Nurses & First Responders' Tax Guide

Dues That Come Off Your Income

Annual union dues usually appear in box 44 of your T4 and flow onto the return automatically. What often doesn't: the professional licensing and registration fees you pay out of pocket to keep practising — a provincial college registration, professional association dues, professional liability insurance premiums. Where they're required to maintain your professional status and your employer doesn't reimburse them, they're generally deductible.

The pattern we see: the T4 dues get claimed, the receipts paid by e-transfer in January don't. Keep every registration and insurance receipt — they add up, every single year.

Shift Premiums, Overtime & Multiple Employers

First, a myth worth killing: overtime is not "taxed more." It's ordinary income — more withholding comes off a big cheque, but the rate at year-end is the same. If a heavy-overtime year produced a refund, that's the withholding math correcting itself, not a bonus.

The real trap is multiple employers — agency shifts, casual lines at a second hospital, paid-on-call at a neighbouring service. Each employer withholds as if theirs were your only income, which routinely leaves a balance owing that nobody warned you about. The return also reconciles CPP and EI across employers, and over-contributions come back to you — but only if the return is done right.

If this was your year, the time to find out what you owe is before April, not after. Our tax estimator gives you a read in two minutes.

Volunteer Firefighters & Search and Rescue

If you put in at least 200 hours of eligible volunteer firefighting or search-and-rescue service in the year, you can claim a credit on a $6,000 amount — doubled from $3,000 as of the 2024 tax year, and still missed constantly.

One wrinkle: volunteers who receive a small honorarium can instead have up to $1,000 of it treated as tax-free — but not both. Which option wins depends on your numbers, so we run it both ways and claim the better one.