Remitting Source Deductions to CRA: What to Find Out First
If you’re about to run your first Canadian payroll, here’s the part that isn’t optional: every dollar you withhold from an employee’s pay for CPP, EI and income tax belongs to the CRA, not to your business, from the moment you withhold it. That makes remitting source deductions to CRA on time a different obligation from paying a supplier late: it’s money that was never yours to hold.
What you’re actually remitting
It’s not just what comes off the employee’s pay. As the employer, you also owe your own matching share — CPP is matched dollar-for-dollar, and the employer EI premium runs at 1.4 times the employee rate. Both the employee’s withheld amounts and your matching contribution go to CRA together, on the same remittance. Run the numbers through CRA’s own Payroll Deductions Online Calculator (PDOC) before your first pay run, rather than estimating — it’s free, and it’s the tool CRA itself expects employers to use.
What this checklist can and can’t tell you
Being straightforward here matters more than sounding thorough: this site’s research doesn’t extend into CRA’s remittance-frequency rules, exact due dates or the specifics of director liability for unremitted amounts — and payroll compliance detail like that is exactly the kind of thing that’s wrong to guess at. What follows is what to go find out, rather than the answers themselves.
- Confirm your remittance frequency directly with CRA. New employers and small payrolls are generally assigned a schedule based on past or estimated withholding amounts — don’t assume monthly is automatic, and don’t assume it stays fixed as your payroll grows.
- Ask an accountant about director liability before you need to know the answer. Directors of a corporation can be held personally responsible when a company fails to remit source deductions — the exact conditions and any due-diligence defence are a legal question for a Canadian accountant or corporate lawyer rather than something to infer from a blog post.
- Find out what happens if you remit payroll deductions late directly from CRA’s own published guidance, before it happens rather than after. Penalty and interest treatment on unremitted source deductions is a specific, current CRA rule, and rules like that change — check the source rather than a forum thread.
- Set up your CRA payroll account before your first pay date. You need the account open, and your remittance frequency confirmed, before the obligation starts.
The honest bottom line
This is a compliance duty with real consequences, and it sits outside what a general newcomer-settlement guide can respectably tell you in specifics. A Canadian accountant or bookkeeper who runs payroll professionally — ideally engaged before you hire your first employee rather than after your first missed remittance — is the right source for your actual schedule, deadlines and liability exposure.
Cape2Canada’s guides focus on the immigration and settlement side of the move; for the business-operations side once you’re hiring in Canada, a local accountant is the resource this post can’t replace.