If your charity's California registration renewal has been sitting in the to-do pile since early 2025, the pile now has a hard date. The state's Registry of Charities and Fundraisers extended every charity renewal that came due between January 7, 2025, and August 31, 2026. All of them are now due on August 31, 2026. That is 15 days away.
The relief is automatic. In the Registry's words, "charities do not need to contact the Registry to obtain this relief." Automatic relief cuts both ways, though: nobody is mailing you a reminder that the runway ends this month.
Who Files, and What Gets Filed
Every charitable corporation, unincorporated association, and trustee that does business or holds property in California renews its registration with the Attorney General's office every year. This renewal is separate from the IRS Form 990 and separate from anything you file with the Franchise Tax Board, and the "doing business" net catches many out-of-state charities that fundraise in California. If state registration is new territory, our guide to charitable solicitation registration covers how the state layers fit together.
The annual package is Form RRF-1, a renewal fee, and a copy of your IRS Form 990, 990-EZ, or 990-PF for the same fiscal year, minus Schedule B, which the Registry instructs filers to leave out entirely. Organizations too small to file a 990 or 990-EZ, generally those under $50,000 in gross receipts, attach Form CT-TR-1 instead. The fee scales with total revenue, from $25 for organizations under $50,000 to $1,200 above $500 million, per the Registry's fee schedule.
In a normal year the deadline is 4 months and 15 days after your fiscal year ends, which means May 15 for calendar-year organizations, unless the IRS granted your organization a filing extension, which the Registry honors. The extension paused that clock for anyone whose due date landed inside the 20-month window. It did not waive any filings. If two annual due dates fell inside the window, expect to file both renewals, each with its own RRF-1 and its own fee.
Why the Deadline Lands Now
The window opens on January 7, 2025, the day the Los Angeles County wildfires began. The Registry's first round of relief ran to October 15, 2025, in alignment with the federal disaster postponement. The Registry later stretched the deadline to August 31, 2026, and tied the longer runway to its own modernization: the relief comes, in its words, "in advance of launching a new Online Filing Service for all existing registrants and submission types in 2026."
Online Filing Goes Dark August 20 to 24
Here is the wrinkle worth planning around. The Registry is scheduled to release its new Online Filing Service in late August, and its current early-release online filing system will be unavailable from August 20 to 24 while it cuts over. Once the new system is live, charities, professional fundraisers, raffle registrants, and nonprofit schools will be required to file and pay online rather than on paper, under regulations the Registry proposed in May.
For this deadline, that leaves two sane paths: file before August 20, or be ready to file in the final week of August on a portal that launched days earlier. File early if you can. A brand-new state system, a crush of extended filers, and a hard deadline is not a combination that rewards waiting until August 30.
Two housekeeping items while you are in there. The Registry says registrants will receive information about the new system by mail, so confirm your mailing address on file is current. And look up your organization in the Registry's Verification Search before you file, so you know exactly which years are outstanding and whether your status is current or delinquent.
What Happens If You Miss It
The Registry's warning is plain: failure to renew leads to the organization being listed as delinquent and "may lead to the loss of tax exemption status with the Franchise Tax Board," along with penalties and possible administrative action. Delinquency is public. Anyone who searches the Registry sees it, and funders who check state standing before approving grants do search it.
The fix, for most organizations, is ordinary paperwork: the form, the fee, and the 990 copy, received by August 31. If your organization is several years behind or has already received Registry correspondence about its status, outcomes start to turn on your specific facts, and this is not legal advice for your situation; that is the moment to bring in counsel rather than guess.
The takeaway
California gave charities a 20-month grace period on registration renewals, and it ends August 31. If a renewal that came due since January 2025 is still outstanding, file it now, ideally before the Registry's systems go offline on August 20. The relief was automatic, but the deadline is real, and the cost of missing it, a public delinquent listing and a threatened state tax exemption, is far larger than the $25 to $1,200 fee.