Sales tax and employer levies by province

Canada does not have a sales tax. It has a federal tax, five provinces that harmonise theirs with it, three that run their own alongside it, one that runs a parallel system through its own revenue agency, and four jurisdictions that add nothing at all.

Layered on top, five provinces charge employers a payroll levy that has nothing to do with the CRA, and thirteen separate boards administer workers' compensation.

This is the reference version. It is deliberately a single page rather than thirteen, because most of what varies is a number, and a number is better in a table than spread across thirteen near-identical articles.

Sales tax, by province#

Three things in that table are worth pulling out.

Nova Scotia is 14%, not 15%. It dropped on 1 April 2025. If a rate table you rely on still says 15%, it has not been maintained since then — which tells you something about the rest of it.

Quebec is administered separately. QST is collected by Revenu Québec, not the CRA, which means a separate registration and a separate return. It is also the one rate with three decimal places, and rounding it to 10% will not reconcile.

The provincial retail taxes are not miniature HSTs. British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba each decide independently what is taxable, and most services sit outside all three. A consulting invoice into Vancouver carries GST alone; a shipment of goods to the same address carries GST plus PST.

You can check any specific combination with the GST/HST rate tool, which applies the place-of-supply rules rather than just looking up a province.

Employer health taxes#

Five provinces charge employers a levy on total payroll. Eight jurisdictions charge none at all — Alberta, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and the three territories.

Two traps here. British Columbia and Manitoba both have a cliff: past the upper threshold the exemption disappears and the lower rate applies to the whole payroll, not the excess — so crossing it costs more than the marginal dollar suggests. And Quebec has no exemption at all; the rate applies from the first dollar of payroll.

Every one of these thresholds applies to an associated group. Two corporations under common control share one exemption, not two.

The employer health tax tool works out the amount for a given payroll, and the employee cost tool folds it in with CPP and EI to show what a hire actually costs.

Workers' compensation#

Thirteen jurisdictions, thirteen boards: WSIB in Ontario, WorkSafeBC, CNESST in Quebec, WorkSafeNB, WorkplaceNL, the WSCC covering both Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and provincial boards elsewhere.

There is no useful national number, because premiums are set by classification unit — what the work actually is — and each board publishes thousands of them, revised annually. A roofing contractor and a software company in the same province pay wildly different rates. The only reliable answer is your own board and your own classification.

What this means for the books#

Multi-province operation is mostly a chart-of-accounts problem. Each tax you collect is a separate liability to a separate authority, and each one reconciles to its own return. Collapsing them into a single "sales tax payable" account works right up until the first time you have to file two returns from it.

The same applies to the employer levies: Ontario EHT, WSIB premiums and CRA source deductions are three obligations to three bodies on three schedules, and they want three accounts.