Based on Statistics Canada’s Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating, 2023 (Tables 45-10-0039-01 and 45-10-0040-01)
Young Canadians are the most likely age group to volunteer in Canada, and that fact deserves genuine recognition. At a moment when national volunteer rates have declined and total hours have fallen by nearly 900 million since 2018, the continued high participation of youth is a foundation the sector can build on.
But the 2023 Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating (SGVP) reveals a more complex picture. Youth volunteer at high rates and low depth, give far fewer hours than older cohorts, and are withdrawing from formal organized volunteering at the fastest pace of any age group. For the 25 to 34 cohort, a broader disengagement from all forms of volunteering points to structural pressures that go beyond anything organizations can address through program design alone.
This blog examines six findings from the 2023 data. The framing is not one of crisis but of opportunity: the conditions to act are favourable, the rates are high, and the window is open. What the sector does with that foundation is the real question.
A note on definitions: the GSS-GVP does not use a single “youth” category. This blog treats 15 to 24 years and 25 to 34 years as two distinct youth cohorts, because they tell meaningfully different stories. All provincial estimates for the 25 to 34 group are suppressed by Statistics Canada due to high sampling variability, so the 25 to 34 analysis is Canada-level only.
1. Youth lead Canada in volunteer participation rates
In 2023, 81.1% of Canadians aged 15 to 24 volunteered, the highest participation rate of any age group in the country, while 76.2% of 25 to 34 year olds volunteered, the second highest. Both figures sit above the national average of 72.8%, and both represent a genuine strength on which the sector can draw.
| 81.1% 15–24 volunteer rate, 2023 | 76.2% 25–34 volunteer rate, 2023 | 72.8% National average, 2023 |
The 15 to 24 rate declined 4.7 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, one of the smaller declines nationally, suggesting overall participation is comparatively resilient for this cohort. The 25 to 34 group fell 8.8 percentage points, the steepest overall rate decline of any age group in the country, and the implications of that drop are explored in detail below.
For volunteer-involving organizations, the high youth participation rates are the starting point, not the conclusion. The sector has a large pool of young volunteers to work with. The question the data raises is what depth of engagement that pool represents, and how to deepen it over time.
2. Participation rate and depth of engagement are two different things
The highest volunteer rates come paired with the lowest average hours per volunteer. In 2023, Canadians aged 15 to 24 averaged 127 hours per year, and those aged 25 to 34 averaged 141 hours, both among the lowest of any age group. By comparison, the 65 to 74 cohort averaged 283 hours per year, more than double the 15 to 24 figure. Average hours increase consistently with age across the full distribution.
| 127 hrs 15–24 avg hrs/yr, 2023 | 141 hrs 25–34 avg hrs/yr, 2023 | 283 hrs 65–74 avg hrs/yr, 2023 |
This gap is not simply a product of life stage and available time, though those factors are real. It reflects the kind of volunteering young people are doing: more episodic, more informal, and more likely to be connected to a specific event or cause than to a sustained organizational relationship. The sector has historically been better at counting youth participants than at deepening their engagement, and the hours data makes that gap visible.
Youth volunteer at the highest rates but give the fewest hours per person. High participation is the foundation. Depth is the opportunity.
3. The typical young volunteer gives about 40 hours a year
The average hours figures above are shaped by a small number of very high-commitment young volunteers, and the median tells a more grounded story. In 2023, the median volunteer aged 15 to 24 gave 40 hours, as did the median volunteer aged 25 to 34, making both cohorts tied for the lowest median of any age group in Canada. Forty hours is less than one hour per week across the year, and it represents a meaningful decline from 2018, when the 15 to 24 median was 55 hours and the 25 to 34 median was 59 hours.
| 55 → 40 hrs 15–24 median hrs, 2018→2023 | −27% 15–24 median decline | 59 → 40 hrs 25–34 median hrs, 2018→2023 | −32% 25–34 median decline |
The decline in median hours between 2018 and 2023 confirms that the pullback in youth volunteering is not simply a baseline difference between age groups but a real reduction in the depth of individual engagement. A volunteer who was contributing 55 or 59 hours annually in 2018 is, on the evidence, contributing about 40 hours by 2023. That is a 27 to 32% reduction in what the typical young volunteer gives, occurring within a five-year window.
Planning for youth volunteer capacity using average hours overestimates what a typical young volunteer will contribute. The median of 40 hours is the more honest benchmark for individual engagement.
4. 15–24 year olds are leaving formal volunteering, not volunteering itself
The most analytically important number in the 15 to 24 dataset is not the overall rate decline of 4.7 percentage points but the formal volunteer rate decline of 12.4 percentage points, the steepest formal decline of any age group in Canada. The formal volunteer rate fell from 52.3% in 2018 to 39.9% in 2023, meaning that more than 1 in 8 young people who were formally volunteering through organizations in 2018 had stopped by 2023.
| 52.3% → 39.9% 15–24 formal rate, 2018→2023 | −12.4 pp 15–24 formal rate decline | 76.2% → 71.9% 15–24 informal rate, 2018→2023 | −4.3 pp 15–24 informal rate decline |
The informal volunteer rate for the same group fell only 4.3 percentage points over the same period, less than a third of the formal decline. This divergence is the defining pattern for the 15 to 24 cohort: young people are not withdrawing from helping broadly, they are withdrawing from organized, institutional volunteering specifically, while continuing to help informally at high rates.
This is consistent with pandemic disruption to school-based and institutional volunteer programs, from which many formal programs have not fully recovered. It is also consistent with research on organizational friction: burdensome onboarding, rigid scheduling, and unclear role expectations are documented barriers to formal youth volunteering that organizations can directly address.
The formal/informal gap is the clearest signal in the 15–24 data. The helping instinct is intact, the organizational connection is what needs work.
5. For 25–34 year olds, formal and informal volunteering fell at nearly the same rate
The 25 to 34 story is structurally different from the 15 to 24 story, and it is important not to conflate them. For this cohort, the formal volunteer rate fell 8.9 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 36.8% to 27.9%, while the informal rate fell 8.7 percentage points, from 78.9% to 70.2%. The two declines are nearly identical, which rules out the organizational friction explanation that applies to younger youth and points instead to something more fundamental.
| −8.9 pp 25–34 formal rate decline | −8.7 pp 25–34 informal rate decline | −8.8 pp 25–34 overall rate decline | #1 Steepest of any age group |
The 25 to 34 cohort is at the life stage of peak career establishment, housing pressure, student debt repayment, and early family formation. These are structural conditions, not individual choices, and they compress available time for all forms of civic participation simultaneously. The near-identical formal and informal declines suggest the barrier is capacity, not organizational trust or program design.
This distinction has direct implications for what organizations can realistically do. Program redesign and reduced friction can help retain 15 to 24 year olds in formal volunteering. For 25 to 34 year olds, the more important levers are flexibility, short-term and project-based commitments, skills-matched roles that fit around demanding schedules, and recognition that sustained engagement at this life stage may look different from engagement in other age groups.
The 25–34 decline is the steepest overall rate drop of any age group in Canada. Reaching this cohort requires addressing time and life-stage pressures, not just redesigning volunteer programs.
6. Youth contributed over a billion hours in 2023, and that contribution is the sector’s long pipeline
Together, the 15 to 24 and 25 to 34 cohorts contributed approximately 1.09 billion hours of volunteer time in 2023, down from 1.30 billion in 2018, a combined loss of 206 million hours over five years. The 15 to 24 group fell from 572 million to 491 million hours (down 14%), and the 25 to 34 group fell from 726 million to 601 million hours (down 17%).
| 572M → 491M 15–24 total hrs, 2018→2023 | 726M → 601M 25–34 total hrs, 2018→2023 | −206M Combined youth hrs lost |
Even with that decline, youth total hours held their share of the national volunteer pool roughly steady, because other age groups fell at comparable or steeper rates. The issue is not a collapse of youth contribution but a failure of that contribution to grow with the population, and a deepening concern about what the sector’s volunteer base will look like in 10 to 20 years.
The sector’s current reliance on older, high-hour volunteers, who are themselves declining in engagement, is partly a product of what happens when younger volunteers do not build deep habits early. Young volunteers who develop sustained, meaningful engagement in their 20s and 30s are the sector’s most committed 50- and 60-year-old volunteers two decades from now. The return on early investment is long, and the window to make it is now.
Young volunteers who engage deeply today are the sector’s backbone in 2040. The return on early investment in meaningful roles compounds over a lifetime.
What this means for volunteer-involving organizations
The 2023 data on youth volunteering is not a story about a generation losing interest in civic participation. Youth are the most likely Canadians to volunteer, and their informal helping instinct is holding up even as formal engagement erodes. The story is about the conditions under which that participation can be deepened, and about a sector that needs to design differently to capture the energy that is already present.
- Reduce friction in formal programs, particularly for 15–24 year olds. The 12.4 percentage point formal rate decline for this cohort is the clearest call to action in the data. A thorough review of onboarding requirements, scheduling flexibility, and the accessibility of entry-level formal roles, asking at each step whether the requirement is proportionate to the role, is the most direct response available to organizations.
- Create clear pathways from informal to formal engagement. Young people are already helping informally at high rates, and programs that build clear, low-barrier entry points from informal helping into organizational volunteering are more likely to capture that existing motivation than programs that begin with a full commitment ask.
- Offer short-term, project-based, and skills-matched roles for 25–34 year olds. For this cohort the barrier is structural time and capacity, and open-ended ongoing commitments are a poor fit for where their lives are. Short-term, skills-matched, and time-limited opportunities that fit around peak career and family formation demands are likely to retain this group more effectively than traditional volunteer role formats.
- Track hours, not just headcount. Both youth cohorts have the highest participation rates and the lowest hours per volunteer of any age group. Counting participants without tracking the depth of their engagement misses the actual capacity question, and organizations that measure only volunteer counts are likely to overestimate their effective capacity.
- Invest in early relationships, because the return is long. Volunteers who develop deep habits of engagement in their 20s and 30s are the sector’s most committed contributors in their 50s and 60s. Early investment in meaningful, growth-oriented roles for young volunteers is not just a recruitment strategy but a succession strategy for the sector as a whole.
About the data
All data in this post draws from Statistics Canada’s Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating, 2023 (SGVP 2023) and the 2018 General Social Survey on Giving, Volunteering and Participating (GSS-GVP 2018), Tables 45-10-0039-01 and 45-10-0040-01, Canada overall. The 2023 SGVP was released November 21, 2025. The 2018 and 2023 cycles are the only currently comparable survey cycles, and the next comparable data collection is expected in 2028. All provincial estimates for the 25 to 34 age group are suppressed in the source data due to high sampling variability, so 25 to 34 analysis is Canada-level only.
For more details and visuals, read our report here:
