Methodology & data sources

Data sources

PlainRRSP combines three categories of upstream Canadian government data into a single calculator engine:

  • CRA registered-plan ceilings - annual RRSP dollar limit, TFSA contribution room, RESP lifetime cap and CESG match, all from the Canada Revenue Agency registered-plans administrator tables.
  • Provincial marginal-tax brackets - current and recent bracket schedules from each provincial finance ministry (Ontario MoF, Quebec MRQ, Alberta TBF, BC, MB, SK, NS, NB, NL, PE, YT, NT, NU).
  • Federal tax brackets - the Canada Revenue Agency's published federal personal income-tax rate schedule, combined with each provincial schedule to compute combined marginal rates.

Data vintage & coverage

The current build ships:

  • CRA limits: RRSP dollar limit and TFSA contribution room, 2009 through 2026 (18 tax years), with the calculator itself using the three most recently published years (2024, 2025, 2026); the full historical run is shown on our contribution-limits-by-year page.
  • Provincial brackets: all 13 provinces and territories, 2026 tax year.
  • RRSP rate-of-earned-income cap: 18% of prior-year earned income, capped at the annual dollar maximum (CRA Schedule 7 rule).
  • RESP CESG match: 20% on the first $2,500 contributed per beneficiary per year, lifetime CESG cap of $7,200.

Source URLs and dataset vintages for every row shipped are recorded internally and surfaced on each detail page when those ship.

How we process the data

  1. Download the latest CRA registered-plans table and the relevant provincial budget rate notice.
  2. Normalize each schedule into a uniform shape (year, account type, dollar ceiling, source URL, vintage).
  3. Spot-check every provincial bracket against the published rate notice, no value is interpolated.
  4. Load into our internal dataset via a unified, repeatable data-build process.
  5. Re-run the calculator engine's full bracket-fill test suite against known reference cases before release.

No bracket value is fabricated, interpolated, or editorially modified. Where the calculator derives a number (marginal-rate-at-income, dollars-deferred-today, retirement-rate trade-off), the underlying formula is documented inline next to the result.

Calculator assumptions

  • The contribution-room calculation assumes you have not over-contributed in prior years; the CRA-published prior-year carry-forward is not modelled in Phase 1.
  • Federal tax brackets are applied uniformly to all provinces (CRA T1 schedule).
  • Provincial brackets are applied on top of federal brackets per the standard combined-marginal-rate convention.
  • The Quebec abatement and provincial surtaxes (Ontario, PE) are not modelled in Phase 1; Phase 2 adds them.
  • Pension adjustments (PA), past-service pension adjustments (PSPA), and attribution rules are not modelled.
  • US-tax filing obligations are out of scope.

Limitations

  • All 13 provinces and territories have full bracket schedules live.
  • Bracket data refreshes once per provincial budget cycle (twice a year typical); intra-year amendments may take days to land.
  • The First Home Savings Account (FHSA) is not yet modelled, it lands in Phase 2.
  • RRSP carry-forward, RRSP-HBP/LLP repayment schedules, and self-employed PA cases are not modelled.

Financial disclaimer

PlainRRSP is for informational purposes only and does not provide financial, tax, or investment advice. Calculator results are estimates based on public CRA and provincial schedules. For decisions with material money on the line, consult a CPA or a CFP licensed in your province.

Editorial process

Every page on PlainRRSP is drafted from a primary source, a CRA bulletin or a provincial rate notice. Explanatory copy is compiled by our editorial team and stamped with the date of last review. Numerical output in the calculator and the per-province bracket tables is computed deterministically from the seeded data; it does not pass through a language model at render time and is stable across requests.

We accept reader corrections on every page. When you flag a numerical error, we either correct it in the next data build (if the underlying CRA or provincial schedule has changed) or annotate the page with a correction notice referencing the original source. We do not silently rewrite history, corrections leave an audit trail and are listed in the methodology change log we plan to publish quarterly.

Update cadence and verification

The CRA publishes the next year's RRSP and TFSA limits in late autumn, typically the week the official inflation factor is confirmed. Provincial budgets refresh marginal-rate schedules in spring and fall. PlainRRSP targets a refresh within seven business days of each release. The underlying data build is fully scripted and reproducible: it re-reads the upstream source and rebuilds the dataset from scratch each time, ensuring no stale values persist between updates.

Every shipped bracket is spot-checked against the published rate notice before release. We do not interpolate between published years; if a province has not yet released its current-year schedule, the previous year's bracket is shown with a clear vintage label until the new notice is verified. The reproducibility of the build means a reader can, in principle, audit any number on the site by rebuilding it from the same upstream sources.

Data & reuse

The full federal and provincial marginal-tax-bracket dataset is available as a downloadable CSV, the same figures every page renders. Each page also ships a downloadable share-card image (the headline figures rendered as a PNG) via the share menu, and every page carries machine-readable Dataset and Article structured data (JSON-LD) so the underlying figures are embeddable and citable by other tools. The underlying CRA and provincial figures themselves are published under the Open Government Licence – Canada; PlainRRSP's compiled presentation, charts, and prose are ours, reuse with attribution to PlainRRSP and a link back is welcome (see the citation block on each data page). We do not run affiliate links or product placements of any kind, this is a purely reference tool with no product recommendations to monetize.

Contact

Questions or corrections? Contact us - we welcome feedback, especially from accountants, tax pros, and CFPs.