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T5018s: the contractor slip CRA actually checks

taxifi team · June 2026 · 4 minute read · All resources

If your business earns most of its income from construction and you pay subcontractors, CRA expects a T5018 slip for each of them. It is one of the lower-profile filings in Canadian tax, and one of the more aggressively matched ones: CRA uses T5018s to check whether your subs reported the income you paid them. That makes your slips part of someone else's audit trail, which is exactly why CRA cares whether you filed.

Who has to file

The test is whether construction is your primary source of business income, generally meaning more than half of it. A general contractor clearly qualifies. So do most trades: electricians, plumbers, roofers, HVAC, excavation. A property manager who occasionally hires a roofer generally does not, because construction is not the business's primary income.

What gets reported

Payments to subcontractors for construction services: the sub who framed the addition, the electrician you brought onto the job, the excavation outfit you paid by e-Transfer. Mixed invoices that bundle goods and services are reported when the services portion is part of the deal. You report the total paid in the period, including the HST you paid them.

When it’s due

You choose a reporting period, either your fiscal year or the calendar year, and the return is due six months after that period ends. Most contractors use their fiscal year so it lines up with the rest of their filings.

The records that make it painless

• A running list of every sub: legal name, business number or SIN, and address, collected before the first cheque, because nobody answers that text in February
• Every payment to each sub through the year, including e-Transfers
• Their invoices, matched to those payments

That last point is where most contractors get hurt. E-Transfers with no invoice behind them still have to be reported, and if CRA reviews you, undocumented sub payments are the first thing questioned. The fix is boring: record payments as they happen, not at year-end.

What it costs to skip

Late or missing T5018 returns draw penalties that scale with how many slips you owe and how late you are, and a pattern of not filing invites the kind of attention no contractor wants. The slips themselves cost nothing but bookkeeping, which is the actual moral of the story: this is a records problem, not a tax problem.

The short version

If construction is most of your income and you pay subs, you file. Pick your period, keep a live record of who you paid and how much, collect everyone's details up front, and the whole thing is an hour in filing season instead of a panic.

taxifi tracks sub payments all year and files T5018s as part of the flat monthly price. If your sub records are currently a stack of e-Transfer confirmations, that is a normal starting point for us: accounting for trades & contractors.