The Canada Child Benefit (CCB): Get Paid to Have Kids?

“Of all the bloggers and podcasts I’ve read and listened to, I never heard anything mentioned about CCB or Canadian Child Benefit. I would love it if you write a blog about this so that everyone could be more informed!”

This e-mail came from a reader recently and it’s a question frequently asked by soon-to-be parents, so let’s dive right into it!

What is the CCB?

The CCB stands for Canada Child Benefit and is a tax-free benefit paid to parents with kids under the age of 18.

Kind of like the federal government’s way of saying “thanks indentured servant parent for giving us a future taxpayer. Here’s some money to help you forget you’re poor now. Good luck!”

Who is it for?

Canadian residents with kids under 18 who live with them, and at least one parent needs to be one of the following;  

1) Canadian citizen

2) Permanent resident

3) some temporary residents (Check CRA site for details), or

4) a person registered or entitled to be registered under the Indian Act.

How do you get it?

Unlike most benefits that need to go through many bureaucracy gauntlets, you get this automatically when you complete your child’s birth registration form at the hospital.

If you didn’t give birth at the hospital, you can also apply for it online through the CRA portal, or through the mail using the RC66 form.

The CRA then calculates the benefit based on your previous year’s tax return and pays you monthly, from July to June of the following year.

What’s the catch?

Free money for having kids? Where do I sign up?

Well, before you run off to ditch all your contraception, here’s the catch:

The CCB is means-tested. So, in order words, the more money your make, the less benefits you get. (I know, cue teeny tiny, microscopic violin)

And as your child ages, the amount also goes down. If you are divorced and only have custody part of the time, the amount gets clawed back. And if you have other benefits, like disability benefits, it also gets clawed back.

How does the clawback work?

The easiest way to calculate your CCB is to use this CRA calculator, but since we love mathing that shit up on this blog, I dove into the numbers behind the calculator just for fun:

For the tax year 2024, here’s the max you can get if your AFNI (adjusted family net income) is $37,487:

• $7,997 per year ($666.42 per month) for kids under 6
• $6,748 per year ($562.33 per month) for kids 6-17

That seems like a lot, especially based on my experience, it costs around $6,659.97 CAD/year or $555/month to raise a kid.

However, since your AFNI is calculated by adding together the income of all family members (excluding full-time students), it’s unlikely that most families’ earnings would be under that amount.

So, for most cases, you need to consider how much the government is going to take back.

For the tax year 2024:

From $37,487 – $81,222: the maximum amount would be reduced by 7%

Above $81,222, it will be reduced by $3,061 plus 3.2% of the income above $81,222.

So, this means at an AFNI of $235,457.81, all your CCB gets clawed back.

In other words, if you have a kid under 6, if your family salary is below $37,487/year, you get the maximum of $7,997/year. If your family salary is at $81,222/year or below, you’ll get at least $4,936/year, and if your family salary is above $81,222, the $4,936/year keeps shrinking until your family salary gets to $235,471.88, at which point it disappears all together.

Example

Here’s an example using the StatsCan average family net income of $88,500 for 2025:

Assuming they have 1 child under 6, here’s how much CCB the average family can expect to get:

Reduction 1 = ($81,222 – $37,487) x 7% = $3061.45

Reduction 2 = ($88,500 – $81,222) x 3.2% = $232.90

CCB = Maximum payout – Reduction1- Reduction 2 = $7,997 – $3,061.45 – $232.90 = $4702.65

So, $4702.65/year or $391.89/month.

The most populous province in Canada is Ontario so we’ll use that as an example. Here the subsidized childcare rates are capped at $22/day due to the CWELCC (Canadian Wide Early Learning and Child Care) system, so a family can expect to spend around $5,500/year per child. That means the CCB for the average family can cover 86% of the childcare cost!

That’s pretty amazing!

But what if you’re a FIRE family, with no need for childcare and don’t make an income outside of your 4% withdrawal amount?

I know of a FIRE family of 3 with a portfolio of $1.25 Million and with a withdrawal amount of $50,000/year to live on.

They would get:

CCB = $7,997 – ($50,000 – $37,487)*0.07 = $7121.09/year or $593.42/month.

Given that I tracked our expenses for LMS to be $6,659.97 CAD/year or $555 CAD/month, the tax-free CCB is more than enough to cover their ENTIRE kid expenses even after the clawback!

Of course, you’ll want to be as tax efficient as possible to reduce your AFNI after FIRE. Here’s Wanderer’s post on how to do that.

Also, this is assuming there’s only 1 kid and you are married. The math changes if you have more than one kid, and/or are divorced and share custody. You can find all that information here on the CRA website.

TLDR: if you have multiple children (up to 4) and your AFNI is at the lowest level, you still get the max CCB for each child. But the claw back grows at subsequent salary levels with multiple kids. I guess they figured the cost for each kid goes down when you have more kids because of economy of scale, except if you’re at the lowest salary level.  

If you have partial custody, it’s based on the % of custody. If you have kids with disabilities, other disability benefits get subtracted from the CCB.

Conclusion

The CCB is an amazing benefit just for having kids in Canada. This means that if you’re an average family that can get a subsidized spot, the CCB can cover most of your daycare expenses.

If you’re a FIRE family with no passion income after retirement and didn’t plan for kid expenses, the CCB could cover most, if not all, of the child’s expense, even with clawbacks.

If you’re a FIRE family who makes too much passion income and get zero CCB due to the clawbacks? Your passion income should be more than enough to cover your child rearing expenses, and if it drops or goes away, you get the CCB.

What do think? Canadian readers, does the CCB help you with your child rearing costs? If you’re planning on having family, does this number surprise you at all?

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