Canada’s sale taxes API

Here’s an API to get Canadian sales tax information. Simple as that.

If you see any discrepancies in actual data, missing future rates, or want to contribute historical rates, please open an issue on the GitHub repository with the data and we’ll include it in the API.

Deprecation notice

As we’ve launched the 3rd iteration of the API, we will be deprecating the older versions of the API in favor of the latest version.

Version 1 of the API will be deprecated on July 1st, 2025.

Version 2 of the API will be deprecated on December 1st, 2025. You can inspect the header returned for x-deprecation-notice in that regard.

Documentation

Authentication

Since we’ve been seeing more and more usages of the API through the years, the fact that we can’t contact users - for example in case of maintenance or deprecation - became a hindrance. We’ve then decided to implement a requirement to authenticate via bearer token, that needs to be obtained after registration to the API.

You then need to send this token in the Authorization header when making requests to the API.

Authorization: Bearer <token>

As of 2025, the token never expires.

Rate limit

API usage is currently rate limited at 60 tries per minute. The rate limit is subject to change upon API popularity.

We strongly encourage the implementation of a caching strategy on the user end: the sales tax rarely changes, and this helps with server load. Updating this cache once a month should be sufficient.

You can inspect the headers returned with your request to monitor rate limits:

Contributing

You know the drill: report bugs in issues, suggest features in issues, and if you can, submit pull requests!

Meaning of acronyms

Usage

Prior versions of the API

Parameters

Where it is needed, the only parameter this API uses is :province and the API expects a two-letter Canadian province postal abbreviation

Possible attributes returned

The attributes returned by the API are pretty standard overall. While some endpoints will have more or fewer attributes than another endpoint, it will always be one of the following:

Meta

Endpoints will also return a meta object containing the following attributes:

{
    "type": "deprecation", // could be info, warning, or deprecation
    "message": "v0 of the API will be deprecated on 01-01-2000", // the message content
    "created_at": "2025-02-26T14:33:02.000000Z" // the date the message was created
}

URL to poll

URL to poll the API is https://api.salestaxapi.ca.

For example, sending a GET request to https://api.salestaxapi.ca/v3/federal/gst will retrieve the currently applicable GST rate.

About historical rates

Any endpoint returning the history of a rate returns the values of rates that the API has ever been aware of.

This means that this API does not strive to know every past rate, but will return any past values that have been seen since its inception. Any more is just a bonus!

GST (Federal tax)

Get current GST

/v3/federal/gst

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": {
    "province": "fe",
    "start": "2008-01-01 00:00:00",
    "type": "gst",
    "gst": 0.05,
    "applicable": 0.05,
    "source": "Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_Canada), accessed May 31 2019.",
    "updated_at": "2019-05-31 14:56:48",
    "incoming_changes": false
  },
  "meta": {...}
}
Get the future GST rate

/v3/federal/gst/future

This endpoint will return a 404: There is no known future rate for GST. if there is no known future value for the GST.

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": {
    "province": "fe",
    "start": "2100-01-01 00:00:00",
    "type": "gst",
    "gst": 0.2,
    "applicable": 0.25,
    "source": "We asked the question to a weird looking 8ball.",
    "updated_at": "2017-05-28 19:03:28"
  },
  "meta": {...}
}
Get the history of known GST rate

/v3/federal/gst/historical

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": [
    {
      "province": "fe",
      "start": "2008-01-01 00:00:00",
      "type": "gst",
      "gst": 0.05,
      "applicable": 0.05,
      "source": "Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_Canada), accessed May 31 2019.",
      "updated_at": "2019-05-31 14:56:48",
      "incoming_changes": false
    },
    {
      "province": "fe",
      "start": "2006-07-01 00:00:00",
      "type": "gst",
      "gst": 0.06,
      "applicable": 0.06,
      "source": "Canada Open Government dataset: Goods and Services Tax / Harmonized Sales Tax (GST/HST) Rates from 1991 - 2015",
      "updated_at": "2019-06-01 14:04:23",
      "incoming_changes": false
    },
    {...}
  ],
  "meta": {...}
}

PST (Provincial tax)

Get current PST for a province

/v3/province/:province

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": {
    "province": "ns",
    "start": "2008-01-01 00:00:00",
    "type": "hst",
    "gst": 0.05,
    "pst": 0.1,
    "hst": 0.15,
    "applicable": 0.15,
    "source": "Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_Canada), accessed May 31 2019.",
    "updated_at": "2019-05-31 14:51:09",
    "incoming_changes": "2025-04-01 00:00:00"
  },
  "meta": {...}
}
Get the future PST rate of a province

/v3/province/:province/future

This endpoint will return a 404: There is no known future rate for :province. if there is no known future value for the GST.

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": {
    "province": "ns",
    "start": "2025-04-01 00:00:00",
    "type": "hst",
    "gst": 0.05,
    "pst": 0.09,
    "hst": 0.14,
    "applicable": 0.14,
    "source": "https://news.novascotia.ca/en/2024/10/23/nova-scotias-hst-drop-2025",
    "updated_at": "2025-02-16 19:16:16",
    "incoming_changes": false
  },
  "meta": {...}
}
Get the history of known GST rate for a province

/v3/province/:province/historical

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": [
    {
      "province": "qc",
      "start": "2013-01-01 00:00:00",
      "type": "gst,pst",
      "gst": 0.05,
      "pst": 0.09975,
      "applicable": 0.14975,
      "source": "Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_Canada), accessed May 31 2019.",
      "updated_at": "2019-06-01 14:39:07",
      "incoming_changes": false
    },
    {
      "province": "qc",
      "start": "2012-01-01 00:00:00",
      "type": "gst,pst",
      "gst": 0.05,
      "pst": 0.095,
      "applicable": 0.145,
      "source": "Revenue Quebec, on Wayback machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20130515154436/http://www.revenuquebec.ca/en/entreprise/taxes/tvq_tps/historique-taux-tps-tvq.aspx, accessed June 1 2019.",
      "updated_at": "2019-06-01 14:36:30",
      "incoming_changes": false
    },
    {...},
    {...}
  ],
  "meta": {...}
}
Get current PST for all provinces

/v3/province/all

Example of successfull response
{
  "data": {
    "ab": {
      "province": "ab",
      "start": "2008-01-01 00:00:00",
      "type": "gst",
      "gst": 0.05,
      "applicable": 0.05,
      "source": "Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_Canada), accessed May 31 2019.",
      "updated_at": "2019-05-31 14:56:53",
      "incoming_changes": false
    },
    "bc": {...},
    "mb": {...},
    "nb": {...},
    "nl": {...},
    "ns": {...},
    "nt": {...},
    "nu": {...},
    "on": {...},
    "pe": {...},
    "qc": {...},
    "sk": {...},
    "yt": {...}
  },
  "meta": {...}
}

License

The API has been built with the Laravel framework its code is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license.