58 Child Care expenses and how they are treated for tax purposes?

Child care expenses are amounts you or your spouse or Common-law partner spend to have someone look after an eligible child so that you or the other person could work to generate income or handle business or attend school ITA 63 (3). An eligible child is

• Under the age of 16 at any time during the year (exceptions are made to the age limit if the child is mentally or physically infirm).
• You or your spouse’s or common-law partner’s child.
• Was dependent on you, your spouse or common-law partner in the taxation year.

Examples of child care expenses (“CCE”) are the amount paid to a child care provider, day care centers, day nursery school, nannies, day camps and overnight camps, not including fees paid for education, leisure or recreational activities, medical or hospital bills, clothing or transportation cost.

CCE is recorded as deductions in section 3(c) of the section 3 ordering rules, when calculating Net Income for Tax Purposes.

Who can claim the CCE?

In order to understand it in much detail there is a good example in income tax folio S-1,F-3,C-1 on paragraph 1.44.

Interactive content (Author: Bhavish Toor, March 2019)

Interactive content (Author: Arminder Sandhu, June 2019)

References and Resources:

• ITA 63; 63(2), 63(3)
• Article – “Income Tax Folio S-1, F-3, C-1, Child Care Expense Deduction”, (Author- Government of Canada)
• Image – “family” by Bhavish Toor licensed under CC BY 4.0
• Competency map: 6.3.2

January 2019

All media in this topic is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA(Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike) license and owned by the author of the text.