The Listing Prep Almanac

How GST and HST work on a staging invoice

The first invoice most new stagers send has no tax on it, and that is usually correct. The question is when it stops being correct, because the answer is a date rather than a decision, and it can pass unnoticed.

This is orientation, not tax advice. An accountant who has seen your books should confirm how any of it applies to you. Everything below comes from four Canada Revenue Agency pages, all read on 4 August 2026: when to register, rates and place-of-supply rules, charge and collect, and Guide RC4022. Rates and thresholds move, so the CRA page is the live one.

The small supplier threshold

You have to register for a GST/HST account, the CRA says, if you are not a small supplier and you make taxable supplies in Canada. Staging is a taxable service, so the second half is settled the moment you invoice anybody.

The threshold is $30,000 over four consecutive calendar quarters. For a sole proprietor, the CRA counts "the total amount of all revenues (before expenses) from your worldwide taxable supplies from all your businesses and those of your associates". Two details there do the damage: it is revenue and not profit, so a stager whose billings carry a large pass-through of furniture rental counts the whole billing, and it is all your businesses, so anything else you invoice under your own name is added in.

Two ways to cross it, with different consequences

Exceed $30,000 in a single calendar quarter and you are no longer a small supplier, and you have to charge GST/HST on the supply that made you exceed it. Your effective date of registration is no later than the day of that supply, so the tax attaches to the job that took you over, not the next one.

Exceed $30,000 over the previous four or fewer consecutive quarters, but not inside a single quarter, and you stop being a small supplier at the end of the month following the quarter in which you exceeded it. Your effective date is no later than your first supply after that, and the CRA's examples add that you have to register within 29 days of it.

The uncomfortable part of the first case is that you can find out afterward. A busy spring can put you over in May, and the tax on that job was payable whether or not the invoice you sent showed it. Watch a running four-quarter total monthly.

You may also register voluntarily while still a small supplier, effective the day you request the account or up to 30 days before. Stagers buying inventory sometimes do, because registration is what lets them recover the tax paid on furniture.

Which rate you charge

The rate follows the place of supply, which the CRA defines as where you make your sale, not where your warehouse sits:

• 5% GST if the supply is made in a non-participating province
• 13% HST if the supply is made in Ontario
• 14% HST if the supply is made in Nova Scotia, on or after 1 April 2025
• 15% HST if the supply is made in any other participating province

The participating provinces, per RC4022, are New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Prince Edward Island. Everywhere else is non-participating, so a stager in Calgary charges the federal rate alone while one in Toronto charges the Ontario harmonized rate.

For a service, the CRA's first general rule is that the place of supply is the province of the recipient's address, where you obtain it in the normal course of business. Its own example: a Quebec supplier builds a website for an Ontario company, the work happens entirely in Quebec, and the Ontario rate applies because the client's address is there. For most stagers this never comes up. It does when a corporate client sits in another province.

What the invoice has to show

The CRA is direct about the minimum. Tell customers whether GST/HST is applied and whether it is included in the price or added separately, and show the rate, plus either the amount payable and the tax as separate lines or a clear statement that the total includes it. If HST applies, show the total rate: the CRA specifically says not to break the federal and provincial parts out separately. That catches people who itemize a "GST portion" and a "provincial portion" out of habit.

A second layer applies when your customer is registered themselves: brokerages, builders and most corporate clients. They need particular information to support an input tax credit, and RC4022 scales it by the size of the sale. Under $100: your business or trading name, the invoice date, and the total amount payable. From $100 to $499.99, add an indication of the total GST/HST charged, the status of each supply where an invoice mixes taxable and exempt items, and your GST/HST registration number. At $500 or more, add the buyer's name, a brief description of the services, and the terms of payment.

Almost every staging invoice sits in the top band, so build one template that carries all of it, with your registration number as a permanent field. That is one thing to check when comparing business tools.

The tax is not your money while you hold it

Two CRA rules govern the gap between invoicing and payment. The first: "You are responsible to hold the GST/HST in trust until you send it to the Canada Revenue Agency. This includes the collectible tax that you charged and have not collected yet." The second: the invoice date determines when you report and remit, so your return for that period includes the tax you charged whether or not you have been paid.

Read together, a client who pays sixty days late does not move your remittance date. For a stager carrying two large vacant installs on net terms that is a real cash timing problem, and the reason the tax portion sits better in a separate account. Early payment discounts work the same way: the CRA says to charge tax on the full invoice amount even if the customer takes the discount. RC4022 adds that invoices are generally kept six years from the end of the year they relate to.

Registration is the thing stagers put off because it feels like it belongs to a bigger business than theirs. The threshold does not measure how big a business feels. It measures revenue over four quarters, and a stager doing a handful of vacant installs a year can cross it well before she thinks of herself that way.