The Scientific Research and Experimental Development program is the federal government's main way of supporting research and development in Canada. It returns billions of dollars each year to companies that work to advance technology.
It works in two ways. It lets you deduct your eligible R&D costs against your income, and it gives you an investment tax credit that lowers the tax you owe, often paid out as a cash refund. The eligible costs can include salaries, materials, and some contractor payments tied to the work.
Canadian-controlled private corporations earn a refundable investment tax credit of 35% on qualified SR&ED expenditures, up to an annual expenditure limit doubled to $6 million for taxation years beginning after December 15, 2024. Other corporations earn 15%. Capital equipment used for SR&ED is once again eligible. Overhead can be added through the proxy method, at a prescribed percentage of eligible salaries.
Typical headline rates; each program has its own rules, limits, and refundability. We confirm current-year parameters for your province as part of every claim.
Read the full SR&ED 2026 guide: salaries, proxy, contractors, and provincial rates →
Any company with a permanent establishment in Canada can claim, of any size and in any sector, as long as it is working to resolve genuine scientific or technological uncertainty. That means cases where you set out to do something and the outcome was not certain, and the usual methods did not tell you how to get there. You do not need a laboratory or a research department. A lot of eligible work happens on a shop floor, on a production line, or in everyday product and process development.
You do not need a laboratory or a formal research department. If you are developing or improving a product, material, device, process, or software, and the outcome was uncertain at the start, you may be doing SR&ED.
Eligible work is systematic. You set out to solve a problem, tried different approaches, ran into difficulties, and worked through them step by step. Grantwork assesses eligibility honestly and early, so you claim what is defensible and leave out what is not.
A supplement maker reformulates to keep an active ingredient stable past 18 months. Three bench formulations fail before a stabilizing system works.
A coating process that worked at bench scale collapses on the production line. Months of systematic trials recover the yield.
A data pipeline hits a performance wall that standard architectures cannot pass. The team designs and tests a novel approach.
A producer removes a preservative while holding shelf-life and texture. The replacement system takes iterative testing to find.
An equipment shop adapts automation to a task it was never designed for, working through repeated failed configurations.
A team fights model drift on sparse, noisy data, experimenting with architectures and training strategies with no known answer.
In every case the same three things are true: the outcome was uncertain at the start, the team investigated systematically, and money was spent on salaries, contractors, or materials. That is what makes a project eligible, whatever the industry.
In practice, a claim is filed with your corporate tax return. It has two parts: a technical description of the work, written to the CRA's T661 form on Lines 242, 244, and 246, and a financial calculation of the eligible costs. The CRA may accept the claim as filed, or select it for a review and ask for more detail on the technical work and the numbers. The program's definition of R&D is not the same as the everyday meaning of research, and that gap is where most claims are won or lost. Grantwork's role is to read your work the way a reviewer will, capture what genuinely qualifies, and prepare the claim so it is clear, well supported, and ready if questions come.
Every engagement covers three stages of the same process:
Your salaries and contractors, federal and provincial, an estimate in seconds. No sign-up.
Advisory on IRAP, Mitacs, CanExport, provincial tax credits, and hiring incentives, sequenced alongside your SR&ED claim.
See the full funding picturePrograms interact as well as stack. We model the combination before anything is applied for, so a grant does not quietly reduce a claim.
See what stacking adds up toIf a claim is selected for review, the person who prepared it answers the questions, as part of the same engagement.
What triggers a review