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GST/HST for online sellers: charge the rate of the province you ship to

The GST/HST rate follows the shipping address, not your province: 5% in most of Canada, 13% Ontario, 14% Nova Scotia, 15% New Brunswick, Newfoundland, PEI.

By Matthew Reeves, FounderAugust 9, 2026 · 8 min read
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Quebec runs its own corporate tax regime through Revenu Québec, and Cadence doesn't currently serve Quebec. The figures below are Ontario's.

Summary

Selling physical goods online from a Canadian corporation raises two separate questions, and they’re worth taking in order.

  1. Do you have to charge sales tax at all? GST/HST is the federal goods and services tax, together with the harmonized sales tax that folds a provincial tax into the federal one in five provinces. You have to register with the Canada Revenue Agency once your worldwide sales pass $30,000 across any four consecutive calendar quarters, which is a rolling 12 months rather than a calendar year.1
  2. Once you’re registered, what rate goes on each order? For goods you mail or courier, the rate is set by the province the parcel is delivered to, not by your own province and not by the province where the customer’s payment card is registered. For 2026 that means 5% GST into Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec and the three territories,2 13% HST into Ontario,3 14% HST into Nova Scotia,4 and 15% HST into New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, and Prince Edward Island.5 HST is a single combined tax rather than an extra one, so the 13% into Ontario already contains the 5% federal part.

Four provinces also run a sales tax of their own that your CRA registration doesn’t cover: British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec. Downloads, online courses and other digital products follow a different rule again, which isn’t on this page.

We generally recommend registering for GST/HST, setting your store to read the ship-to address, and running a sales-by-province report each quarter, so you see your British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec totals before they cross a provincial registration threshold. If you’re selling at hobby scale, expect to stay under $30,000, and aren’t spending much on stock, equipment or advertising, staying unregistered is the better answer. What you spend matters, because a registered business claims back the GST/HST on its own purchases and an unregistered one can’t.

Registering, and the $30,000 line

Being registered means you hold a GST/HST account with the CRA, add the tax to what you charge customers, and send the government what you collected, less the GST/HST you paid on your own business purchases. You can stay unregistered while you’re a small supplier, the CRA’s name for a business whose worldwide revenue from taxable sales stays at or below $30,000.1 Taxable sales covers almost everything a store sells, counted as gross revenue before expenses, with a short list of exclusions (e.g. financial services, and selling your own business equipment). The test also counts the sales of any business associated with yours (e.g. another company you control). Orders you ship outside Canada count too, even though you charge 0% on them, because exports are zero-rated rather than left out of the system.6

Before you’re registered or required to be, you charge nothing. After that, the date you become registered depends on how you crossed the $30,000 line, measured over calendar quarters: the three-month blocks starting January 1, April 1, July 1 or October 1.

  • You pass $30,000 inside a single quarter. Your registration is effective on the day of the sale that took you over, so that sale carries tax and you have 29 days from it to open the account. A sale on May 12 is charged at the ship-to province’s rate, and the account has to exist by June 10.
  • You creep past $30,000 across four quarters without exceeding it in any single one. You stay a small supplier through the month following that quarter, and registration takes effect on your first taxable supply afterwards. Crossing during the quarter ending June 30 keeps you a small supplier through July 31. If your next taxable sale is August 5, registration starts that day and you have 29 days from that sale to apply.1

Once registered you file a return every reporting period, including the ones where you sold nothing. New and smaller stores normally start on annual filing, and the CRA tells you which period you’re on when it registers you.

The rate on a shipped order

Once you’re registered, every sale is treated as happening in one province, and that province sets the rate. Tax law calls the province a sale happens in the place of supply. For goods sent by mail or courier, the legislation deems delivery to happen in the province of the address you send them to and in no other, overriding whatever your sales contract says about where legal delivery happens.7 For a store that ships every order, the shipping address is the whole answer.

An Alberta seller shipping a jacket to Toronto therefore charges 13%, rather than the 5% it charges a customer down the road. The billing address doesn’t come into it, which is easy to get wrong in a checkout: gift orders, orders your supplier ships straight to the buyer on your behalf, and business customers whose card is registered to a head office elsewhere all produce the wrong rate if your cart reads the billing field. A shipping or delivery charge on the same invoice as the goods is normally taxed at the same rate as the goods.

Undercharging is the expensive mistake, because the CRA bills you for the tax you should have put on the invoice whether or not you charged it. An Alberta seller that charges 5% instead of 13% on a $1,000 Ontario order still owes the CRA the full $130. You may be able to bill the customer for the missing $80 afterwards, but contract terms and collectability can leave you covering it yourself.8

The four provinces with their own sales tax

Your GST/HST registration is federal, and four provinces run a sales tax of their own that it doesn’t cover: British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec. Each has its own registration and its own returns, and where you have to register you charge that province’s tax on top of the 5% GST on every order delivered to an address there. Both are worked out on the price before tax, so a $100 order into British Columbia is $100, plus $5 GST, plus $7 PST, or $112. In our view these four get less attention than they deserve, because they’re where the surprise bills actually come from.

  • British Columbia charges 7% PST (provincial sales tax). If you market in a way that reaches BC buyers (e.g. a Canada-wide ad campaign), then accepting BC orders and delivering goods into BC means registering from your first sale, with no dollar floor. Without any marketing, registration starts once your sales to BC customers have passed $10,000 over the previous 12 months, or you expect them to over the next 12.9
  • Saskatchewan charges 6% PST and sets no dollar threshold at all for sellers based outside the province, so the obligation starts at your first sale there. Its own bulletin says a business that fails to collect can be assessed the tax anyway, with penalty and interest, on audit.10
  • Manitoba charges 7% RST (retail sales tax), and you register once all three of these are true: you ship goods into Manitoba, you advertise in a way that reaches Manitoba buyers, and you accept orders from Manitoba customers. Its $30,000 small-business exception is a separate $30,000 from the federal one, written for sellers inside Manitoba who already paid Manitoba tax on their stock, so an online seller in another province almost never qualifies.11
  • Quebec charges 9.975% QST (Quebec sales tax), which Revenu Québec administers rather than the CRA, as it does the GST/HST of businesses based in Quebec. A seller with no presence in Quebec has no ordinary QST obligation, but a seller carrying on business there does, and stock in a Quebec warehouse is the usual way an online seller gets there. Selling to Quebec buyers who hold no QST number of their own, meaning ordinary consumers, separately pulls you into Quebec’s specified registration system once those sales pass $30,000 over any 12-month period.12

Ignoring a required provincial registration leaves you exposed to an assessment for tax you should have collected, plus interest and possible penalties. In our view hoping not to be noticed is a poor way to price that risk, because recovering old tax bills from customers can be difficult. Check each province’s rules before you begin selling there rather than relying on GST/HST registration alone.

A business located in British Columbia must check its home-province rules too. If it sells or leases taxable goods, or provides software or taxable services, in the ordinary course of its business, it must register to collect PST (a small-seller exception aside), so a BC store charges its BC customers 7% PST in 2026 from its first sale.13

The first-sale rule above cuts both ways: a seller based in Saskatchewan is under it too. Every business operating or making retail sales in Saskatchewan must register for a PST number, with only a narrow exception for the smallest home-based sellers dealing with non-commercial customers, so a Saskatchewan store charges its local customers 6% PST in 2026 on top of the 5% GST.13

Manitoba’s $30,000 small-business exception above was written for a seller inside the province, and if that’s you, it genuinely applies. Anyone carrying on business in Manitoba must hold an RST number before making any taxable sales, but a business whose annual taxable sales stay under that line may opt not to register, and once sales pass it there’s one month to register and start collecting 7% RST in 2026.13

If your business sits in Alberta or in one of the five HST provinces (Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, or Newfoundland and Labrador), there’s no second sales-tax registration to take on at home: your CRA account covers your own province, and your checkout charges 13% HST in Ontario5% GST in British Columbia5% GST in Alberta5% GST in Saskatchewan5% GST in Manitoba15% HST in New Brunswick14% HST in Nova Scotia15% HST in Prince Edward Island15% HST in Newfoundland and Labrador on a home-province order in 2026.13 The four bullets above are only about parcels you ship into British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba or Quebec.

How often this changes

Rates move rarely, but Nova Scotia dropped from 15% to 14% on April 1, 2025, so any tax setting in your store untouched since then is still charging Nova Scotia customers 15%, an extra $1 on every $100 of goods.4 What counts as taxable moves too, separately from the rates. We’d re-check the whole setup once a year, and straight away if any of the following happens:

  • Your worldwide taxable revenue crosses $30,000, over four quarters or inside a single one.
  • You move inventory into a warehouse in British Columbia, Manitoba or Quebec, including one run by an outside fulfilment service, which makes registration there mandatory immediately and stops the dollar thresholds above applying.
  • You start selling into a province you hadn’t shipped to before, and Saskatchewan above all.
  • You add a digital product (e.g. an online course) to a catalogue that used to be entirely physical, because a different place-of-supply rule applies to it.

Closing thoughts

Sales tax offers no upside for getting it right and a real bill for getting it wrong, so what you want is a setup you can leave alone rather than an optimized one. Most of the work is a single afternoon: register, confirm your cart reads the shipping address and carries the current rates, and decide which provincial registrations you’re taking on. Growth is what unsettles it, and a new province changes the answer without announcing itself as a tax event.

How we handle it

We set up the GST/HST account, check the tax configuration in your store against the ship-to rule and the current rates, and take on the filings. Returns go in on time whether or not there was anything to report. Where you sell into British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba or Quebec, we track the by-province numbers each quarter and tell you before a registration becomes mandatory rather than after.

Footnotes

  1. The small supplier test counts total worldwide revenue before expenses from taxable supplies, including supplies taxed at 0% such as exports, and it counts the revenue of associated businesses. The test leaves out financial services, sales of capital property, and goodwill on the sale of a business. The $30,000 threshold is in the Excise Tax Act, section 148(1)(b), and the single-quarter test is in section 148(2). Neither figure is indexed to inflation. The effective registration dates, the 29-day deadline and the two worked examples above follow Canada Revenue Agency, “When to register for and start charging the GST/HST” (Examples 2, 3 and 4). Verified 2026-08-09. Registration timing rechecked 2026-09-25 against CRA Small suppliers: under the rolling-quarter route, registration begins with the first taxable supply after small-supplier status ends, with 29 days from that supply to apply. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. The 5% rate is the federal GST charged on a taxable supply made in a non-participating province or territory. The non-participating provinces and territories are Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon. Sources: Canada Revenue Agency, “Charge and collect the GST/HST: Which rate to charge”, and “GST/HST calculator (and rates)”. The Excise Tax Act, section 165(1), sets the same rate at 5% of the value of the consideration. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  3. Ontario’s 13% HST is a single tax made up of the 5% federal part plus an 8% Ontario part. The provincial part is set out in Schedule VIII to the Excise Tax Act. Sources: Canada Revenue Agency, “Charge and collect the GST/HST: Which rate to charge”, and Government of Ontario, Ministry of Finance, “Harmonized Sales Tax (HST)”. The Ontario page also describes a point-of-sale rebate on certain items. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  4. Nova Scotia’s provincial part of the HST fell from 10% to 9% effective April 1, 2025, taking the combined rate from 15% to 14%. The CRA’s historical table shows Nova Scotia at 15% from October 1, 2016 through March 31, 2025. Sources: Canada Revenue Agency, “Charge and collect the GST/HST: Which rate to charge” (page updated 2026-04-08), and GST/HST Memorandum 3-3-3 (April 2026), which still carries 14%. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩ ↩2

  5. New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador have been at 15% since July 1, 2016, and Prince Edward Island since October 1, 2016. Source: Canada Revenue Agency, “GST/HST calculator (and rates)”, which carries the current and historical provincial rates. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  6. The Excise Tax Act, Schedule VI, Part V, section 12 zero-rates a sale of goods in three cases. They are where the supplier ships the goods to a destination outside Canada named in the contract for carriage, where it transfers possession to a common carrier retained on the buyer’s behalf for shipment outside Canada, and where it mails or couriers them to an address outside Canada. Section 12 carries no documentary evidence test of its own, though you still keep proof of export under the Act’s record-keeping rules. See Canada Revenue Agency, GST/HST Memorandum 4-5-2 on exports of tangible personal property. A separate route in section 1 covers goods a business customer takes delivery of in Canada and then exports itself, and that route does require evidence satisfactory to the Minister, at paragraph 1(e). Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  7. The deeming rule is in the Excise Tax Act, Schedule IX, Part II, sections 1 and 3. Section 3 treats goods as delivered in a particular province, and in no other, in three cases. Those cases are where the supplier mails or couriers the goods to an address in that province, where it ships them to a destination in that province named in the contract for carriage, and where it hands them to a carrier it retained on the buyer’s behalf for that destination. Canada Revenue Agency, GST/HST Memorandum 3-3-3 on place of supply for tangible personal property (April 2026) explains the rule at paragraph 13, and the Alberta-to-Toronto example above is its own. Goods a customer collects in person are delivered where the seller is, which this page does not cover. A delivery charge billed with the goods is dealt with in GST/HST Memorandum 3-3-7. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  8. Excise Tax Act 224 permits recovery of uncollected tax as a debt where its conditions are met, including disclosure under 223(1) and accounting for or remitting the tax. Later recovery therefore isn’t categorically barred, but contract terms, documentation and collectability matter. GST/HST recovery rule verified 2026-09-25. Separate provincial sales taxes require their own legal analysis. ↩

  9. BC PST is charged at 7% on the price before GST is added. The registration tests for a seller located in Canada but outside British Columbia are in Government of British Columbia, Ministry of Finance, Bulletin PST 001, “Registering to Collect PST” (issued October 2012, revised August 2023). Both routes above also require that you accept orders from BC customers. The $10,000 threshold is measured on retail sales and leases of goods plus sales of software and telecommunication services to BC customers. Registration is required with no dollar threshold where the seller holds inventory in the province at the time of sale. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  10. Saskatchewan PST is charged at 6% on the price before GST is added. Source: Government of Saskatchewan, Ministry of Finance, Information Bulletin PST-5, “Registration and Reporting Requirements” (issued June 1984, revised July 2025). The same bulletin says the small trader guidelines for home producers do not extend to vendors based outside the province. It also says non-resident businesses that do not collect the tax due on sales to Saskatchewan consumers can be assessed it on audit, with penalty and interest. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  11. Manitoba RST is charged at 7% on the selling price before GST is applied. Sources: Manitoba Finance, Information Bulletin RST 004, “Information for Vendors” (issued April 2000, revised June 2024), and Manitoba Finance, “Retail Sales Tax”. The bulletin sets out the three-part out-of-province test, the $30,000 small-business exception, and the denial of that exception to businesses that have not paid Manitoba RST on stock bought for resale. Holding inventory of taxable goods in Manitoba is an independent registration trigger, with no dollar threshold. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  12. The QST rate of 9.975% is imposed by the Act respecting the Québec sales tax, section 16, and it appears at the same rate in the CRA’s table of provincial rates. Revenu Québec also administers the GST/HST for businesses based in Québec. Ordinary QST registration applies to a person carrying on business in Québec (section 407). The specified registration system, which the Act calls registration under Division II, applies instead to a person that is neither already registered nor carrying on business in Québec, once its threshold amount for any 12-month period exceeds $30,000 (sections 477.5 and 477.4.3). That threshold amount counts taxable sales of physical goods made in Québec to Québec consumers who are not themselves registered, and it excludes zero-rated sales and sales made through a specified distribution platform. A seller inside the specified system gets no input tax refund for the QST it pays on its own purchases (section 477.11). Source: Act respecting the Québec sales tax, chapter T-0.1, at legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca. Verified 2026-08-09. ↩

  13. For Ontario: Canada Revenue Agency, Charge and collect the GST/HST - Which rate to charge. Verified 2026-08-13. 13% across every period in CRA's rate-history table (back to 2013-04-01). HST applies in Ontario on or after 2010-07-01 per RC4058 applicable-rates table.For British Columbia: Province of British Columbia (Ministry of Finance), and the Canada Revenue Agency for the GST component, B.C. provincial sales tax (PST) - Province of British Columbia. Verified 2026-09-24. The general PST rate is 7%, and a 2026 Act extended the tax to five kinds of professional service from October 1, 2026. The province paused that extension in September 2026 with a regulation that exempts all five services from October 1, 2026.For Alberta: Canada Revenue Agency, Charge and collect the GST/HST - Which rate to charge. Verified 2026-08-13.For Saskatchewan: Saskatchewan Ministry of Finance, Information Bulletin PST-5, Registration and Reporting Requirements (revised July 2025). Verified 2026-08-13. No PST rate or base changes announced in the 2026-27 budget document.For Manitoba: Manitoba Finance - Taxation Division, Retail Sales Tax - Province of Manitoba. Verified 2026-08-13.For New Brunswick: New Brunswick Department of Finance and Treasury Board, Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) - Finance, and Transitional Rules for the New Brunswick HST Rate Increase (March 30, 2016). Verified 2026-08-13. HST has applied in NB since April 1, 1997 under the CITCA. The provincial component rose from 8% to 10% (13% to 15% total) effective July 1, 2016, per the NB Finance transitional rules notice of March 30, 2016.For Nova Scotia: Government of Nova Scotia - Finance and Treasury Board (official news release), Province Lowers HST, Raises Income Thresholds for Nova Scotians (March 31, 2025). Verified 2026-08-13. Provincial portion cut from 10% to 9% on April 1, 2025, lowering the combined rate from 15% to 14%. Budget 2026-27 states it is 'maintaining the HST at 14 per cent, after a one per cent cut' - no 2026 change.For Prince Edward Island: PEI Department of Finance and Affordability (Taxation and Property Records), Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) | Government of Prince Edward Island. Verified 2026-08-13. HST implemented April 1, 2013 under the CITCA signed November 26, 2012, and the rate is unchanged by Budget 2026.For Newfoundland and Labrador: Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Finance, Harmonized Sales Tax – Department of Finance, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Verified 2026-08-13. Provincial portion rose from 8% to 10% effective July 1, 2016, making the combined rate 15%. NL has participated in HST since July 1, 1997. No sales-tax changes in Budget 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

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