Government Benefits & Deductions

Most of the calculators on this page don't want this year's income. The Canada Child Benefit, the Child Disability Benefit, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and the OAS recovery tax all run from July 2026 to June 2027 on what you reported for 2025, and the RDSP grant and bond reach back further, to the 2024 return. A raise that started in January won't touch any of them until next July; a bad year turns into a better benefit twelve to eighteen months later. Only the contribution tools — CPP and EI — are about money moving now.

The ten split into what comes off and what comes back. CPP takes 5.95% of what you earn from $3,500 up to $74,600, and EI takes 1.63% of the first $68,900; that EI premium is what a later claim draws on — 55% of average insurable earnings up to $729 a week, on an hours bar set by how much unemployment your region has. Everything else is paid to you, and one approval opens three of the cards. The Disability Tax Credit is non-refundable, so in a year with no tax to reduce it is worth nothing by itself; it is still the gate to the Child Disability Benefit and to an RDSP, where $1,500 of contributions attracts $3,500 of grant and a family under $38,237 collects a $1,000 bond for opening the plan at all.

Each calculator exists for the one variable that stops the program being eyeballed. For the CCB it is the phase-out, two bands keyed to how many children you have rather than their ages. For OAS it is the 15 cents taken from the pension for every dollar of 2025 income above $93,454. For CPP at 60 versus 65 it is the trade between 0.6% a month lost for starting early and 0.7% a month gained for waiting — 36% less at 60, 42% more at 70 — and the age at which the two lines cross. For GIS it is which of four marital categories you fall into, since each has its own table.

Federal does not mean identical everywhere. Quebec replaces CPP with QPP at 6.3% and pays a reduced EI rate, and the provincial half of the Disability Tax Credit is valued at each province's own lowest rate, so those three tools ask where you live. The rest don't.