Dietitian & nutrition practice cross-border tax: a short, honest file

US clients booked online: usually zero-rated, not automatically tax-free

A service supplied to a US-resident client who is outside Canada when the session happens can often be zero-rated as an exported service under GST/HST rules — 0% tax charged, with full input tax credit recovery on the related costs — rather than simply exempt the way an RD's Canadian-client counselling is. The distinction matters because zero-rating has real conditions: the recipient generally has to be a non-resident who is not in Canada at the time of the service and not registered for GST/HST, and those conditions are worth documenting client by client rather than assumed across an entire US client list. A coaching program sold to a mixed Canadian-and-US audience, in particular, needs its Canadian and US enrollments tracked separately, since only the US-resident portion is a candidate for zero-rating. Where a US client pays a subscription for a self-paced program with no live component at all, that supply may sit closer to a sale of digital content than a personalized dietetic service either way, which is a separate classification question from residency and worth reviewing if online programs make up a meaningful share of revenue.

State licensure is a practice-scope question, not a tax one — but it deserves a flag

Several US states regulate the practice of dietetics or nutrition counselling and require in-state licensure to serve residents of that state, a caveat similar to the one that applies to psychotherapists taking on US telehealth clients. This is not a tax question and we do not advise on it directly, but we flag it deliberately: a growing US client list is worth checking against the specific states those clients live in, by someone qualified to answer a licensure question, rather than assumed to be fine simply because the payment clears and the session runs smoothly online. Practices that grew a US client base organically, one referral at a time, are often surprised to find those clients concentrated in a handful of states, which makes the licensure review a shorter task than it first sounds.

Buying supplements from a US supplier is a landed-cost question

Practices reselling supplements sourced from a US manufacturer or distributor pay Canadian duty and GST at the border depending on the product's tariff classification, and the purchase invoice itself is in USD. The real cost of goods sold on a resold supplement therefore includes exchange-rate movement layered on top of the wholesale price and any duty paid at import, which is worth tracking as its own line in the books described on our dietitian bookkeeping page rather than folded into one blended "supplies" account that hides how a weaker dollar quietly erodes a supplement line's margin. A practice that reprices its supplement retail once a year, on a fixed markup set when the exchange rate was more favourable, can end up selling at a loss for months without anyone noticing until the year-end numbers come in short.

Corporate wellness contracts with US-headquartered companies

A corporate wellness contract with a company whose head office sits in the US is still, in most cases, an ordinary domestically delivered service if the RD's sessions are run for Canadian staff from Canada — the contract's tax treatment follows where and to whom the service is actually delivered, not where the client's corporate parent is based. The exception is a dietitian who actually travels to deliver sessions at a US site, which raises its own state tax and immigration questions well beyond the scope of a standard corporate wellness engagement, and is worth a separate conversation before it is booked rather than after. Most corporate wellness engagements we see in this niche never reach that point, since the RD delivers entirely by video call or from a Canadian office, but it is worth asking the question at the proposal stage rather than discovering the answer once travel is already booked.

See our answer on whether to charge GST/HST on sales to US customers for the general export rules behind the zero-rating discussion above. For the broader cross-border toolkit, see our cross-border tax services page. None of these three questions changes the domestic bookkeeping and GST/HST split covered on our other pages for this niche — they sit alongside that work, not in place of it.