Nearly Half a Million People Made No Home Buyers' Plan Repayment Last Year

What the CRA figures actually show

The Home Buyers' Plan is the most used first-home tool in the country, and a large share of the people using it are quietly turning part of it into taxable income.

A review of Canada Revenue Agency data by Canadian Mortgage Trends, published on 11 November 2026, found that about 1.23 million Home Buyers' Plan participants had a repayment due for the 2025 tax year. Of those who had filed a return, 518,520 fell short of the annual minimum. The CRA's first breakdown of those shortfalls shows 476,100 repaid nothing at all — close to 92% of everyone who fell short. The remaining 42,420 made a partial repayment.

Measured against participants who had filed, 45.2% fell short in 2025, compared with 45.8% in 2024 and 46.3% in 2023, the same review reports. The share is not getting dramatically worse. It has simply been high for years, which is the part most people do not expect.

The report also notes a figure worth holding onto: the CRA reported $456.1 million in Home Buyers' Plan amounts included in taxable income for 2025. That total covers repayment shortfalls together with ineligible withdrawals and amounts taken above the plan's limit, so it is not a clean measure of missed repayments — but it is the scale of the tax bill attached to this one part of the system.

What a missed repayment actually costs you

People often assume a missed Home Buyers' Plan repayment is like a missed RRSP contribution — an opportunity you can take up later. It is not. The CRA is explicit: if you repay less than your required minimum for a year, you have to include the difference in income and report it on line 12900 of your return, as the agency's repayment guidance sets out.

Two things happen at once, and the second one is the expensive one.

• The shortfall is taxed this year. It is added to your income for the year you missed, at whatever bracket you land in.
• Your plan balance drops by the same amount. You no longer owe it — but the money is also no longer inside your RRSP, and the contribution room that produced the original deduction is spent.

Take a $60,000 withdrawal, the current maximum, repaid over 15 years. The minimum is $4,000 a year. Miss one year entirely and $4,000 goes onto that year's income. For an Ontario earner in a middle bracket, that is roughly $1,200 to $1,500 of tax on money that never reached a retirement account. Do it four or five times across a 15-year schedule and the arithmetic stops being a rounding error.

Repayments themselves are straightforward: you make an ordinary RRSP contribution and then designate it as a Home Buyers' Plan repayment on Schedule 7. You can also repay more than the minimum, which shrinks every future minimum, because the CRA recalculates the annual amount as your remaining balance divided by the years left in the period.

If you withdrew in 2022 or later, your clock has not started yet

One reason the 2025 numbers are not the whole picture: participants whose first withdrawal was in 2022 or 2023 were excluded from them entirely. Canadian Mortgage Trends reports that the CRA confirmed those cohorts' first required repayments are due for the 2027 and 2028 tax years.

That is the temporary relief that defers the start of the 15-year repayment period by an additional three years. As the CRA's own guidance puts it, the repayment period would then start the fifth year following the year of the first withdrawal — so a first withdrawal in 2022 means a first repayment year of 2027, and 2023 means 2028. We set out how that schedule runs in our piece on the 2027 deadline.

So a very large group of recent buyers is about to join the pool of people with a repayment due, having never made one before. If you bought in 2022 using your RRSP, the first bill arrives on the return you file in spring 2028 for the 2027 year. Nothing stops you repaying earlier, and every early dollar reduces future minimums.

Why this sits on a mortgage desk at all

It is a tax question, so it is fair to ask why a mortgage broker is writing about it. Three reasons, all of them practical.

• The withdrawal was part of a mortgage file. If we helped structure the down payment, the repayment schedule is the other half of that decision, and nobody else in the transaction is tracking it.
• Extra taxable income shows up later. A shortfall inflates your reported income for that year. That is not free — it can affect income-tested benefits, and it means your notice of assessment tells a story that does not match what you actually earned.
• It usually signals a cash-flow squeeze. People miss the repayment in the years money is tightest, which are often the first years in a home. That is a conversation worth having before the return is filed, not after.

If you are weighing a Home Buyers' Plan withdrawal against an FHSA, or using both, the repayment obligation is one of the real differences between them: an FHSA withdrawal for a qualifying home purchase is never repaid. Our First Home Hub sets out how the two work together.

What to check before the end of December

The useful window is now, not in April, because an RRSP contribution designated as a repayment can be made during the year or in the first 60 days of the following one.

• Find your Home Buyers' Plan statement of account in CRA My Account. It states your remaining balance and your minimum for the next year.
• Check which year your repayment period actually started. The relief for 2022-and-later withdrawals catches people out in both directions — some repay early, which is fine, and some assume they are still inside it when they are not.
• If money is tight, repay what you can. A partial repayment is taxed only on the shortfall, not the whole minimum.
• If you have missed years already, nothing is retroactively fixable — but the forward schedule is, and overpaying now lowers every remaining minimum.
• Mention it before a renewal or a refinance. Your income picture for the year is part of that file.

None of this changes what you can borrow by itself. It changes how much of your own money ends up with the CRA instead of in your retirement account, which over a 15-year schedule is the number that matters.