Home › Paid duty › Paid duty and tax
Canada · Paid duty
Paid duty, tax and the record you keep
Most paid duty is paid through the service and appears on your T4. That single fact decides what follows — and it is not how it works in the United States.
Paid duty is usually employment income
This is the part that differs most from how it works south of the border, and it is worth getting straight before anything else.
In most services, paid duty is arranged through the service and paid through the service. The money reaches you the way your salary does, with deductions already taken, and it appears on your T4 along with everything else you earned that year. There is no separate slip for it and no Canadian equivalent of the American 1099 arriving in the post.
That is the usual arrangement, not a universal one. Some work genuinely is contracted directly, and a few services handle certain assignments differently. Which one you are in is a fact about how you were paid, and your pay statement will tell you.
Why that changes what follows
An employee and a self-employed person are treated as two different things, and the rules that apply to one do not apply to the other. If your paid duty income is on your T4, you are an employee for it — including for the purposes of what can and cannot be claimed against it.
Employment expenses in Canada generally run through your employer: there is a form your employer has to complete and sign before certain expenses can be claimed at all, and whether they will is their decision, not yours. That is the first question to ask, and it is a question for your service, not for a website.
Your own record of the year, built as you work rather than reconstructed at filing time.
The per-kilometre figure is not what people think it is
The CRA publishes a per-kilometre rate every year, and a great deal of what is written about it online is wrong. It is the most an employer can reimburse an employee per business kilometre without the money becoming taxable. It is a limit on a reimbursement.
It is not a rate you write on a return. Someone genuinely self-employed does not claim a flat rate per kilometre at all — they work from actual vehicle costs, apportioned by how much of the driving was for business. Which means the kilometre log is the foundation either way, whichever side of the line you are on.
Current figures are published by the Canada Revenue Agency. They change most years, so we do not reproduce them here.
What to write down while the job is fresh
Whatever the arrangement turns out to be, the same record serves it:
- The date, and the hours you actually worked rather than the hours booked
- Who the work was for
- The rate, and what the assignment came to
- Whether it has been paid, and when
- The kilometres, if you drove your own vehicle
None of that is difficult in the week it happens. All of it is guesswork by the following February, which is when it gets asked for.
Where this stops
This page explains how paid duty is normally paid and what to keep a record of. It is not tax advice, it does not tell you what you can claim, and it cannot know your service's arrangements or your own situation. A person qualified to give that advice can — and the reason to keep a proper record is so that when you sit down with one, the year is already written down.
This page describes how paid duty generally works. It is not policy and it is not advice. Your service's paid duty office and your collective agreement set the terms that apply to you.
The year, already written down
Log each duty as you work it — the hours, the rate, what is still owed and the kilometres. Come February it is a record rather than a memory.
Scan to install
