WooCommerce GST/HST settings for selling across Canada

The CRA's rule for goods is that a sale sent by mail or courier is made in the province the goods are sent to. An Ontario store shipping to Calgary charges 5% GST. Shipping to Halifax, it charges 14% HST, Nova Scotia's rate since it came down from 15% on April 1, 2025. WooCommerce follows this when Calculate tax based on stays on its default, Customer shipping address. Billing address is the worse choice for shipped goods, because a gift paid for in Toronto and delivered to Vancouver gets Ontario's 13% instead of BC's GST and PST. Shop base address is worse still.

WooCommerce matches rows on country and state code and uses only the first matching rate at each priority. Canada needs thirteen rows at priority 1, country CA, one per WooCommerce province code: AB, BC, MB, NB, NL, NT, NS, NU, ON, PE, QC, SK, YT. Enter HST as a single 13 or 15 named HST, never as 5 plus 8; the CRA's registrant guide says not to show the federal and provincial parts separately. A provincial tax is a second row for the same province at priority 2, with Compound left unticked. Revenu Québec calculates QST at 9.975% on the price excluding GST, so a C$25.00 item carries C$1.25 GST and C$2.49 QST. A compound row would tax the GST too, overcharging Quebec buyers by about half a cent per dollar. Set Display tax totals to Itemized so GST and PST print as separate lines.

A GST/HST number from the CRA covers the federal tax and the harmonized provinces, and nothing else. British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Quebec each register sellers for their own tax, so a priority-2 row for a province where you hold no account collects money you have nowhere to remit. BC publishes the clearest test. Under Bulletin PST 001, a business elsewhere in Canada that takes BC orders and delivers there, courier included, registers once BC gross revenue passed C$10,000 in the previous 12 months or will in the next 12. Soliciting BC buyers needs no threshold at all; registration then comes before the first delivery. A website alone is not soliciting. A geotargeted ad campaign is. Quebec's tax runs through Revenu Québec, and a GST/HST registrant elsewhere in Canada selling to Québec consumers comes under its specified QST system once those sales pass C$30,000 over 12 months. Saskatchewan and Manitoba (where the tax is called RST) have their own out-of-province rules, so check the province's site first. WooCommerce Tax, the automated option, works for Canada-based stores but by its own documentation does not determine where your business has a tax obligation. Once you hold accounts in two or more provinces, or cannot tell whether your advertising counts as soliciting BC, that call belongs to an accountant.

Below C$30,000 of taxable sales a Canadian business is a small supplier and need not register for GST/HST. The counting method sets your start date. Cross C$30,000 within one calendar quarter and you are registered from the day of the sale that crossed it. Cross it over four consecutive quarters and small supplier status ends at the end of the month after the quarter in which you crossed. Scenario: quarters of C$7,000, C$8,000, C$6,500 and C$9,000 total C$30,500, so a store crossing in the October to December quarter stops being a small supplier at the end of January. Until then, keep Enable tax rates and calculations off. Registering early is allowed, and it trades prices 5% to 15% above an unregistered competitor's for input tax credits on what you buy.

A US store couriering from the US is usually outside the CRA's e-commerce rules: its definition of a qualifying tangible personal property supply excludes goods mailed or couriered to Canada from outside the country. Those parcels are imports, assessed by the CBSA. Under CUSMA, courier shipments from the US or Mexico enter free of duty and tax up to C$40, pay tax without duty from C$40 to C$150, and pay both above C$150, in Canadian dollars of value for duty. Mail gets none of it: postal shipments over C$20 pay. So a US store's Canadian tax table stays empty, and the decision is who pays at the door. Leaving it to the buyer is the worse option on any order over C$40, because the tax arrives with a brokerage fee the courier sets and the store never quoted. Quoting landed cost at checkout and shipping duties paid removes that surprise. Stock in a Canadian fulfillment warehouse changes this: those sales are qualifying goods, and past C$30,000 over any 12 months the store registers under the normal GST/HST regime. The simplified GST/HST registration people mention is for digital products and services, not goods.

When goods and delivery are sold together, the CRA says GST/HST on the delivery generally follows the goods: a delivered order of zero-rated basic groceries is zero-rated, freight included. WooCommerce's default Shipping tax class, based on cart items, together with the Shipping checkbox ticked on every rate row, handles the simple cases. Mixed carts are different. The CRA wants the delivery charge reasonably apportioned between taxable and zero-rated goods, while WooCommerce's code taxes all of it at the standard rate once one standard-rated item is in the cart, so a store selling groceries beside taxable goods needs custom code for the split. Switching shipping tax off is the wrong shortcut; it under-collects on every ordinary order. Shipping rates and carriers are a separate decision.

The CRA allows either pricing style if the buyer can tell whether GST/HST is included. In WooCommerce, inclusive pricing fails on arithmetic. With Prices entered with tax on Yes, your price is read as including your base province's tax and recalculated for every other address. Scenario: an Ontario store enters C$113.00 for a jacket. WooCommerce sees C$100.00 plus 13% HST, so an Alberta buyer pays C$105.00, a New Brunswick buyer C$115.00, and the advertised price is right only in Ontario. The woocommerce_adjust_non_base_location_prices filter can hold the gross price fixed instead, which moves your margin by province. Most Canadian stores are better off with No, I will enter prices exclusive of tax and both display settings on Excluding tax, which also clears WooCommerce's off-by-one rounding warning. The CRA rounds to the nearest cent, half a cent up, and lets same-rate items be totalled and rounded once, which is what Round tax at subtotal level does. Keep the per-line default if your accounting sync rebuilds tax line by line. A cent of drift per order becomes a reconciliation job by quarter end.

Business buyers claim input tax credits from your receipts, and the CRA sets the content in tiers. Under C$100: your name, the date, the total. From C$100 to C$499.99, add the GST/HST charged, or a statement that the price includes it, and your GST/HST registration number. From C$500, add the buyer's name, a description of the goods and the payment terms. Core WooCommerce has no field for a registration number, so it goes into the footer text under WooCommerce → Settings → Emails or into your invoice plugin's template.

Our free store audit goes through these settings on your live store: the tax table row by row, priority and compound flags, the shipping tax class, the three display settings, rounding, and whether checkout shows GST, HST, PST and QST on separate lines. It does not tell you where to register or what to file, and no engagement of ours does. We invoice Canadian clients in Canadian dollars at fixed prices, Launch Setup from C$2,849, so the quote does not move with the exchange rate. The packages are on pricing.