Ontario Tax Brackets 2026

The brackets as Ottawa and Ontario publish them

You pay both sets at once, on the same taxable income, and each rate touches only the slice of income that falls inside its own band.

Look at the last two Ontario thresholds. Every other figure in both tables moved up this year, by the 2.0% indexing factor CRA applied federally and the 1.9% it applied for Ontario. $150,000 and $220,000 are round because Ontario's Taxation Act writes them in as fixed amounts, and the section that indexes the rest of the schedule leaves them out; they have stood since the 2014 tax year. So inflation works on the 11.16% band from one side only. Its floor rises every January while its ceiling stays at $150,000, which makes the band a little narrower each year, and an income that merely keeps pace with prices drifts further into 12.16% territory without anyone having voted for it.

Where 13.16% becomes 20.53%

Ontario works its tax out in two passes. The first is the bracket arithmetic above, less your non-refundable credits, which gives basic Ontario tax. The second looks at that result. Any part of it above $5,818 is charged a further 20%, and any part above $7,446 a further 36% on top of that. Past the second line, each extra dollar of basic Ontario tax costs $1.56, so Ontario's three upper brackets behave as if they were 17.41%, 18.97% and 20.53%. The posted rates are still the legal ones; the surtax is a separate step in the calculation, and a bracket table that stops at the posted rates understates the top of the scale by more than seven points.

Because the trigger is an amount of tax rather than an amount of income, the surtax has no fixed starting salary. For someone whose only credit is the basic personal amount, it starts once taxable income passes $94,901, and the 36% layer once it passes $111,809. On a salary the CPP and EI credits push both lines later, to about $98,600 and about $115,000 of pay. On a $120,000 salary it comes to $636, added to $8,000 of basic Ontario tax.

The same arithmetic makes an Ontario credit worth more to someone above those lines than its face value suggests. Credits such as the disability amount or medical expenses are valued at 5.05%, but above the second threshold each dollar of Ontario tax they remove also removes the surtax it would have drawn, so a dollar of credit is worth 7.88% of itself rather than 5.05%.

The Health Premium climbs in short, steep ramps

The Ontario Health Premium is collected through the tax return, but it isn't a bracket, and for most of the income scale it doesn't change at all. It is a flat charge — nothing up to $20,000 of taxable income, then $300, $450, $600, $750 and finally $900 — and it moves only on the ramps between those levels. The two lower ramps take 6% of each dollar. The three upper ones take 25%, and they are only $600 wide, but inside them the next dollar costs far more than its bracket says: 44.05% between $48,000 and $48,600, 54.65% between $72,000 and $72,600, and 73.26% just over $200,000.

The premium's bands are fixed dollar amounts in the Taxation Act and aren't on its indexing list, so they don't move with inflation the way the brackets around them do. The money involved is small — no ramp costs more than $150 — but it explains results that look like mistakes: a raise that crosses $72,000 keeping visibly less of itself than one that stops just short, or one row of a marginal-rate table spiking for no apparent reason. Price a raise across one of those lines in the pay raise calculator and the same jump shows up.

Every band, on the next dollar

This table wasn't made by adding the federal and Ontario rates together. It comes from running calc-hq's tax engine across the whole income range and reading the tax on each next dollar, so the Ontario tax reduction, the surtax, the Health Premium ramps and the shrinking federal basic personal amount at the top are all in it. It is income tax only, federal plus Ontario, on taxable income that carries no CPP or EI — interest, rent, a pension, a RRIF withdrawal. CPP, EI and refundable credits and benefits are left out.

A dollar of salary costs a little less until $85,000. It also earns CPP and EI credits, and part of the CPP comes off taxable income, so at $60,000 the engine charges 28.10% on the next dollar of pay rather than 29.65%; between $74,600 and $85,000, where the 4% second-tier CPP is deducted in full, it charges 28.46%. Above $85,000 the two rates match, but every bracket threshold sits $1,127 higher in salary terms than in the table, which is the enhanced CPP already taken off your pay before tax.

Ontario's tax reduction starts at $600, twice the $300 basic amount, and shrinks by every dollar of Ontario tax you owe. While that tax is under $300 the reduction still covers all of it, so on this kind of income the first dollar of Ontario tax doesn't arrive until $18,929, not the $12,989 basic personal amount. After that, Ontario's real rate is 10.10%, double the posted 5.05%. The reduction runs out at $24,870, when Ontario tax reaches $600. The Health Premium starts at $20,000 and climbs across the same stretch, so the next dollar there costs 30.10%, more than it does at $60,000. A parent gets a larger reduction for each child under 18, which pushes these lines higher; the calculators here don't count it.

How a bracket works, on a $75,000 salary

The worry that a raise into a higher bracket can leave you worse off comes from reading the rate as if it applied to all of your income. It applies only to the dollars inside the band. On a $75,000 salary the engine charges $8,259 of federal tax and $4,446 of Ontario tax, $750 of it the Health Premium, for $12,705 in all. That works out to 16.9% of the salary, because the lowest slices were taxed at 14% and 5.05% and the personal amounts, with the CPP and EI credits, cancelled the tax on the bottom of the income altogether.

The rate on the next dollar is 28.46%. A $1,000 raise from here adds $285 of income tax, and the second-tier CPP takes another $40, which leaves $675 of the thousand. Every calculator in the payroll section runs on this same engine, and so do the ones for tax on extra income, which is why a bonus or a commission priced there comes out at the rates in the table above rather than the posted ones.

The personal amounts, and why Ontario taxes first

Both governments forgive tax on a slice of income through the basic personal amount, but not the same slice. Ottawa's is $16,452; Ontario's is $12,989. On paper, then, Ontario starts taxing a few thousand dollars sooner than Ottawa does. In practice the Ontario tax reduction cancels that for anyone whose only credit is the basic amount. Each amount is turned into a credit at its government's lowest rate:

The federal amount is the one that moves with income. It holds at its maximum up to $181,440 of net income and shrinks to $14,829 by $258,482, which adds just under a third of a point to the federal rate across that band. That is why the table shows 48.26% there rather than the 47.97% you get by stacking 29% on a surtaxed 12.16%. Ontario's amount is the same whatever you earn.