TFSA contribution room
The rules
- Room accrues from the later of 2009 and the year you turn 18, for every year you are a Canadian resident. You do not need to have filed, earned anything, or opened an account — unlike an RRSP, room has nothing to do with income.
- Unused room carries forward indefinitely. Someone who was 18 by 2009 and has never contributed has $109,000 at 1 January 2026.
- Withdrawals come back — the amount you take out is added to your room on 1 January of the following year, not immediately.
- Room is a property of the person, not the account. Two TFSAs draw on one pool.
- Over-contributing costs 1% a month on the excess, for as long as it stays there.
Turning 18 is what starts the clock, even in the seven provinces and territories where the age of majority is 19 (BC, NB, NL, NS, NT, NU, YT). There you cannot open a TFSA until 19, but the room accrues at 18 and waits for you.
What the engine does
- Builds your room from your birth year, and caps contributions at it. Money that will not fit stays in your other savings rather than disappearing — a clamp never destroys a dollar, it only moves it somewhere legal.
- Adds a fresh year of room every 1 January, and returns last year's withdrawals with it.
- Takes your own CRA figure if you give it one, and then stops assuming anything about your history. This is the accurate input: the plan cannot know what you have already contributed, and that is usually the biggest part of the answer.
- Refuses over-contributions rather than modelling the 1% penalty. The projection shows what you can legally do, not what it would cost you to break the rule.
Limits after 2026
CRA announces each year's limit in the fall of the year before, so 2027 onward is not known. The plan does not guess it and does not publish one: it simulates one, by the rule the Income Tax Act sets out — the limit indexed to inflation and rounded to the nearest $500 (s. 207.01, indexed under s. 117.1) — using the inflation rate in your own plan. At 2% that puts 2027 at $7,500.
Two things follow, and the plan holds to both:
- A projected limit is used only to cap contributions. It is never displayed as a published figure, and never cited as a source.
- The real limit will differ, because CRA indexes by a specific CPI average rather than by your assumption. A long plan's later years are an estimate of your room, not a promise.
The indexation carries the unrounded base forward rather than the published limit. That detail matters more than it looks: $7,000 × 1.02 rounds back to $7,000, so indexing the rounded figure would freeze the limit forever.
What it deliberately does not
Residency is assumed. A year you are a non-resident for the whole year accrues no room, and withdrawals made while non-resident only rejoin your room once you are resident again. That is a per-year question the plan never asks, so if you have lived outside Canada since 2009, your real room is lower than what you see here — get the figure from CRA and enter it.
Your history is assumed, unless you give us the number. Without it, the plan takes every year since you turned 18 and supposes you have contributed nothing.