Form T776 takes about twenty minutes to complete and about eleven months to prepare for.

The form itself is short. Two income lines, thirteen expense lines, a personal-use adjustment, a depreciation area, and two lines for what happens when you sell. Nearly all the difficulty sits upstream, in whether your records are already sorted into those boxes.

Here is the walkthrough, top to bottom.

Before the first line: identification and ownership

Fiscal period — for individuals, January 1 to December 31. No exceptions worth chasing.

Address of each property — one T776 covers all your rental properties. You list the addresses and report combined totals. Keep separate per-unit records behind the form anyway, for the reasons in our chart of accounts guide.

Your percentage of ownership — this box drives everything below it and is where the most common errors start.

You report your share of the income and expenses, and your share is your actual ownership interest, not a number you pick for tax efficiency. Where you and your spouse bought a rental with unequal contributions, the split follows the capital each of you put in. Splitting 50/50 because it produces a lower household tax bill invites attribution rules to undo it.

Partnership or co-ownership — most small landlords, including spouses owning a rental together, are co-owners rather than partners. A partnership requires carrying on a business in common with a view to profit. Simple co-ownership of an investment property does not create one. Tick the box matching your reality, because partnership treatment brings different rules and a possible information return.

The income section

Line 8141, Gross rents — all rent charged for the calendar year, before any expense. Report on an accrual basis if you have receivables. Unpaid December rent still belongs in December.

Line 8230, Other income — laundry, parking billed separately from rent, pet fees, late fees, forfeited deposits applied to arrears or damage, lease-break payments, and any insurance proceeds compensating for lost rent. A deposit still held in trust is not income. It appears nowhere on this form.

Line 8299, Total gross rental income — the sum. This number also goes to line 12599 on your T1.

The expense section

Enter the total for each category, before your personal-use adjustment.

• 8521 Advertising
• 8690 Insurance
• 8710 Interest and bank charges
• 8810 Office expenses
• 8860 Professional fees
• 8871 Management and administration fees
• 8960 Repairs and maintenance
• 9060 Salaries, wages and benefits
• 9180 Property taxes
• 9200 Travel
• 9220 Utilities
• 9281 Motor vehicle expenses
• 9270 Other expenses

Two reminders while you fill these in: only the interest portion of the mortgage payment goes on 8710, and anything with a lasting benefit belongs in the depreciation area, not on 8960.

Line 9945, Personal portion — where you live in part of the property or used a unit yourself for part of the year, this line removes your share. Use a reasonable basis, usually square footage, and use the same basis consistently year over year. Document the calculation once and reuse it.

The two lines from a sale

Line 9947, Recapture of capital cost allowance — triggered when you dispose of a property for more than its remaining undepreciated capital cost, up to the total depreciation you previously claimed. Fully taxable.

Line 9948, Terminal loss — the reverse. Undepreciated capital cost exceeds proceeds, and the shortfall is deductible in full.

Neither line covers your capital gain. The gain on the property itself goes on Schedule 3, not here.

Area A: capital cost allowance

This is the depreciation table. Column by column, you carry forward the opening undepreciated capital cost of each class, add the year's acquisitions, subtract dispositions, apply the half-year adjustment where it applies, multiply by the class rate, and land on your claim.

Three practical notes: each rental building costing $50,000 or more sits in its own class line, so a three-property landlord has three separate Class 1 entries rather than one pooled figure. The claim is capped so it never creates or increases a rental loss across your properties. And the claim is optional and adjustable — enter what you want, up to the maximum. Software defaults to the maximum, which is not always what you want. Our capital cost allowance guide explains why.

Line 9936, Capital cost allowance — your total claim from Area A, carried down.

Where the numbers land on your T1

Line 12599, Gross rental income — from line 8299.

Line 12600, Net rental income — after all expenses, the personal portion, and capital cost allowance. This is the figure joining your other income.

A net rental loss is deductible against your other income in the year, which is why the rule capping capital cost allowance at zero net income exists.

Dates and the details around them

• April 30 — the filing deadline for most individuals.
• June 15 — the filing deadline if you or your spouse carried on a business during the year. Rental income by itself does not usually make you self-employed, so most landlords file by April 30.
• Payment is due April 30 regardless — the June 15 extension covers filing, not paying. Interest starts May 1 on any balance.
• Instalments apply where your net tax owing exceeds $3,000 in the current year and in either of the two prior years. Due March 15, June 15, September 15 and December 15.
• Records get kept six years from the end of the tax year they relate to.

The part nobody puts on a form

The form is a container. Everything determining whether it takes twenty minutes or a lost weekend happened between last January and last December.

Landlords who file quickly share the same three habits. They enter transactions weekly. They categorize at entry using the T776 lines. They keep a per-unit view behind the combined totals.

LuxOasisOS produces a CRA-ready export mapped to these exact lines, per unit and combined, with the capital additions listed separately. Filing becomes transcription.