Every CRA deadline for your corporation, from your year-end

How each date is worked out

Your corporation has a tax year, and that year doesn’t have to run from January to December the way your own tax year does. The last day of it is your year-end, and almost every corporate date on this page counts forward from that single day. The calculator takes the year-end you entered and applies the rule the CRA publishes for each filing (e.g. six months for the return, and two or three months for the tax itself).

The T2, your corporation’s income tax return, is due six months after year-end, and the CRA states that rule in two halves. Where the tax year ends on the last day of a month, the return is due on the last day of the sixth month after it. Where the tax year ends on any other day, the return is due on the same day of the sixth month after. That second half is why a year-end of August 30 files by February 28 rather than by March 1.

The balance-due day, meaning the day the tax itself has to reach the CRA, falls two months after year-end for corporations in general. A corporation gets three months instead where all of the CRA’s conditions are met: it was a CCPC throughout the year, it claimed the small business deduction in the current or previous year, and last year’s taxable income was within its own business limit for that year (or the group’s, where it is associated). Those conditions are the three questions the calculator asks, and each one opens on Not sure, so the calculator shows the safe two-month date until you answer all three Yes.

CCPC status has to hold for the whole tax year, not only on the year’s last day. A corporation earning its profit from selling goods or services almost always claims the small business deduction in both years. The limit in the income condition is the reduced business limit on the T2, which starts at $500,000 for a corporation on its own. That limit is lower where investment income the year before ground it down, where taxable capital reduced it or where an associated group shared it.

GST/HST reporting periods run from the first day of your fiscal year rather than from January. A quarterly filer with a June 30 year-end therefore closes its quarters on September 30, December 31, March 31 and June 30. A monthly or quarterly filer files and pays one month after each period ends, and an annual filer files and pays any balance three months after the fiscal year-end. An annual filer isn’t off the hook until then, though. Where last year’s net GST/HST and this year’s both reach $3,000, it also pays a quarter of the tax one month after each fiscal quarter, and those four instalment dates are in the list too.

Corporate instalments don’t simply land on month-ends, which is the version of the rule most often written down. The first one is due one month, or one quarter, less a day from the first day of the tax year. The rest fall on the same day of each month or quarter that follows. For a tax year starting on the first of a month, that does work out to the last day of each month. For a tax year starting on the 10th, every instalment falls on the 9th instead.

Whether instalments are due at all is tested on the federal and the provincial parts of the tax separately. A part is paid in instalments only where it’s over $3,000 both this year and last, and never in a first tax year. Quarterly instalments are open only to a small CCPC with a clean record: one that claimed the small business deduction, with taxable income and taxable capital inside the CRA’s limits and twelve months of on-time remittances and returns. Every other corporation that owes instalments pays them monthly, and because the monthly dates are never later than the quarterly ones, Not sure shows those.

The slip and personal dates are the exception to all of that. T4 slips report salary, T4A slips report fees and other amounts that aren’t salary, T5 slips report dividends, and all three are due the last day of the February after the calendar year they cover. Your own T1 return and your own tax payment are due April 30, and personal instalments fall on March 15, June 15, September 15 and December 15. None of those move with your corporation’s year-end, so what the calculator shows is the next one of each to fall due after it.

Why the payment date comes before the filing date

The corporate tax is due two or three months after year-end, while the return that works out how much you owe isn’t due until six months after it. Owing the money before anyone has finished calculating it reads like an error in the rules, and it isn’t one.

In the real world the six-month date is the one that carries least, and the penalty arithmetic is why. A late T2 costs a percentage of the tax still unpaid at the balance-due day (i.e. the tax you had not paid by the date the money was owed). A further percentage of that same unpaid amount is added for each complete month the return is late. Both halves are a percentage of unpaid tax, so a corporation that paid on time and files late owes no late-filing penalty at all. Interest runs from the balance-due day rather than from the filing deadline, for the same reason.

We’d build the year around the payment dates and treat the filing dates as the tidying up afterwards, so long as your corporation actually owes tax for the year. The condition that flips it is a corporation with nothing to pay, where the filing date is the only one left that carries a consequence.

What changes with a year-end other than December 31

A December 31 year-end lines your corporate dates up with the calendar the rest of your tax life already runs on, which is most of why owners pick it. Move off December 31 and you keep two calendars rather than one, which is what every other year-end costs you.

Everything that counts from the year-end moves with it: the T2, the balance-due day, the GST/HST periods and instalments where your GST/HST year follows your fiscal year, and the corporate instalment dates. Everything on the calendar year stays where it is: the T4, T4A and T5 deadline in February, your April 30 personal return, and the four personal instalment dates. A June 30 year-end therefore puts the corporate tax payment in September and the return in December, while February and April keep the dates they always had.

We’d put the whole set of dates into a calendar the day a year-end is picked. A year-end nobody else uses appears in no reminder email and on no standard filing schedule. That said, a corporation sitting on December 31 gets the reminders anyway, so the calendar entry earns its keep mostly for everyone off that date.

What this calculator does not do

The calculator flags a date that falls on a Saturday or a Sunday, because the CRA treats a return or payment received on the next business day as on time. Public holidays are a different matter and aren’t checked at all, because working out which weekdays are holidays in your province is a bigger job than one year-end can support. As such, check the weekday of every date on the list before you rely on it.

Payroll source-deduction remittance dates, meaning the days the tax held back from pay has to reach the CRA, aren’t worked out here either. They run off the remitter type the CRA assigns from what your payroll withheld two calendar years earlier, and nothing about a year-end reveals that.

Most provincial filings other than Alberta’s AT1 are out of scope, and an incorporated owner has several of them (e.g. the provincial sales tax returns in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and the employer payroll levies). Most provinces’ corporate registry returns count from the incorporation anniversary rather than from the year-end, so a year-end can’t date them. Ontario’s annual return is the exception: it’s due within six months after the tax year ends, and the calculator adds it for an Ontario corporation.

Quebec sits outside this calculator for a different reason than the rest of them, which is that we don’t prepare Quebec filings at all. A Quebec corporation files separately with Revenu Québec on Revenu Québec’s own dates, and none of those dates appear anywhere on this page.

Whether your corporation owes corporate tax instalments at all, and how much each one is, is a question this page doesn’t answer. The calculator shows when they would fall and the condition that decides whether they’re due, and the test itself has a calculator of its own.

A worked example