Bare Trust T3 Filing in Canada: Do You Have to File for 2026?

If your name is on a property or an account that really belongs to someone else, you may be a trustee of a bare trust — and for taxation years ending on or after 31 December 2026, certain bare trusts must file a T3 return and Schedule 15. Bare trusts were exempt for 2024 and 2025. That exemption has ended. For a 31 December 2026 year-end, the filing is due 31 March 2027, and the exemptions that might spare you are conditional and fact-specific.

Your name is on your child’s condo. Do you have to file a T3?

There are three situations that quietly create a bare trust, and none of them feel like one at the time.

A parent goes on title of their adult child’s condo so the child can clear a lender’s mortgage stress test. A spouse is added to a property or account because the bank asked for a second name. An owner-manager holds real estate or investments through a nominee corporation, with a bare trust agreement sitting in a drawer nobody’s looked at since it was signed. In all three, one person’s name is on the paperwork and someone else — or something else, like an operating company — actually owns and benefits from the asset.

That gap is what a bare trust is, in one sentence: it exists whenever the legal owner of an asset (the name on title) is different from the person or entity that actually owns and benefits from it, with the legal owner having no real powers or responsibilities of their own beyond holding the asset.

Almost nobody in this position thinks of themselves as a trustee. There’s usually no trust document, no lawyer involved when the arrangement was created, and no paperwork it has ever required before now. That’s exactly why the 2026 reporting rules catch people who have never filed a T3 in their life — and why “I didn’t know it was a trust” isn’t a defence CRA is required to accept.

If the arrangement is really part of a broader estate plan rather than a one-off title add, our estate planning services page covers how bare trusts fit inside the wider structure.

“I thought bare trusts were exempt” — what changed, and when

This is the single most valuable thing on this page, because most of what you’ve read online is out of date.

Bare trusts were supposed to start filing T3 returns and Schedule 15 for the 2023 tax year. That didn’t happen the way it was announced, and the rules have moved twice since. Here is the position for each year, in one table, because the year you’re checking against changes the answer:

If you last checked this in 2024 or 2025, the correct answer at the time was “you don’t have to file.” That answer expired the day your trust’s taxation year moved to a 31 December 2026 or later year-end.

Bill C-15, the Budget Implementation Act, 2025, No. 1, received Royal Assent on 26 March 2026. That’s what turned the 2026 start date from a proposal into law, and it’s why treating this as still uncertain is now the wrong instinct. Finance Canada confirmed the bill’s passage the following day.

A lot of the accounting content ranking for this topic right now was written before that date. You’ll find pages still titled “proposed” or built around a 2025 filing year — some genuinely useful, some now simply wrong for a 31 December 2026 year-end. Bare trusts have been through two false starts already, so the caution is understandable. But as of this writing, there has been no further deferral, delay, or cancellation of the 31 December 2026 start date. Check the date on anything you’re reading, including this page, and confirm it against a current CRA source before you rely on it.

This filing sits inside a wider picture, too — trusts are one piece of a broader plan alongside wills and beneficiary designations. Our complete guide to estate planning in Canada covers how it all fits together.

Do the new rules actually catch you? Walk the test

Here’s how to work through your own situation, in order.

Step 1 — Is there a bare trust arrangement at all? Ask whether the person named on title or on the account is different from the person who actually paid for the asset, uses it, and would receive the proceeds if it were sold. If the answer is yes — a parent on a child’s condo, a spouse added for a mortgage, a nominee corporation holding property for an operating business — a bare trust likely exists on the facts, regardless of whether anyone ever called it one.

Step 1a — is the arrangement exempt from filing? Being on title for mortgage purposes doesn’t automatically create a filing obligation, and it doesn’t automatically avoid one either. What matters is whether a trust exists on your facts, and whether you fall inside one of the two exemptions below.

Step 2 — the $50,000 exemption. A trust holding assets with a total fair market value that does not exceed $50,000, throughout the entire year, may not have to file. This exemption applies to any type of asset — there is no restriction on what the trust holds, only on its total value.

Step 3 — the $250,000 exemption. This is a separate rule, with a different number and different conditions. It applies only to trusts holding specific asset types set out in paragraph 150(1.2)(b.1) of the Income Tax Act, with a total FMV that does not exceed $250,000 throughout the year, provided certain additional conditions in the same provision are met. CRA defines the qualifying asset types in that paragraph — we won’t guess at the list here, since getting it wrong on a penalty-bearing filing is worse than leaving it to the statute. If your assets don’t clearly fall inside that category, test against the $50,000 rule instead.

Do not merge these two rules. A trust with $200,000 in a bank account is not automatically exempt just because $200,000 is less than $250,000 — that threshold only applies to the restricted asset types, and a bank account may not qualify.

Neither exemption is all-or-nothing, either. CRA frames both as meaning a trust may not be required to file a T3 at all, or may have to file the T3 without Schedule 15 — read the outcome carefully rather than assuming a clean exempt/not-exempt answer.

Step 4 — other non-filing categories. A small number of trusts created by statute or court order — bankruptcy trustee arrangements and certain provincial guardian or public trustee arrangements, for example — sit outside the reporting rules entirely. These are narrow and don’t cover the three situations at the top of this page.

What this means for the parent-on-title scenario specifically: there is no line item on any CRA page that says “parent added to a child’s title for mortgage purposes is exempt.” CRA’s own Taxpayers’ Ombudsperson has written about the unfairness this creates for exactly this group, but that’s a fairness discussion, not a statutory exemption. Whether you have to file depends on whether a bare trust exists on your facts (Step 1) and whether the value clears one of the two thresholds above (Steps 2–3) — usually not, given most GTA homes are worth well over $250,000. Treat this as a test to walk, not an assumption to make, and once you’ve walked it, that’s the moment to get the answer confirmed properly rather than guess.

What it costs if you get it wrong

There are two separate penalties, and the gap between them is the whole reason this deserves attention now instead of in March.

The basic penalty is what most people picture when they hear “late filing,” and on its own it’s manageable. The gross-negligence penalty is the one worth reading twice: on a Toronto-area home worth $1.2 million — not unusual in Toronto, Markham, or Richmond Hill — 5% is $60,000. On a $2 million property, it’s $100,000. There’s no cap bringing that number back down, because the penalty scales with the asset, not the size of the mistake.

CRA has said publicly it intends to apply the gross-negligence penalty only in the most egregious cases — where a failure to file was knowing or wilfully blind, not an honest oversight. That should be reassuring if you genuinely didn’t realize a title arrangement counted as a trust. But it’s an administrative position, not a change to the legislated penalty — CRA can revise that discretion at any time, and the statute doesn’t move either way. Already had a CRA request, or behind on a filing that should have gone in? Our CRA representation service handles that conversation directly with the agency. Falling behind also carries interest — see late-filing penalties and interest — and where CRA agrees the circumstances warrant it, there’s a penalty relief process worth knowing about.

The deadline: 31 March 2027, and why March is too late

A T3 return and Schedule 15 are due 90 days after the trust’s taxation year-end. For a trust with a 31 December 2026 year-end, that 90-day count lands on 31 March 2027.

The filing itself asks for the identity of every trustee, settlor, beneficiary, and controlling person connected to the trust, for every arrangement that’s reportable. Schedule 15’s official name, in fact, is Beneficial Ownership Information of a Trust — worth knowing so you recognize it elsewhere. It’s a different thing from the corporate registers that track who controls a company under the CBCA and provincial equivalents; if trust beneficial ownership reporting is a separate obligation from what you were actually looking for, that guide covers the corporate side.

Getting to that filing correctly is not a one-afternoon job. It means identifying every arrangement that might be a bare trust across your properties and accounts, gathering fair market value evidence for each one as of the relevant dates, and working through the $50,000 and $250,000 exemption tests properly rather than assuming your way to an answer. None of that is fast, and doing it in the last two weeks of March 2027 — alongside a first-ever filing requirement, alongside everyone else who left it that late — is a worse experience than doing it now, while there’s still runway. Our trust and estate filing service is built around exactly this: identifying reportable arrangements, running the exemption analysis, and getting the T3 and Schedule 15 filed correctly and on time.

What to do next

If you’re on title of someone else’s property — a child’s home, a parent’s home, anywhere your name sits on paperwork for an asset you don’t actually own — start with Step 1 above and confirm whether a trust relationship exists. If the property’s value clears the exemption thresholds, likely for most GTA real estate, plan for a filing rather than hoping it’s overlooked. If the underlying goal was ever broader estate planning rather than a one-time mortgage fix, review that alongside estate planning more generally, and see how capital gains apply to inherited property for what happens when the property eventually passes to the person who actually owns it.

If you hold assets through a nominee corporation — a common structure for owner-managers holding real estate or investments through a numbered company or holdco — assume the bare trust agreement behind it is reportable and get the corporate structure reviewed alongside it. See estate planning for business owners for how nominee and holding structures fit into succession planning.

If you think you should have filed for an earlier year — say, CRA specifically requested a 2023 filing and it wasn’t made — don’t file late quietly and hope it goes unnoticed. The Voluntary Disclosures Program exists for correcting a past filing gap, and using it properly can materially change the penalty outcome compared to being caught first.

None of this is DIY territory. No consumer tax software files a T3, and the exemption analysis genuinely requires judgment on the facts — professional help here isn’t overkill, it’s the standard of care the penalty regime assumes you’ll meet.

About this article: Triple M Professional Corporation (TMP Corp) is a Chartered Professional Accountant firm serving Toronto, Markham, and Richmond Hill. We walk clients through this exact test every spring, and increasingly through the year as people realize a title arrangement from years ago now has a filing attached to it.

This article is general information about Canadian bare trust reporting rules as of August 2026 and is not legal or tax advice. Rules, thresholds, and CRA administrative positions can change; confirm your specific filing obligations with a qualified professional before relying on any of the above.

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