Do you have to register for GST/HST?

You register directly with the CRA at no cost through Business Registration Online (BRO) — since November 3, 2025 the CRA no longer takes new registrations by phone; callers are redirected to BRO. Services that charge to "register your GST number" are charging for a form you can do yourself in minutes.

Voluntary registration lets you claim input tax credits on your purchases (laptop, software, phone plan). If your clients are businesses (they don't care about the tax, they claim it back) and you have real expenses, registering early often pays. If your clients are consumers, it makes you 5-15% more expensive.

No — that's the most common mistake. The test looks at any single calendar quarter and at every rolling window of four consecutive quarters. There is no January reset.

You were required to charge GST/HST from your effective date — the CRA can assess you for tax you never collected, plus interest. Register now with a backdated effective date and talk to the CRA (or a professional) about the missed period. Waiting makes it worse.

No. The mandatory day-one registration for taxi and commercial ride-share drivers applies only to the ride-share business — your other self-employment keeps small-supplier status until the normal $30,000 tests say otherwise. Your fares still count toward that $30,000, so once your combined taxable sales cross the threshold, you must collect GST/HST on all of it.

The fastest way is Business Registration Online (BRO) — you get your business number (BN) and your GST/HST account number in the same session. Save or print them before you close the tab: the CRA won't mail them to you, the session times out after 10 minutes of inactivity, and you can't save a half-finished registration. Have ready: your SIN, date of birth, home postal code, your business name and type, a description of what it does, and your effective date of registration (the calculator above tells you that date). Just starting out with no revenue history? A reasonable estimate of your first year's income is fine. Sole proprietors whose SIN starts with 9 must use BRO; if BRO can't handle your situation (for example, a business owned by another business), the CRA's other registration routes include Form RC1.

You file a return for every reporting period, even one with zero sales — a "nil return" is still mandatory — and nearly all registrants must now file electronically (paper returns draw a penalty). The CRA assigns your default reporting period based on your revenue; you can switch to more frequent filing in your CRA account. Monthly and quarterly filers file and pay one month after the period ends. Annual filers generally get three months after fiscal year-end — except the classic freelancer case: a sole proprietor with a December 31 year-end who had business income that year pays by April 30 but files by June 15. (No business income that year? Both fall three months after year-end, March 31.) A due date landing on a weekend or CRA-recognized holiday rolls to the next business day.

For property, often yes. On the day you register, the CRA treats capital property, real property and inventory you have on hand for your business as though you had just bought them, with GST/HST equal to their "basic tax content" — and you may claim input tax credits on that amount. Services are the reverse: no ITC for services supplied to you before you became a registrant, even if you paid the tax afterwards — though tax you paid earlier for services to be supplied to you after registration is claimable. Prepayments split by period: in the CRA's own example, you prepay January-to-March office rent and register March 1, so you claim the ITC on March's rent only.