SR&ED for software & SaaS
Your engineering team is probably eligible for SR&ED.
SR&ED is Canada’s federal tax credit for eligible research and development work. If your developers solved problems that weren't answered by documentation or Stack Overflow, that work may qualify.
No credit, no fee.
Free eligibility check
What qualifies
Examples of eligible work
- Designing new algorithms or ML models where performance wasn't predictable
- Solving performance, latency or scalability limits in your architecture
- Novel integrations between systems with undocumented or conflicting behaviour
- Building data pipelines that handle volume or consistency problems at scale
- Security or reliability work where standard approaches failed
Avoid these
Common mistakes
- Claiming routine feature development or UI work
- No contemporaneous evidence: tickets, commits and test results matter
- Over-claiming time for staff who mostly did maintenance
- Missing the 18-month filing deadline
- Ignoring eligible contractor spend
Worked example
8 developers at $110,000 CAD, 40% SR&ED time, no contractors. Ontario CCPC.
| SR&ED salaries | $352,000 CAD |
|---|---|
| Overhead proxy (55%) | $193,600 CAD |
| Contractors (80%) | $0 CAD |
| Materials | $0 CAD |
| Ontario credit (8%) | $43,648 CAD |
| Federal credit | $175,683 CAD |
| Total credit | $219,331 CAD |
| Our fee (15%) | $32,900 CAD |
| You keep | $186,432 CAD |
Illustrative estimate for a CCPC. Not tax advice.
What CRA expects to see
- Project-level records created at the time of the work: tickets, commits, pull requests, design docs, test and benchmark results
- A clear statement of the technological uncertainty at the start
- The hypotheses you tested and what happened, including what failed
- Timesheets or a reasonable time-allocation method for each person claimed
FAQ
Questions we hear often
Does agile development qualify?
Yes. Sprints, spikes and retrospectives often map well onto the systematic investigation CRA looks for, as long as there was technical uncertainty.
Does using open-source or cloud services disqualify us?
No. What matters is whether you had to resolve a technical uncertainty, not which tools you used.
Can we claim if we're not profitable?
Yes. For CCPCs the enhanced credit is refundable, so you receive cash even with no taxable income.
Find out what your R&D is worth.
Estimate your credit or book an assessment.