Canada tax residency: the 183-day rule

Canada tax residency: factual or deemed

Your residency status decides how Canada taxes your income:

Your situation	Your status	Taxed on
You keep significant residential ties in Canada: a home, a spouse or common-law partner, dependants	Factual resident	your worldwide income, with provincial or territorial tax where your ties are
No significant ties, but 183 days or more in Canada in the calendar year	Deemed resident, for the whole year	your worldwide income for the whole year, with a federal surtax instead of provincial tax
No significant ties, and fewer than 183 days in Canada	Non-resident	generally, income from sources in Canada
Resident of another country under its tax treaty with Canada	Deemed non-resident	as a non-resident

The 183-day rule: deemed residents of Canada

Section 250(1)(a) of the Income Tax Act deems you resident in Canada throughout a tax year if you stayed there — “sojourned” — for a period, or periods adding up to, 183 days or more in that year. The CRA applies it only to people who aren’t factual residents.

• The days add up over the calendar year, one stay or several. The count starts again on 1 January.
• Any part of a day is a day: days you work, study or holiday in Canada, weekend trips included.
• Commuting days don’t count. Living in the US and going home each night after work in Canada isn’t sojourning. A holiday in Canada is.
• 182 days is the most you can spend without becoming a deemed resident. The 183rd makes you resident for the whole year, taxed on your worldwide income from 1 January, not only from that day.
• A tax treaty can override it. If you’re also resident in a country Canada has a tax treaty with, the treaty’s tie-breaker rules decide — a permanent home first, then the centre of your vital interests. If they make you resident there, section 250(5) deems you a non-resident of Canada.

Factual residents: residential ties, not days

If Canada is your home, the 183-day rule doesn’t apply to you: a factual resident can’t also be a deemed resident. Whether you stay resident while you’re away depends on your residential ties:

• Significant ties: a home in Canada that’s available to you, a spouse or common-law partner in Canada, dependants in Canada.
• Secondary ties, weighed together: personal property such as a car or furniture, Canadian bank accounts and credit cards, a provincial driver’s licence, provincial health insurance, memberships, a Canadian passport.

The CRA says no particular length of stay abroad, on its own, makes you a non-resident. Keep your ties while you work or study abroad for a while, or spend part of the year in the US, and you may still be a factual resident, taxed as if you never left. You generally become a non-resident when you sever your significant ties — usually on the latest of the day you leave, the day your spouse or partner and dependants leave, and the day you become a resident of your new country.

Wintering in the US? The US has its own count: see how many days Canadians can stay in the US.

Worked example

You have no home or family in Canada, and no tax treaty makes you a resident elsewhere. You spent 1 June to 31 August in Canada: 92 days. Arriving again on 1 October, you can stay until 29 December — your 182nd day this year. Staying on 30 December would be day 183, and you’d be a deemed resident for the whole year.

Keeping permanent resident status is a different test, with its own day count: see the Canada PR residency obligation. Other countries count to 183 their own way: Spain, Australia and the rest side by side in the 183-day rule by country.