Tax season anxiety has a specific shape: a T4 arrives in late January, a bank posts a T5 in February, and by March you are staring at a folder wondering whether it is finished. Wondering is unnecessary, because the arrival of your slips is not random. Issuers work to deadlines the Canada Revenue Agency sets, and those deadlines form a calendar you can plan against. Most of the slips a typical household needs are due to the CRA by the last day of February. Trust slips run a month later. Learn that calendar once and January stops being a guessing game: you will know what should have arrived, what is legitimately still in transit, and exactly which missing slip is worth a phone call — and when.
The arrival calendar
| Due to CRA | Slips | What they report |
|---|---|---|
| February 28 | T4, T4A, T4A(OAS), T4A(P), T4E, T4RIF, T4RSP, T4FHSA, T5, T5007, T5008, T2202 | Employment, pension and benefit income, investment income, securities transactions, tuition |
| March 15 | RRSP contribution receipts | Contributions, including the first-60-days receipts that follow |
| March 31 | T3, T1204 | Trust and mutual-fund allocations, government service contract payments |
That table is built from the CRA due dates published for Auto-fill My Return: the February 28 family covers the T4 and its relatives, the T5 for investment income, the T5008 for securities transactions and the T2202 for tuition; the T3 sits at March 31; and RRSP contribution receipts are due March 15 (s1). Add the human layer: slips typically reach you within about 5 to 10 days of the filing date, by mail or in an online account (s2). So a T4 missing on February 10 is a non-event. The same T4 missing on March 12 is a phone call.
Build your expected list first
The checklist that matters is not the generic one — it is yours. Before anything arrives, write down every issuer who owes you a slip, from your own year: each employer you worked for at any point in the year, each bank and brokerage account, each pension or benefit payer, your RRSP provider, your school if you studied, and any trust or mutual fund holding. One line per issuer, with the slip you expect beside it. This list is the whole system. Every arrival gets ticked against it; every gap on it in March is a named, chaseable item rather than a vague feeling that something might be missing. Households get reassessed most often not over exotic slips but over ordinary ones from forgotten sources: the employer from a job left in March, the small interest T5 from a dormant account, the T5008 from two trades in an app opened for a promotion.
The chase procedure
- Late January: set up. Create the folder (paper or digital), write your expected-issuer list, and confirm you can sign in to CRA My Account — you will want it in step 4.
- Through February: file, do not chase. Tick slips off the list as they arrive. Issuers have until the end of February for most slips (s1); chasing in mid-February spends your time and their patience for nothing.
- First week of March: audit the gaps. Compare the folder against the list. Anything in the February family still missing is now genuinely late by the 5-to-10-day delivery expectation (s2) — contact those issuers, and confirm the mailing or email address they hold for you.
- Mid-March: cross-check with Auto-fill. CRA's Auto-fill My Return imports slip data issuers have filed (s1). If a slip appears in Auto-fill but never reached you, you have the data and the issuer has a delivery problem; if it appears in neither, the issuer has a filing problem and the call matters.
- Late March: wait for the T3s before you file. Trust and mutual-fund slips are due March 31 (s1). Filing in February with a T3 outstanding almost guarantees an amendment or a reassessment later. Unless you are certain no T3 applies to you, the complete-file date is early April, not early February.
- File, then keep the folder intact. Store every slip with the filed return. If a late or corrected slip surfaces afterward, you amend with documents in hand instead of reconstructing the year.
What success looks like: every line on your expected list is ticked, the Auto-fill cross-check shows nothing you do not already hold, and you file once — no amendment, no reassessment letter in the autumn asking about income you simply filed too early to include.
The receipts that are not slips
Slips are only half the folder. Charitable donation receipts, medical expense receipts, childcare receipts and union or professional dues do not arrive on the CRA slip calendar because nobody files them centrally; they exist only if you kept them. Receipts for RRSP contributions made in the first 60 days of the new year generally arrive before the end of March (s2) — check yours against your contribution confirmation rather than assuming the January batch was the whole set. The year-end habit that makes all of this easy is unglamorous: one folder, physical or digital, that receives every tax-shaped document the day it arrives, all year. January then becomes an audit of a file that already exists, instead of an archaeological dig.
Digital versus paper: run both channels
Slips now arrive through two channels at once, and treating only one as real is how documents get missed. Employers post T4s to payroll portals employees stopped checking after leaving; brokerages default to online tax folders behind logins used twice a year; the CRA holds its own copy of most slips in My Account whether or not the paper envelope ever reached your mailbox. The robust habit is a two-channel sweep at each chase step: empty the physical folder, then log in to every portal on your expected-issuer list and download whatever its tax section holds, then compare both against the list. Downloads beat screenshots and portal views, because portals purge and employers change providers; a PDF in your folder is evidence you control. Name the files as you save them — issuer, slip type, year — so that April-you is not opening fourteen documents called 'statement.pdf' at midnight. None of this is sophisticated. It is clerical discipline applied for one month a year, and it is worth real money: the reassessment interest and the hour on hold with the CRA both trace back, almost every time, to a slip that existed somewhere and simply never made it into the folder.
FAQ
A slip never arrived. Can I file without it? First check Auto-fill and CRA My Account, where issuer-filed data may already sit (s1), and contact the issuer for a copy. Filing while knowingly omitting income a slip would have reported invites a reassessment when the CRA matches its copy against your return.
What if a deadline falls on a weekend? Published guidance notes that a due date falling on a weekend or public holiday moves to the next business day (s1) — a day or two of grace in the calendar, not a reason to chase early.
I received a corrected slip after filing. Now what? Keep it, compare it against what you filed, and amend the affected lines if the numbers differ. Corrected slips are a normal part of the season, which is one more reason the folder stays intact until well after the return is assessed.