TD1 Form 2026: Federal + Provincial Personal Tax Credit Amounts Explained

A TD1 takes most new hires about three minutes to fill out. They tick the basic personal amount, sign the bottom, hand it back. The form goes into a folder. The employee never looks at it again. The employer's payroll system uses the basic amount to compute every withholding for the next twelve, twenty-four, forty months.

Sometimes that's the right answer. Often it isn't.

The TD1 is the form Canadian employers use to determine how much income tax to take off your paycheque at source. There are actually two TD1s — a federal one filed with the Canada Revenue Agency, and a provincial one filed for your province of work — and Quebec replaces the provincial side with TP-1015.3-V, administered by Revenu Québec rather than CRA. The two forms together produce a single number: your total personal tax credit amount, which the payroll system multiplies by the lowest marginal rate (15% federally, varying provincially) to compute the credit applied against your gross tax.

Everyone working in Canada files one. Almost no one re-files it. And the employees who do re-file when their life changes — a marriage, a baby, a Disability Tax Credit certificate, a retirement-aged parent moving in — usually take home meaningfully more pay than the ones who don't.

This post is about what's on the form, what the 2026 numbers are, and the three places employers and employees consistently get it wrong.

The 2026 federal TD1 numbers

The CRA publishes a fresh TD1 every November for the upcoming year. The 2026 amounts:

A new hire who only ticks line 1 has a federal claim of $16,452. A 67-year-old with a disability certificate, a spouse with no income, and a registered pension of $20,000 has a federal claim of roughly $52,000 — and three times the personal-credit-related federal tax relief flowing through their paycheques.

The provincial TD1 sits next to the federal one, with a parallel structure but jurisdiction-specific amounts. Most provinces follow a basic + age + disability + spousal + dependant + caregiver pattern; the totals differ.

What every province publishes for 2026

Provincial basic personal amounts for 2026 — the minimum you'll see on any TD1 if the employee claims only line 1:

Saskatchewan has two SK-only credits — a Senior Supplementary amount of $2,569 (line 3) and a Child amount of $8,358 per child under 18 (line 8) — that no other province has. Manitoba layers a Family Tax Benefit on top (line 12) computed from your dependants and your net income. Yukon mirrors federal almost exactly. Ontario, BC, and most maritime provinces fall in the middle in terms of structure, with their own caregiver lines that don't quite line up with the federal Canada caregiver amount.

If you're an employer running payroll for staff in more than one province, your payroll system is doing the right calculation for each — but only if it knows each employee's province of work and uses that province's TD1 amounts. The most common error in multi-province payroll is using one province's amounts for everyone.

The multi-employer trap

The single most common TD1 mistake — by a wide margin, in the audits I've seen and the bookkeepers I've talked to — is the multi-employer trap.

CRA's basic personal amount is per person, not per job. If you work two jobs and claim the full $16,452 on both TD1s, each employer's payroll assumes your only income comes from them and applies the credit accordingly. You under-withhold. At tax time you owe roughly $2,460 in federal tax you weren't expecting (the lowest marginal rate of 15% × $16,452), plus a similar provincial gap.

Every TD1 (federal and every provincial form) has a checkbox at the bottom labelled "More than one employer or payer at the same time." If you have a second job, the procedure is:

1. On your highest-paying employer's TD1, claim normally.
2. On every other employer's TD1, tick the multi-employer box, enter $0 on line 13, and don't fill in lines 2 through 12.

This applies to weekend retail jobs, side gigs that pay through payroll (not invoiced), summer student work that overlaps with the school year, anything where two employers are issuing T4s for the same calendar year. It also applies to consultants whose first invoice of the year is taken on as a payroll job — the payroll TD1 for the new role gets $0 if the consulting income is high enough to be the primary source.

Employers can't catch this for you. They have no visibility into your other employers' withholding. The trap closes only at tax time.

When to re-file

A TD1 isn't a one-time form. The CRA expects you to update it any time your situation changes in a way that affects the credit lines:

• Marriage or common-law cohabitation. Adds line 7 (spousal) — potentially $16,452 minus your spouse's net income, federally, plus the provincial spousal amount.
• A baby or other infirm child under 18. Line 2 federally — $2,740 per infirm child.
• An adult dependant moving in — parent, grandparent, sibling whose income is below the worksheet threshold. Lines 8, 9, or 10 depending on infirmity and age.
• Turning 65 — line 3, age amount, $9,208 federally (less if your net income is above $46,432).
• Receiving a Disability Tax Credit certificate from CRA. Line 6, disability amount, $10,341 federally. This is the credit that gets re-filed least often despite being one of the largest.
• Starting to draw a pension in the year — line 4, lesser of $2,000 or actual pension income.
• Becoming a full-time student with tuition over $100 per institution — line 5.
• Taking on a second job, or losing a second job — toggle the multi-employer flag.

You don't have to wait until January to re-file. Most payroll systems that support digital TD1 will update your withholding on the next pay run after you file. If your company is still on paper TD1s — and many Canadian SMBs are — hand a fresh TD1 to your HR contact whenever any of the above changes happen.

TP-1015.3-V — the Quebec exception

Quebec is the only province where the provincial side of the TD1 is administered by a different agency. Federal employees in Quebec still file the federal TD1 with CRA. The provincial credits are claimed on TP-1015.3-V, administered by Revenu Québec, and remitted to a different ledger.

The credits are similar but not identical. The 2026 Quebec basic personal amount is $18,056 — higher than every other province's. The age amount, pension amount, and severe-impairment-equivalent-of-disability amount all exist but with Quebec-specific numbers. Transfers between spouses work the same way. The certification block at the bottom asks for a signature stating the form is correct and complete, just as the federal TD1 does.

If you're an employer hiring a Quebec resident for the first time, expect to set up Revenu Québec source-deduction reporting in addition to your existing CRA payroll account. If your payroll system was built without Quebec in mind, the giveaway is usually that it tries to file your QC employees' provincial credits to CRA, which Revenu Québec won't see and CRA won't accept. Hibiscus HR was built Quebec-first because the founder is Canadian and the founder's first user was a Montréal accounting firm — the Quebec side is the same digital experience as the rest of Canada.

What this looks like in practice

The reason the TD1 takes three minutes to fill out and then never gets touched again is that paper forms are bad at re-filing. You'd have to ask HR for a fresh form, fill it out from memory, sign it, hand it back, and trust them to update payroll. Most employees never bother — and most HR teams never prompt them to.

The Hibiscus HR onboarding portal renders the federal TD1 and the relevant provincial TD1 (or Quebec's TP-1015.3-V) digitally, with worksheet phase-outs computed automatically and a typed-name signature captured at file time. Employees can re-file from their employee portal whenever a life event happens. HR gets an email when an employee re-files. Payroll uses the new claim total on the next pay run. The 6-year CRA retention requirement is met by an immutable filing-history table in the database.

If you'd like to see what that looks like for your team, start a 30-day trial or book a demo. The TD1 is one of those small things that no employee notices when it's working correctly — and that costs employers and employees real money when it isn't.

Federal TD1 amounts published by: Canada Revenue Agency, TD1 — 2026 Personal Tax Credits Return Quebec TP-1015.3-V published by: Revenu Québec