Plain Language SummaryDementia is the largest single contributor to disability and need for care among older adults. Dementia is accompanied by a progressive decline in cognitive abilities that interferes with the performance of activities of daily living, including toileting. Caregivers rate the independent use of the toilet as the most important activity that they would like the person living with dementia to retain. Faecal incontinence affects the quality of life, causes caregiver strain and is often likely to contribute to moving the person with dementia into a care home. However, there are currently no robust estimates of how many people with dementia living in the community (not in a care home) also experience faecal incontinence. Using a national dataset (interRAI-HC) from New Zealand, we demonstrate that during 1 year (August 2020 to July 31, 2021) 26.7% of people living with dementia faced the additional challenge of faecal incontinence. Over a 5‐year period (August 2016 to July 2021) the risk of developing faecal incontinence for people living with dementia was 1.7 times greater than the risk for people without dementia. Our study demonstrates that faecal incontinence affects a significant proposal of older people with dementia who are living in the community in New Zealand. Globally, more than 35 countries collect the same data as used in this study. We argue, that this could be used internationally, to better understand the level of community, health and clinical services that are required to support people with dementia and their caregivers to manage faecal incontinence.