See where your tax dollars go

Every spring when Canadians sit down to do their taxes, a common question gets asked: Where does my money go?

In 2024-25, the federal, provincial and territorial governments collected roughly $390-billion from Canadians in personal income taxes, with that money funding everything from health care programs and education to defence and interest on the debt.

To illustrate where those tax dollars flow, The Globe and Mail has created a tax tracker to help Canadians follow the money. Enter your employment income below and the province you live in to see a rough approximation of how your tax dollars get divvied up.

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A few things to know:

Your information isn’t stored. Once you close the browser, the details you entered go away.

This isn’t a tool to tell you how much tax you owe. That’s a job for your accountant or tax software.

And there are some assumptions baked in. It counts income tax only – not CPP, employment insurance or other deductions from a pay stub. It is also only an estimate for a single person below the age of 65, with no dependants, whose only income is employment pay from a job (not self-employment), based on 2025 tax rules.

On the spending side, the split shows how each dollar that governments spent was used, based on the 2024-25 fiscal year, not which tax paid for it. Income tax covers only part of that spending. The rest comes from other taxes, royalties, fees, federal transfers and, of course, borrowing.

For more details, see the full methodology below.

Enter your annual income from work and select your province or territory to see how your tax dollars are distributed.

How to read this breakdown: Each category shows the federal and provincial or territorial portions separately, and the combined share of your income tax. The sort or grouping control sets the order. At lower employment income amounts, there is no income tax, and so nothing gets allocated to the spending buckets. The spending shares are for 2024-25, the latest full fiscal year available from Statistics Canada. The mix changes from year to year, and defence spending in particular has risen sharply since.

Federal transfers: The Canada Health Transfer, the Canada Social Transfer and equalization appear as federal rows because they are federal payments to the provinces. Your federal dollars there are your share of the national programs, not what your own province receives. To avoid the same dollar being counted twice, the health and social transfer amounts your province received are taken out of its column before your provincial tax is allocated, because each is paid in support of a specific area (health in one case, and postsecondary education and social programs in the other). Neither transfer obliges a province to spend the money in those areas, though the health transfer comes with broad conditions under the Canada Health Act, so this is a judgment about where the money lands rather than a rule provinces follow. Equalization and territorial financing are provided with no particular purpose, so there is no category to take them out of, and they remain inside provincial spending totals. Smaller transfers that can’t be separated by province remain in both columns.

Provincial spending: As with the federal figures, the provincial shares come from Statscan’s classification of spending by function tables, which allows jurisdictions to be compared consistently. The provincial spending amounts include municipalities, school boards, hospitals and universities, which is broader than the provincial government alone. Roughly a fifth of Ontario’s column is municipal spending, paid for mainly by property taxes and fees. Benefits paid from premiums rather than tax, such as workers’ compensation and Quebec’s parental insurance, are taken out, as are EI benefits federally. In the three territories, federal territorial financing pays for most of what is spent.

It’s worth noting that federally or provincially, a lot of the benefits that people receive from government get buried in the categories and aren’t visible here, whether that’s Old Age Security, child benefits and subsidized child care, education grants or low-income drug plans, to name just a few.

Methodology and sources

What the estimate measures

The calculator estimates 2025 federal and provincial or territorial income tax for a person who is single, with no dependants, and is under the age of 65, whose only income comes from employment. It then shows how those amounts relate to government spending, using the same Statistics Canada classifications of spending for both levels of government.

How the model was built

We used an artificial intelligence large language model, Anthropic’s Claude, to help create the tax and spending models behind the tax tracker. The tool and a workbook containing the underlying calculations and judgment calls were reviewed by three economists, who suggested improvements that were then applied. A sample of tax and spending scenarios across various provinces and income levels were then hand tested by The Globe and Mail to verify the calculations.

How tax is calculated

The calculation relies on 2025 tax forms. Income is applied across the published brackets, after the deduction for the enhanced CPP or QPP contribution, and the credits every employee gets are subtracted, specifically the basic personal amount and its phase-outs, the credits for CPP or QPP contributions and EI or QPIP premiums, and the Canada employment amount.

Quebec’s provincial return works differently, using a larger basic amount and the deduction for workers in place of those contribution credits. Ontario’s surtax, health premium, tax reduction and LIFT credit are applied, as are the low-income reductions and benefits of other provinces. For Quebec, the 16.5-per-cent abatement, the deduction for workers and Quebec’s own contribution rates apply.

In the tool, tax refers to whatever the federal and Quebec tax returns count as income tax, so Ontario’s health premium is included but Quebec’s drug-plan premium is not, on the assumption the worker has private coverage through a job.

The bracket arithmetic was checked by The Globe and Mail against EY Canada’s tax calculator and Raymond Chabot Grant Thornton’s published rate tables, and the full calculation, with credits, against tax-software returns.

How the tax rate chart works

The marginal-rate chart shows the tax on the next dollar of pay under the published schedule, plotted against income from work rather than taxable income, and includes the bracket rates, Ontario’s surtax and the phase-out of the basic personal amount, with the federal and provincial lines drawn separately and each held at zero until that government starts collecting tax.

It leaves out the clawback of low-income credits and Ontario’s health-premium ramps, which raise the real rate over certain bands, and the credits for CPP and EI contributions, which lower it by about two percentage points until contribution ceilings are reached.

How spending is allocated

The breakdown is purely illustrative. Federal and provincial tax are each spread across their government’s spending in proportion to its shares, so the split shows how each dollar of spending was used, not which tax paid for it.

Both columns use Statscan’s tables classifying government spending by function, using its fiscal 2024-25 data. From the federal column, EI benefits, the carbon rebate and the Quebec abatement are removed, because premiums, the fuel charge and tax room pay for them, and the transfers to provinces are shown as their own rows at Public Accounts amounts.

The provincial column covers the province with its municipalities, school boards, hospitals and universities. The Health and Social Transfers that the provinces receive, and benefits paid from premiums (like workers’ compensation and Quebec’s parental insurance), are taken out before provincial tax is allocated. For Quebec, only the cash portion is taken out, since much of its entitlements arrive as federal tax room rather than money.

Equalization and smaller transfers remain. Statscan’s classification excludes capital spending, which understates defence, housing and transportation, and spreads federal spending on programs for Indigenous peoples across health, education, social protection and housing rather than showing those as lines.

Income tax is one source among several, accounting for roughly 46 cents of every dollar Ottawa takes in, and for the provinces, roughly one quarter. Borrowing covered about seven cents of every dollar Ottawa spent in 2024-25, and by Statscan’s measure, seven of the 13 provinces and territories also ran deficits.

Primary sources

• Canada Revenue Agency, 2025 provincial and territorial forms, with the federal return, CPP and EI rates and Canada Workers Benefit amounts
• Revenu Québec, 2025 income tax return
• Statistics Canada Table 10-10-0024-01, for federal spending by function, Table 10-10-0005-01 for consolidated provincial-territorial and local spending and Table 10-10-0017-01 for provincial revenue and balances, all using reference year 2024
• Public Accounts of Canada 2025, Volume I, Section 3 for transfers to provinces, the carbon rebate and the Quebec abatement; Annual Financial Report 2024-25.
• Employment and Social Development Canada, Employment Insurance Monitoring and Assessment Report 2025, EI benefits by type.
• Association of Workers’ Compensation Boards of Canada, Key Statistical Measures 2024; Yukon Workers’ Safety and Compensation Board, 2024 annual report; Conseil de gestion de l’assurance parentale, Rapport annuel de gestion 2024.

Important limits

The tax tracker tool is an explanatory estimate, not tax advice or a filing calculation. It does not count CPP or QPP contributions, EI or QPIP premiums, sales taxes, property taxes or fuel charges, and it applies no deduction or credit that depends on more than pay, like RRSP contributions, union dues, dependants, medical expenses or tuition.

Refundable credits such as the Canada Workers Benefit and the GST/HST credit are counted as spending, not subtracted from tax, so at low incomes a person’s net position is better than the tax figure alone suggests.

The tool uses 2025 tax rules, which have since changed in several jurisdictions, and Statscan’s first estimate for spending for fiscal 2024-25, an estimate it will revise. Spending shares change from year to year.