The Volunteer Firefighter Credit, and the Hours Nobody Logs

Who Qualifies

The credit is for volunteers in two kinds of service. Volunteer firefighters serve with a fire department. Search-and-rescue volunteers serve with an eligible search-and-rescue organization: one that's a member of the Search and Rescue Volunteer Association of Canada, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association or the Canadian Coast Guard Auxiliary, or one recognized as a search-and-rescue organization by a provincial, municipal or public authority.

They're two separate credits: the volunteer firefighters' amount and the search and rescue volunteers' amount. You can claim one or the other in a year, not both. But if you do both kinds of service, the hours combine toward the 200.

Hours don't count if you were employed by the same organization and did the same or similar duties as paid work. A career firefighter who also volunteers with the department in their home township can still count those volunteer hours. Volunteering with the department that pays you for the same duties doesn't count.

Volunteer ambulance technicians are a different case. They can qualify for the tax-free honorarium described below, but the credit itself is only for firefighting and search-and-rescue service.

Which Hours Count Toward 200

The CRA lists three kinds of eligible service, and they're the same for both credits:

Responding to, and being on call for, firefighting or search-and-rescue calls and related emergency calls.

Attending meetings held by the fire department or search-and-rescue organization.

Required training related to preventing or suppressing fires, or to search-and-rescue services.

Being on call counts, not just the calls you actually responded to, and for many volunteers it's the largest part of the year. It's also the part departments record least consistently. Some log on-call shifts carefully; some only log calls attended. If your department only counts calls, your certified total can come out well under the hours you actually gave.

So the useful question to ask your chief isn't "will you certify my hours?" It's "how are my on-call hours being recorded?" Ask it while the year is still running, when there's time to fix the answer.

Certified Hours

You don't send anything with your return to prove the hours. But the CRA may ask you for certification from the fire department or search-and-rescue organization confirming how many hours of eligible service you performed. If it asks and you can't produce one, the claim has nothing behind it.

So get the certificate before you file, not after a letter arrives. January is the time: the year's records are complete, and the chief isn't fielding the same request from every member in April. Keep it with your tax records.

If your department doesn't keep hours you'd trust, keep your own: the date, whether it was a call, an on-call shift, a meeting or training, and how long. A record kept as you go gives the department something to certify against, and gives you something to compare its figure with.

The Honorarium Choice

Many departments pay volunteers an honorarium. If it's paid by a government, a municipality or another public authority, up to $1,000 of it can be tax-free. Your T4 shows the exempt part in box 87 and the taxable rest in box 14. The exemption applies separately for each eligible employer, so a volunteer paid by two departments can have an exempt amount from each.

This is where you have to choose. If you take the exemption, you can't claim the credit. If you claim the credit, the whole honorarium becomes taxable: the box 87 amount goes into your employment income along with box 14.

Which way comes out ahead depends on your own numbers: the size of your honorariums, how many departments pay you, and what the rest of your income looks like. The credit works off a fixed $6,000 amount. The exemption works off whatever you were actually paid, up to $1,000 per employer. Neither one wins every time.

So we run your return both ways and claim the better one. It's a few minutes of arithmetic on our side, and it's the step that gets skipped when the return is done in a hurry.

If You Missed It Before

If you qualified in an earlier year and didn't claim it, that year's return can be adjusted. See our FAQ for how adjustments are requested. The same rules apply as for a current year: you need the hours for that year, and the CRA can ask for the department's certification of them, so ask for a certificate for each year you're going back for.

The amount was $3,000 for years before 2024, and the honorarium choice applied in those years too. A year in which you took the tax-free honorarium isn't a missed credit, because you can't have both.