First time tax in Canada

[shersingh]

I moved to Canada in Dec 2023. I left my US job and started a new job in Canada when I moved over. My spouse remained in USA for the remainder of the year and continued her job.

1. When I file my taxes, do I need to report my US income?
2. Can I file joint in USA and just single in Canada, or will it be better to file separate in USA as well?

 

[armoured]

1. You need to report any US (in fact all world) income from the date of your arrival. It's fairly clear on the tax form when you do this.

Note, there are some things for which you may have to tell CRA about your total income for the year in which you immigrated - but that's to calculate some benefits, etc., not to pay taxes on. (This may end up being irrelevant or not worth the effort for 2023 as some amounts you might get prorated for would be so tiny if you were only in country from december).

To explain: Some things like hst rebates, child benefit and perhaps carbon rebates are partly based on income. In our case we got some requests from CRA for income for the part of the year before we immigrated, even though we weren't taxed on that income in Canada.

What I'm unclear on is how much of these various calcs are done looking back or forward (they pay some amounts for current year based on previous I think), so I can't tell you how much it would matter if you didn't eventually provide that info.