TFSA · Contribution room
The 2026 TFSA contribution limit is $7,000.
That is the new room added this year, not your total room. If you have been eligible since 2009 and never contributed, your cumulative room is $109,000. Most people are somewhere between the two, and the number is easy to lose track of once withdrawals and re-contributions enter the picture.
How much TFSA room do I actually have?
The annual limit tells you what gets added each year. Your own room is the sum of every year's limit since you turned 18 and became a Canadian resident, minus what you have already contributed, plus anything you withdrew in a prior year. The CRA publishes the current dollar limit and a worksheet for calculating your room on canada.ca.
What happens to my room after a withdrawal?
Money you take out of a TFSA does not come back as room right away. The amount you withdrew is added to your room on January 1 of the following year. Until that date the withdrawal has freed up nothing you can use, even though the account balance says otherwise.
What happens if I re-contribute too early?
Putting the money back in the same year, without unused room already sitting there to cover it, puts you over. The CRA charges 1% a month on the excess for each month it stays in the account. What decides this is the date, not the size of the deposit. The same amount in January can be fine.
Why a running total of deposits misses it
A spreadsheet that adds up deposits gets the right total and the wrong room. Two accounts at two institutions, a withdrawal in November, a deposit back in December: the total is the same either way, and the room is not. The dates decide the answer, so the dates have to be in the record.
How do I get my exact number?
Enter your birth year, when you became a resident, and your contribution and withdrawal dates. The free calculator applies the CRA's timing rules to those dates and returns your room to the cent, checked before each release against a locked reference model of the published rules.
The engine is hash-verified, formula-certified, audit-grade: the certification record spells out exactly what is tested, and where the claim stops.
Other contribution limits
Written by Mo Kechout Content verified