Income Tax Explorer

This charting tool allows you to explore how Canada's tax rules effect Canadians of different incomes. Just select a tax item and the type of chart you would like to look at above. Then move the slider to see changes from year to year.

Tax items include income, deductions, tax credits and tax payable. The Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) provides a description of items. An effort was made to standardize item names to allow comparison between years. However, since 2004 the number of tax items has increased from 64 to 112, and some item definitions have changed. For this reason, not all item data is available for every year between 2004 and 2012.

Each bar represents an amount for Canadians within the labeled range of annual income. The following six charts can be explored for each tax item:

Total item amount: This is the dollar total of all the amounts filed for a given item.
Number of returns filed with item: This is the total number of filers for a given item.
Average item amount for all returns: This is the average dollar amount filed for an item including filers and non-filers. This is useful for determining the average benefit a Canadian of a given income derived from a tax credit.
Average item amount among filers: This is the average dollar amount filed for an item including only those who filed for the item.
Average item amount as percent of income: This is the total item amount divided by total assessed income. This is useful for determining the average benefit of a tax credit as a percent of income.
Percentage of returns filed with item: This is the percentage of Canadians in each income category that filed for a particular item.

All dollar amounts are inflation-adjusted to 2015 Canadian dollars. For details regarding how the data was prepared, see the python code.

Note: As of July 2015, the final data for the 2012 tax year had not yet been released. The CRA has provided preliminary data for 2012 that are "based on approximately 95% of income tax and benefit returns excluding the reassessments for a given tax year."