Rental Income Tax in Ontario

The two cases in the old FAQ

If you have no rental income, keep the property tax receipt. That is the whole instruction the firm published for a home that is not rented.

If you do have rental income, keep the house papers: home insurance, interest paid on the mortgage, legal fees, management and administration fees when the property is a condo, maintenance and repairs, property tax, and the utility bills for hydro, water and gas. Those are the documents the Scarborough office asks for before it prepares the rental section of the T1.

How the return is filed

Rental income is part of the personal return, not a separate corporate filing, unless the property is owned by a corporation. A simple personal return starts at $49.99 + HST. Adding a rental statement changes the quote, because the preparer has to sort personal use from rental use when you also live in the property. Bring last year’s notice of assessment as well.

What this page does not invent

Capital cost allowance, a full T776 walkthrough, and a sample rent calculation are not in the old site’s pages. Ask the office before you claim a large repair, because a repair and a renovation are not the same paper. The personal return itself is described on personal income tax.

The only office is in Scarborough, near Kennedy Station. You can come in or send the papers. English, Bengali and Tamil are spoken. Manoranjan (Mano) Talukder, CPA, leads the firm, which has done this work since 2010. Personal income tax returns start at $49.99 + HST. Everything else is quoted before it starts.

The two cases the FAQ actually published

If there is no rental income, keep the property tax receipt. That was the whole instruction for a home that is not rented. The receipt can still matter on a personal return. Bring it with the other slips.

If there is rental income, the FAQ says to keep the rent and the house costs: home insurance, interest paid on the mortgage, legal fees, management and administration fees when the property is a condo, maintenance and repairs, property tax, and the utility bills for hydro, water and gas. That list is what the Scarborough office asks for before it prepares the rental section of the T1. A receipt you cannot explain is not entered.

How it sits on the return

Rental income is part of the personal return unless a corporation owns the property. A simple personal return with only employment slips starts at $49.99 + HST. Adding a rental statement changes the quote, because the preparer has to sort personal use from rental use when you also live in the property. Bring last year’s notice of assessment. If that year was already filed and the rental figures were wrong, the fix is a T1 adjustment, not a second filing.

Self-employed expenses and rental expenses are different lists. A vehicle used for a business is the self-employed file: fuel, repairs, lease payments. A house cost is the rental file. Do not mix them and hope the software sorts it out. The office will put each receipt on the schedule it belongs to.

What this page will not invent

The original site did not publish a sample rent calculation, a capital cost allowance rate, or a line-by-line T776. Those are not added here. A large repair and a renovation are not the same paper. Ask before a big job is claimed as a current expense. The personal return itself is described on the personal income tax page. A property held in a corporation is corporate tax plus the books, not this page.

Toronto, Scarborough and the rest of the GTA use the same office. There is no local branch in the city where the property sits. You can come to Suite 205 or send the papers. English, Bengali and Tamil are spoken. Manoranjan (Mano) Talukder, CPA, has led the firm since 2010.

A house you live in and a house you rent

If you rent out part of the home you live in, the office separates the rented share from the personal share before any house cost is claimed. Insurance, mortgage interest, condo fees, repairs, property tax and utilities can all appear on the rental FAQ’s list, and only the rented portion belongs on the return. A property with no rent at all still keeps the property tax receipt, which was the FAQ’s other case. A property owned by a corporation is not this T1 schedule. It is the corporate return and the books.

Bring the lease or a note of the rent received, the expense receipts, and last year’s notice. If you have more than one property, label the receipts by address before you send them. The quote follows the number of properties and whether you also live in one of them. Nothing on this page is a published rate for capital cost allowance. Ask before a renovation is treated as a repair.

Label each receipt with the property address and the month. A condo’s management fee stays with that unit. A repair on the home you live in is not automatically a rental cost. The preparer will ask what share was rented before a number is entered.

If a property was sold in the year, say so before the rental schedule is prepared. A sale is not the same paper as a year of rent.