This is general information, not tax advice. It is written from the CRA’s own published guidance and every source is linked, but your situation may have details in it that this article does not. For anything that matters, talk to an accountant.
With that said: the questions freelancers ask about GST and HST are usually the same five questions, and they have reasonably clear answers.
Do I have to charge GST or HST as a freelancer?
Not at first. Canada has a small supplier exemption, and while you qualify for it you do not have to register, charge, or file anything.
The threshold is 30,000 dollars in taxable supplies over four consecutive calendar quarters. Two parts of that are easy to get wrong.
First, “taxable supplies” means your revenue from work that is taxable, before expenses. Not your profit. Not what landed in your bank account after fees.
Second, and this is the one that catches people, it is four consecutive quarters, not a calendar year. It is a rolling window. Your business can pass 30,000 dollars in the middle of the summer on the strength of the previous autumn’s work, with no January anywhere in sight.
There are two ways you stop being a small supplier, and they have different timing.
You pass 30,000 dollars in a single calendar quarter. You stop being a small supplier immediately. Your effective registration date is no later than the day of the sale that took you over, you have to charge tax on that sale, and you have to register within 29 days of that date.
You pass 30,000 dollars across four quarters, but not in any one of them. You stop being a small supplier at the end of the month following that quarter. Your effective registration date is no later than the day of your first sale after that point.
You can also register voluntarily while you are still under the threshold. The reason people do it is input tax credits: once registered, you can claim back the GST and HST you pay on business expenses. If you buy equipment or software, that can be worth more than the paperwork costs you. It also means filing returns on a schedule, so it is a real commitment rather than a free upgrade.
Which rate do I charge?
The rate follows your customer’s location rather than yours, under the place of supply rules. For services this generally means the province of the customer’s address that you have on file in the ordinary course of business. There are exceptions, and they are genuinely fiddly for some kinds of work, so if a large part of your income comes from one out of province client it is worth confirming your specific case.
The current rates:
- Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon: 5 percent GST
- Ontario: 13 percent HST
- Nova Scotia: 14 percent HST, reduced from 15 percent on 1 April 2025
- New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island: 15 percent HST
So a designer in Calgary billing a client in Toronto charges 13 percent, not 5. A writer in Halifax billing a client in Vancouver charges 5 percent, not 14. This is the single most common error in the whole subject, and it is uncomfortable to fix months later.
Work for clients outside Canada is often zero rated, which means you charge tax at 0 percent but the sale still counts toward your threshold and you can still claim input tax credits. “Often” is doing real work in that sentence: the conditions depend on what you supply and to whom, and some services to non-residents are excluded. If you invoice abroad, get this one checked rather than assumed.
What has to appear on the invoice?
Here the rules are unusually concrete, because your invoice is the document your client needs in order to claim their own input tax credit. If it is missing something, their claim can be denied, and they will come back to you about it.
What is required depends on the total amount. These thresholds changed on 20 April 2021, from 30 and 150 dollars to 100 and 500. Plenty of advice online still quotes the old numbers.
Under 100 dollars:
- Your business or trading name
- The date of the invoice
- The total amount payable
100 dollars to under 500 dollars, all of the above plus:
- The total GST or HST charged, or a statement that the amount includes GST or HST at the applicable rate
- Which items are taxable and which are exempt, if you have both
- Your GST/HST registration number
500 dollars or more, all of the above plus:
- Your client’s name or trading name
- A brief description of what you supplied
- The terms of payment
For most freelance work, every invoice you send is in that top tier, so the practical answer is: put all of it on every invoice. The registration number is the field people forget, and it is the one that costs your client money.
Any invoicing tool can produce this, including a template you write yourself. Whatever you use, check that a finished invoice really carries all of it, because the registration number in particular is easy to leave off a template and expensive for your client when it is missing.
It is also worth a thought about where the resulting records sit, given that they amount to every client you have and what they pay you. Ledger keeps them on your own devices rather than on someone else’s server, which is one answer to that.
What about Quebec, British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba?
These four have a second tax that GST registration does not cover.
Quebec has QST, administered by Revenu Québec rather than the CRA. It has its own registration, its own returns, and its own threshold rules. If you are in Quebec or you sell into it in volume, treat it as a separate subject.
British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba each have a provincial sales tax with its own registration requirements and its own view of which services are taxable. In several cases professional services are outside PST entirely, but “in several cases” is not something to build on. Check your province and your line of work.
Registering for GST does nothing about any of these. They are separate systems with separate deadlines.
What are the most common mistakes?
Charging tax before you have a number. Do not collect GST or HST until you are registered. If you have crossed the threshold, register promptly, because your obligation starts from your effective date whether or not you noticed.
Leaving the registration number off. On anything over 100 dollars this breaks your client’s input tax credit.
Charging your own province’s rate. Covered above, and worth repeating, because it is the error that produces the largest corrections.
Treating the threshold as a calendar year. It is four rolling quarters.
Confusing zero rated with exempt. Zero rated sales count toward your threshold and let you claim input tax credits. Exempt supplies do neither. They are not interchangeable.
Not claiming your own input tax credits. Once registered, the tax you pay on business purchases is recoverable. People remember to collect and forget to claim.
What records do I need to keep?
Six years, from the end of the last tax year the records relate to. That covers your invoices, the tax you charged, and the receipts behind the credits you claim. You can destroy them sooner only with written permission from the CRA.
Six years is long enough that the format matters. Whatever you use should let you get your own data out in a form you can still read after you have stopped using the software, which is a reason to think about where your records actually live before you have six years of them.
The short version
Under 30,000 dollars across four rolling quarters, you can ignore all of this, though registering voluntarily is sometimes worth it. Over it, register within the deadline, charge the rate for your client’s province, and put your registration number, a description of the work, your client’s name and the payment terms on every invoice. Then check whether your province has a sales tax of its own.
And then, genuinely, ask an accountant. An hour of their time early is cheaper than a correction later.
Sources: CRA on when to register and charge, which rate applies, input tax credits and invoice requirements, and keeping records. Rates and thresholds change, so check the source before you rely on any figure here.