M matching charities were not delivered, and the SUMMARY record carries limitReached: true with windowComplete: false. windowComplete: true is the guarantee that you hold every matching charity: it is set only when the run delivered at least matchedTotal records and the spend limit did not cut delivery short.
• Speed, measured 10 September 2026. A one-year window of 1,884 charities was delivered across two SQL pages in about 18 seconds (roughly 100 records a second, dominated by the datastore's per-page response time, not by the Actor). A default 90-day run of ~170 records is a single page and a few seconds.
• Rate limits. data.gov.au documents none for the datastore SQL endpoint, and consecutive 1,000-row pages at ~1 request/second returned HTTP 200 throughout testing on 10 September 2026. The Actor still pauses ~200 ms between pages and retries 429 and 5xx responses with exponential back-off, honouring Retry-After.
• Freshness. The ACNC refreshes the register file weekly (on the run above it was last refreshed 6 September 2026, reported in the SUMMARY as resourceLastModified). The register also holds future-dated registrations (the latest registration date on 10 September 2026 was 21 October 2026), which a window ending today naturally excludes. Run an overlapping window (for example daysBack: 14 weekly) rather than one that exactly abuts the previous run.
• Status is Registered only. This open dataset ("datadotgov_main") lists currently registered charities and carries no status column, so every record is Registered. Charities whose registration has been revoked are shown on the ACNC website but are not published in this file; this Actor cannot return them.

Use cases

• Lead generation and market sizing for the not-for-profit sector: pull newly registered charities by state, size and charitable purpose, each with its ABN, website and registered address, to build a prospect list for grant-makers, professional services, insurers or software vendors serving charities.
• Grant-making and due diligence: look up a charity by ABN, or pull every charity advancing a given purpose (health, education, religion) or helping a given beneficiary group, with its size, operating states and overseas countries, to scope eligibility and check standing before disbursing funds.
• Sector research and dashboards: download the whole register and analyse registrations over time, size distribution, geographic and overseas footprint, and the mix of charitable purposes and beneficiary groups across Australia's charity sector.

Support

Open an issue on the Actor's page on Apify Store. Issues are answered within 14 days, as the Store terms require. Bug reports that name the run id and the input used are fixed fastest.