Every CRA deadline an incorporated owner actually has

Summary

Two calendars drive your corporation’s year, and most missed deadlines come from mixing them up. Your fiscal year-end, the date your corporation closes its books each year, sets the deadlines for the corporation’s tax return, its tax payment and, in most cases, its sales tax. The ordinary calendar year sets the payroll, slip and personal-tax deadlines. For a December 31 year-end and a corporation that pays you a salary:

1. Payroll source deductions, the income tax, Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance amounts your corporation holds back from your pay, due the 15th of the month after you were paid, so March pay is due April 15.
2. T4 and T5 slips, which report the salary and the dividends your corporation paid you, due the last day of February.
3. The corporate tax bill, due March 31 if your corporation meets the three conditions below, and February 28 if it doesn’t. Most small owner-managed corporations get March 31.
4. GST/HST (Goods and Services Tax, harmonized with provincial sales tax in some provinces), the sales tax you charge customers, filed and paid by March 31 if your corporation is on annual filing.
5. Your personal return and your personal tax bill, both due April 30.¹
6. The T2, your corporation’s income tax return, due June 30.

We’d build the year around both payment and filing dates, because interest starts at the payment deadline while the ordinary late-filing penalty uses tax still unpaid at the filing deadline. Paying before the filing deadline can avoid that penalty, even if interest has already started. Our deadline calculator lists every date below from your own year-end, with a calendar file to download.

What this article assumes

Every rule below is also given in relative terms (e.g. “six months after year-end”), so you can apply it to a year-end other than December 31. Which government collects your corporation’s provincial tax changes with the province you file in.

Quebec runs its own corporate return on its own deadlines, and we don’t cover Quebec.

One phrase does a lot of work below. Corporations associated with yours means, broadly, other corporations you or your family control (e.g. a holding company above yours, or a second operating company beside it), which the CRA adds together and treats as one group whenever it applies a threshold. If you own more than one company, assume it applies to you and get it checked.

The corporate return and when the tax is due

The T2, your corporation’s income tax return, is due six months after the end of its tax year, meaning the twelve months ending on your fiscal year-end, so a December 31 year-end files by June 30.³ A corporation incorporated in Canada files one every year, including a year when it earned nothing and did no business at all.³

The money is due earlier than the return. The day the tax itself has to reach the CRA is called the balance-due day. That day falls two months after year-end for corporations in general, or three months for a Canadian-controlled private corporation (a CCPC, meaning a private company controlled by Canadian residents) that meets three conditions.⁴ There’s no logic to the two-against-three-month split that you could reason out, so check which one applies rather than guessing.

Your corporation gets the three-month version only where all three of these are true:⁴

• The corporation was a CCPC throughout the tax year.
• The corporation claimed the small business deduction, either in the year you’re filing for or in the year before it. That deduction taxes the first $500,000 of active business income (i.e. profit from running the business, rather than from investments) at 9% federally in 2026, well under the general rate charged on profit above it. Your accountant claims it on the T2, so a CCPC earning under $500,000 of profit almost certainly has.
• Last year’s taxable income, meaning roughly the corporation’s profit after expenses and deductions rather than its sales, was no higher than its business limit for that year. The business limit is the same $500,000 as above, and it shrinks where your corporation and the corporations associated with it earn more than $50,000 a year of investment income or hold more than $10 million of capital, so you can lose the three-month deadline well below $500,000 of profit.⁵

The third condition catches people, because nothing arrives in the mail when you fail it.

Payroll remittances and slips

If your corporation pays you a salary, the amounts it holds back from each paycheque (income tax, Canada Pension Plan contributions and Employment Insurance premiums) are called source deductions, and sending them to the CRA is called remitting. How often you remit depends on your remitter type, which the CRA works out from the average your corporation withheld per month two calendar years earlier, so your 2026 schedule comes off your 2024 payroll. A regular remitter has an average under $25,000 a month and pays by the 15th of the next month, while eligible small employers can remit quarterly.⁶

T4 slips, which report the salary your corporation paid you, and T5 slips, which report the dividends, are both due the last day of February. Slips are named for the year the pay was in rather than the year you file them, so the slips covering 2025 pay were normally due February 28, 2026. Every deadline in this article moves to the next business day when it lands on a weekend or a public holiday, so check the weekdays each year.⁷

GST/HST

GST/HST deadlines apply once your corporation is registered or required to register, and everything below assumes that obligation exists. Registering is its own topic.

Filing frequency comes from qualifying taxable sales in Canada, excluding zero-rated exports, financial services, capital-property sales and goodwill. Domestic zero-rated sales still count. At $1.5 million or less a year, annual filing is assigned automatically, counting associated corporations’ qualifying sales alongside your own.⁸

Monthly and quarterly filers file and pay one month after each period ends. An annual filer files and pays three months after the end of its GST/HST year, which for most corporations is the same date as the fiscal year-end, so a December 31 year-end means March 31 for both the return and the payment, even in a year with no sales.⁸

Annual filing means one return, but quarterly instalments may still be required,⁹ and what it costs you is twelve months without checking the tax you collected against the tax you paid. We’d usually recommend electing quarterly filing instead, so long as your bookkeeping is current enough that closing a quarter isn’t a project.

Your personal return, and instalments

Your own return, the T1, and the personal tax you owe on it are both due April 30. The June 15 extension you may have heard about is for people who carry on a business personally, which a shareholder-employee of a corporation isn’t.¹ Instalments, meaning prepayments made during the year before the final bill is worked out, run monthly or, for eligible corporations, quarterly for corporate income tax, and quarterly for personal tax, and whether you owe any of them turns on threshold tests that have an article of their own.

Penalties and interest

Filing the T2 late ordinarily costs 5% of the corporate tax still unpaid at the filing deadline, plus a further 1% of that unpaid tax for each complete month the return is late, to a maximum of 12 months.¹⁰ A corporation that paid its balance before the filing deadline therefore avoids that penalty, though payment after the balance-due day still attracts interest. Late filing can also forfeit a refund: the return must reach the CRA within three years of the end of the tax year it covers.³

Late payroll remittances carry the harshest penalties of any deadline in this article. The ordinary penalty applies to the amount above $500, running from 3% at one to three days late up to 10% past seven days. A single day of delay on a $6,000 remittance therefore costs $165, with the full amount exposed where the failure was knowing or grossly negligent.¹⁰ As such we treat remittance dates as the ones you never let slip when cash is tight.

Interest on late corporate income tax runs separately from the penalties, charged from the balance-due day until the balance is paid, compounded daily.¹⁰ The rate the CRA charges on overdue taxes, which it calls a prescribed rate, is reset every calendar quarter, and the current quarter’s figure is on our CRA interest rates page.¹¹

How often this changes

We’d re-run the calendar once a year at year-end planning, and sooner if any of these moves:

• Your corporation’s taxable income crosses its business limit, which pulls the corporate payment deadline a month earlier, to two months after year-end.
• The average withheld from payroll each month crosses $25,000, which tightens your remitting frequency two calendar years later.
• Taxable supplies across you and your associated corporations pass $1.5 million, which takes annual GST/HST filing off the table.

Where your numbers sit close to one of those lines, somebody has to look at your figures.

Closing thoughts

The owners who get caught out have usually known the date was coming and hadn’t set aside what it would take to meet it. The dates arrive in an order set by administrative convenience rather than by when a business has money, so tax on a profitable year falls due in a month when cash may be short. Putting an amount beside each date, and moving the money as it’s earned, is most of the job.

How we handle it

When we take on a corporation we set the year’s dates from your fiscal year-end, your remitter type and your GST/HST reporting period, then file the returns and slips against them. If you’ve already missed something, we start with whatever is still accruing interest.