Platform reporting is here: what CRA sees from Uber, Lyft and DoorDash

The platforms report you now — reconcile or get reassessed

Under the Reporting Rules for Digital Platform Operators, rideshare and delivery platforms must collect and verify seller details — including your SIN — and report your gross platform income and transaction counts to CRA annually. Unless your activity is trivial (roughly fewer than 30 transactions and under about $2,800 for the year), you are in the report, and the platform must send you a copy of what it filed by the end of January.

Two traps follow from the word gross. The platform reports what riders and restaurants paid — before commissions, service fees and adjustments — while your bank deposits are net. Your T2125 should start from the reported gross and deduct platform fees explicitly, so the top line matches CRA's copy. And drivers who never reported at all no longer have a visibility argument: CRA is receiving this data from foreign-based platforms too, and prior years can be corrected voluntarily on far better terms than after a letter arrives.

GST/HST: rideshare has no threshold; delivery does

The GST/HST rules split this niche down the middle. Ride-hailing is a taxi business under the Excise Tax Act, so a rideshare driver must register and collect GST/HST from the first fare — the $30,000 small-supplier threshold does not apply. Food and parcel delivery is not a taxi business, so couriers keep the ordinary $30,000 threshold. A driver doing both needs a registration because of the rideshare side, and then must track which revenue stream is which.

Registration is not all cost. The tax collected on fares flows through your GST34 return, but so do input tax credits on gas, maintenance, phone plans and car washes, apportioned to business use off the mileage log — which is why the log is the single most valuable record a driver keeps.

USD payouts and the paperwork behind US platforms

Many platforms operating in Canada are US or foreign-headquartered, and payout statements, referral bonuses and some incentive payments can arrive denominated in US dollars. All of it is Canadian business income, converted to CAD — either at the rate on each payout date or consistently at the Bank of Canada annual average. Keep the platform's own annual tax summary: it is the document that bridges gross fares, fees and net deposits, and it is what we reconcile against the CRA copy. A driver who accumulates a US-dollar bank account for these payouts should also remember that US accounts count toward the $100,000 T1135 threshold for specified foreign property.

Border cities: when the trip itself crosses

In Windsor, Niagara and Sarnia, real fares cross the bridge — airport runs to Detroit or Buffalo, usually as taxi or limo work since the big apps rarely dispatch cross-border. For income tax, the treaty gives a clean default: a Canadian-resident driver with no fixed base in the US keeps those profits taxable only in Canada. The practical frictions are elsewhere: US fuel and toll receipts in USD to convert, and commercial-crossing rules — insurance, immigration and vehicle authority — that are not tax questions but end careers faster than tax does, so we flag them for the professionals who handle them.

What we actually do for drivers

We reconcile platform summaries to the CRA-reported gross, file the GST34 returns rideshare work requires, keep the mileage log defensible, and clean up prior years before CRA's matching does. When a driver incorporates into a small fleet, the file grows — payroll, HST on fleet revenue, vehicle ownership — and connects to our rideshare and delivery tax services, with treaty questions handled by our cross-border tax practice.

Source: CRA — GST/HST for digital-economy businesses.