Are house cleaning services tax deductible in Canada in 2026

This comes up constantly, usually in February. The short answer is that cleaning your own home is a personal expense and there is no deduction or credit for it, no matter how much you spend.

The longer answer is that the moment part of your home earns income, some of the cost of cleaning it follows that income. Below is each situation, what CRA actually says, and which form it goes on.

We are cleaners, not accountants. Everything here is sourced from CRA's own pages and linked so you can check it, but your situation is yours. Confirm it with someone qualified before you file.

The short answer, by situation

Five situations cover almost everybody who asks this question.

Based on CRA guidance as at August 2026. Rules change and situations differ, so confirm yours with an accountant before you file.

The rest of this page is each row explained, with the form number and the CRA page it comes from.

If you are self-employed and work from home

This is the most common yes. CRA lets you deduct business-use-of-home expenses if the workspace is either your principal place of business, or a space you use only to earn business income and use regularly to meet clients.

What you deduct is a share, not the whole bill. CRA's suggested basis is the area of the workspace divided by the total area of your home. If your office is 120 square feet in a 1,200 square foot home, that is ten percent. Clean the whole place for $200 a month and the business share is $20.

If a room does double duty, CRA lets you narrow it further by hours: work out how many hours a day the space earns income, divide by 24, and apply that to the business share.

Two limits worth knowing. Business-use-of-home expenses cannot create or increase a business loss, so you can only claim up to your net income before them. Anything left over carries forward to a future year. It goes on line 9945 of Form T2125.

• Principal place of business, or a client-facing space used only for business.
• Deduct the workspace share, worked out on a reasonable basis.
• Cannot create a loss. The excess carries forward.
• Form T2125, line 9945.

If you are an employee working from home

Stricter, and it changed. The temporary flat rate method that existed for 2020 to 2022 is gone. From 2023 onward employees have to use the detailed method, which means a signed T2200 from your employer and Form T777.

Salaried and commission employees can both claim a share of electricity, heat, water, the utilities portion of condo fees, home internet access fees, rent, and maintenance and minor repair costs. Commission employees can additionally claim home insurance and property tax.

Nobody can claim mortgage interest, principal payments, furniture or capital expenses like new flooring.

The share is worked out the same way: the size of your workspace against the size of your home, reduced further if the room is also where you eat dinner.

The bit nobody quotes properly: materials or service?

Here is where most articles on this topic overreach, so read this before you claim anything.

On the self-employed page, CRA's wording is that you can deduct part of your maintenance costs “such as heating, home insurance, electricity, and cleaning materials”. On the employee page, the example given for maintenance is “minor repairs of the home furnace or air-conditioner or the purchase of household cleaning products”.

Both name cleaning materials. Neither names a cleaning service.

Plenty of accountants treat a cleaning service as an ordinary maintenance cost and claim the business-use share of it, and that is a defensible reading of a general maintenance category. But it is not what CRA's own examples say, and you should hear that from us rather than discover it in a review. Ask your accountant directly rather than assuming, and if they say yes, keep the invoices.

This is not us talking ourselves out of a sale. It is the difference between an article written to be useful and one written to make hiring a cleaner sound like a tax play.

If you rent the place out

This is the clearest yes on the page. Cleaning a rental property is a current expense, which means it is deductible in full against your rental income in the year you pay it, on Form T776. Not a share. All of it.

That covers the turnover clean between tenants, a periodic clean of common areas, and the cleaning fee on a short-term let. If you rent out part of your own home, you apportion by the rented share in the usual way.

One distinction worth knowing: if you provide hotel-like services alongside the space, such as meals or cleaning during the stay, CRA is more likely to treat the income as business income on Form T2125 rather than rental income on T776.

The rule that catches Toronto Airbnb hosts

If you let a place short term in Toronto, this is the most important paragraph on the page.

Since 1 January 2024, section 67.7 of the Income Tax Act denies all deductions on income from a short-term rental that is prohibited by, or does not comply with, provincial or municipal rules. For tax purposes a short-term rental means a property offered for rent for under 90 consecutive days.

Toronto requires operators to register with the City before listing, and its bylaw covers stays under 28 days. The two thresholds are different and it is worth being precise about that: a 60-day let is a short-term rental for the tax rule but sits outside Toronto's bylaw, so there is nothing to be non-compliant with. A one-week let is squarely inside both.

If you are letting under 28 days in Toronto without a valid registration, the rule does not just deny the cleaning fee. It denies everything against that income: mortgage interest, utilities, insurance, the lot. The City's own penalties for operating unregistered run from $1,000 to $100,000, so the tax consequence is not even the expensive part.

There was transitional relief for 2024, where a property that became compliant by 31 December 2024 was treated as compliant for that year. After that, denial is prorated across the days you were non-compliant. And under subsection 67.7(4) CRA can reassess this at any time, with no ordinary limitation period.

So if you are an Airbnb host asking whether the cleaner is deductible, the question underneath it is whether your registration is current. Sort that first.

If the cleaning is part of caring for someone

Narrower, and often missed. Where a person needs full-time attendant care in their own home, amounts paid for housekeeping can form part of the attendant care claimed under the medical expense tax credit, on line 33099.

The framing matters. This is not “I hired a cleaner and my parent is elderly”. It is attendant care, which includes housekeeping among services like personal care and meals, and it generally needs a medical practitioner to certify that the person requires a full-time attendant, unless they already qualify for the disability amount.

There are also interactions between the disability amount, the disability supports deduction on line 21500, and attendant care claimed as a medical expense. The same dollar cannot be claimed twice. If this is your situation it is worth twenty minutes with an accountant, because the amounts involved are usually not small.

What to keep, whichever applies

CRA does not want a shoebox, it wants to see that the expense was real, was yours, and was for what you say it was.

1. An invoice, not a text message. It should show who you paid, what for, and the date.
2. Proof of payment. Card or bank transfer beats cash, because it puts a third party on the record.
3. The workspace measurement. Write down the square footage of the room and of the home, once, and keep it. That single number is what your percentage rests on.
4. Which form it went on. T2125 for self-employment, T777 for employment, T776 for rental.

For what it is worth, every clean we invoice goes out through Stripe with an emailed receipt showing the date, the address and the amount, which is exactly the record CRA is asking for. That is not a reason to hire a cleaner, but it does make this part easier.

Where this comes from

So you can check it rather than take our word for it. Each of these was read on 10 August 2026.

• CRA, business-use-of-home expenses, the self-employed rules, the two qualifying conditions and the loss restriction
• CRA, expenses you can claim as an employee, what salaried and commission employees may claim, and the cleaning products example
• CRA, Rental Income (T4036), current expenses against rental income
• CRA, deductions from short-term rental income, section 67.7, the 90-day definition and what counts as non-compliant
• CRA, attendant care and care in a facility, housekeeping within attendant care
• City of Toronto, short-term rentals, the registration requirement and the 28-day threshold