GST, HST, QST, PST: which taxes apply to a Canadian accommodation business

Ask an operator which taxes they charge on a room and you usually get one number back. Ask them to break that number into its parts and it gets quiet, because a Canadian room night is rarely one tax. It is two or three separate charges from two or three separate authorities, with different rules about what they apply to and different people responsible for remitting them.

Here is the whole structure on one page. Not the rates, which change and which are yours to confirm, but the shape, which does not.

There are three kinds of tax on a Canadian room night

They get lumped together on the invoice and they are not the same kind of thing.

Federal and provincial sales tax. GST, and depending where you are, HST, QST or PST. These apply broadly to what you sell, not only to the room.

Accommodation tax. Called a lodging tax, a municipal accommodation tax, a destination marketing fee or a hotel room tax depending on where you are. It applies to accommodation and only to accommodation.

Occasionally, a local levy on top. Set municipally, varying by town, sometimes collected by the province on the municipality's behalf and sometimes not.

The first is a tax on your supply. The second is a tax on a night's stay. Software that treats the second as though it were the first is the single most common source of a wrong remittance, because it will happily apply it to a kayak rental.

Which sales tax applies where

Every province and territory carries GST at the federal level. What sits alongside it is the part that varies.

• GST only - Alberta, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon.
• HST, a single harmonized tax replacing GST and the provincial one - Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador.
• GST plus a separate provincial sales tax - British Columbia and Saskatchewan (PST), Manitoba (RST).
• GST plus QST, administered by Revenu Québec rather than the CRA - Quebec.

Two consequences fall out of that list immediately.

If you operate in an HST province you are dealing with one authority and one return. If you operate in Quebec you are dealing with two taxes and, in practice, Revenu Québec for both. If you operate in BC, Saskatchewan or Manitoba you have a federal registration and a separate provincial one, and they do not have the same rules about what is taxable.

We deliberately do not publish the rates. They change, and a rate table on a marketing site is a promise to maintain something we cannot maintain. The current figures are on the CRA and provincial sites, and your accountant has them.

Do you have to register at all

The threshold that matters most to a small property is the small supplier rule: broadly, if your worldwide taxable revenues stay under $30,000 across four consecutive calendar quarters, you are not required to register for GST/HST. Quebec runs a parallel threshold for QST.

Two things operators get wrong about it.

It is revenue, not profit, and it counts everything taxable you sell. Rooms, activities, the firewood, the shop. A property that thinks of itself as under the line on room revenue alone can be over it once the rest is counted.

Not registering is not automatically the cheaper choice. A registrant charges tax and claims input tax credits on what they buy. If you are building, renovating, buying equipment or carrying real operating costs, the credits can be worth more than the administrative burden. This is a genuine calculation, not an obvious answer, and it is worth an hour of an accountant's time once rather than a guess that compounds for years.

There is also a third thing worth knowing: if you are not registered, an accommodation platform may be required to collect and remit GST/HST on your bookings instead. That rule was aimed at exactly this situation. Which means "am I registered" is not only a question about your own filing, it changes who is responsible on a Booking.com or Airbnb reservation. There is a separate guide on that.

The accommodation tax is a different animal

This is the one that catches people, so it is worth stating plainly.

It applies to the accommodation and nothing else. Not to the guided hike. Not to the bundle of firewood. Not to the bottle of wine. Not to the cleaning fee in most places, though that one is worth confirming locally because it is treated inconsistently.

It survives a package. If you blend breakfast into a nightly rate so the guest sees one all-in price, the accommodation tax is still computed on the lodging portion of that price, not on the blended total. Getting this wrong over-collects on every package you sell, quietly, forever.

Who remits it is not always you. Quebec writes this down most clearly: a direct booking, a traditional agency booking and a registered digital platform booking produce three different answers about who files. Elsewhere it depends on the arrangement your municipality has with the platforms.

The rate is yours to configure and yours to confirm. Municipal accommodation taxes vary by town and change. Anyone who hands you a national table of them is handing you something out of date.

What this means for how your books have to be built

Everything above collapses into four requirements. A system either meets them or it puts you in a spreadsheet.

1. Each tax is its own component on every posting. GST, HST, QST, PST and accommodation tax as separate stored fields, not one tax total. A total cannot be split back into its parts afterwards, no matter how the report is written.
2. Accommodation tax is populated only from a lodging charge. Structurally, not by remembering to untick a box on the kayak.
3. The blend is carved. Tax on a package computed against the lodging portion, not the package price.
4. Rounding happens per night and sums. Rounding once against a stay total produces a number that does not match the invoice the guest is holding, and reconciling those two is a job nobody has time for.

Meet those four and your return is a query against columns that already exist. Miss any one and it is a reconstruction, once a period, forever.

Verify before you file

Rates change, thresholds move, provinces harmonize and de-harmonize, and municipalities add levies. This guide explains a structure, not your filing. Confirm your registration obligations and your current rates with the CRA, with Revenu Québec if you are in Quebec, with your provincial authority, and with your accountant.

What none of them can fix afterwards is a year of postings that stored one tax total.

---

In Cardinal, entering your property address configures the tax table and timezone for the correct province. Every posting stores GST, HST, QST, PST and accommodation tax as separate components; accommodation tax is only ever populated from a lodging charge; blended package rates are carved so the accommodation tax lands on the lodging portion; and tax is rounded per night and summed so the ledger foots to the printed invoice to the cent.