For a parent in the Greater Toronto Area earning $90,000, one day a week in the office costs roughly $4,100 of gross salary once you price the driving, the parking, the bought lunch and the after school care. Move from two office days a week to four and you have handed back about $8,200 in pay without your salary changing at all. That is the practical answer to how much working from home is worth, and it is why a mid career parent will often turn down a raise to keep a remote or hybrid schedule.
The reason the trade looks lopsided is a tax quirk almost nobody spells out. Money you do not spend on commuting is after tax money, already in your pocket. A raise is pre tax money that gets cut by your marginal rate before you see it. Canada also gives you nothing back for the cost of getting to your regular workplace, so none of that spending is recoverable at filing time. The gap between those two things is the whole story.
The research behind the eight percent figure
The number people quote comes from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, run by José María Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis. Across a broad cross section of American workers, the option to work from home two or three days a week is valued at about eight percent of pay. More than half of respondents put it at five percent or more, and roughly one in five value it at fifteen percent or more.
Two findings inside that work matter more for Canadian parents than the headline average. First, workers living with children under fourteen show a higher willingness to pay for remote days than otherwise similar workers without children, and the pattern holds for fathers as well as mothers across every country studied. Second, in the 2025 update to the same research programme, the work from home rate is seven percentage points higher for workers with children under eight. The fuller treatment of the pattern is in the authors’ Journal of Economic Perspectives paper.
Statistics Canada’s 2022 Time Use Survey supplies the Canadian half. Teleworkers saved more than an hour on days they worked from home, against an average daily commute of 63 minutes for non teleworkers. Parents who worked from home spent about 71 minutes more per day actively caring for or being with their children. Time saved on the road does not vanish. It lands somewhere, and for parents a meaningful share of it lands on the kids.
What one office day a week actually costs
Take an Ontario household with two school age children and a 25 km drive each way. A single office day per week works out to about 46 commuting days a year once vacation and statutory holidays come out.
| Cost per office day | Amount | Per year (46 days) |
|---|---|---|
| Fuel, tires, maintenance and wear on 50 km | $12 | $552 |
| Parking | $15 | $690 |
| Bought lunch and coffee, net of eating at home | $12 | $552 |
| After school care, two children, after the tax deduction | $24 | $1,104 |
| Total | $63 | $2,898 |
Two of those lines deserve an explanation, because most articles on this subject get them wrong in opposite directions.
The driving line is deliberately conservative. The CRA’s 2026 automobile allowance rate is 73 cents per kilometre for the first 5,000 km, which would price 50 km at $36.50 and turn a single weekly office day into $1,679 a year on its own. That rate is built to cover insurance, licensing and depreciation as well as fuel, and most people pay the insurance and own the car regardless of where they work. The marginal cost of the trip, meaning what actually changes when you drive it, is closer to $12. If a commuting cost calculator is quoting you the full per kilometre rate, it is overstating your saving.
The care line runs the other way. Before and after school programs are eligible child care expenses under Form T778, so the parent with the lower net income can deduct them, up to $5,000 per child aged 7 to 16 and $8,000 per child under 7. Stop paying $30 a day and you also stop claiming a deduction on it. At a 19 percent marginal rate for that lower earning spouse, the true saving is about $24, not $30. Very few write ups on remote work make this adjustment, and it takes roughly a fifth off the largest line in the table.
Why the raise has to be bigger than the saving
Here is where the arithmetic turns. To end up with $2,898 more in your bank account from a raise, your employer has to hand over considerably more than $2,898.
At $90,000 in Ontario for 2026, the next dollar of salary faces 20.5 percent federal tax and 9.15 percent Ontario tax, just under 30 percent combined. CPP and EI have already stopped, because the 2026 CPP ceiling is $74,600 with the second tier ending at $85,000, and EI stops at $68,900. So the raise needed is $2,898 divided by 0.7035, or about $4,120.
Now run the same family at $60,000. The income tax rates are identical, but CPP at 5.95 percent and EI at 1.63 percent are both still biting. The wedge is 37.2 percent, and the raise needed climbs to about $4,617.
That is the counterintuitive part. The lower paid worker needs a larger gross raise to break even on the same commuting costs, because payroll contributions take a bite that stops entirely for higher earners. It is worth saying plainly that CPP is not a pure loss, since it buys a future retirement benefit and part of the enhanced portion is deductible. For the purpose of what shows up on your next pay stub, though, the money is gone.
If you want to see this on your own income, the payroll calculator will show the CPP, EI and tax on a specific salary, and our guide to marginal versus average tax rates explains why the marginal rate is the only one that matters for judging a raise. The CPP page and the EI page have the current ceilings, and the payroll contributions overview shows how the two stack.
Set the result against the eight percent research figure. Eight percent of $90,000 is $7,200 for two or three remote days a week, which is about $2,880 per day per week. Our Ontario parent is out of pocket $4,120 per day per week in hard cash, before valuing a single minute of the 46 hours of annual driving or the roughly 54 hours of extra time with their children that one office day removes. For a Canadian parent with a real commute, the survey figure looks low.
The CRA rules people get wrong
Commuting is never deductible. Travel between your home and your regular place of work is a personal expense in Canada, full stop. Not the gas, not the parking, not the transit pass. There is no Canadian equivalent of a commuter benefit.
The $2 per day flat rate method no longer exists. Several Canadian personal finance sites still describe the temporary flat rate method, worth up to $500, as an available option. It was permanently eliminated starting with the 2023 tax year. The CRA’s own guidance now offers employees only the detailed method.
Most hybrid workers cannot claim home office expenses at all. The detailed method requires a signed Form T2200 from your employer, and requires that you worked more than 50 percent of the time from your home workspace for at least four consecutive weeks in the year. Somebody in the office four days a week fails that test outright. Working from home by choice, rather than under a written or verbal requirement, also fails it.
The net effect is that Canada’s tax system is close to neutral on where you work, with a mild tilt toward the office being the more expensive option for you personally. That is exactly why the saving lands as clean after tax money.
What Canadian workers actually say
The Angus Reid Institute surveyed 1,918 Canadian adults in July 2025 and found three in five would prefer to spend most of their working time at home. Among people who have actually done it, that rises to about three quarters. Of those told to spend more days in the office, 51 percent said they were upset by the request, against fewer than one in five who reacted positively.
Robert Half Canada found a quarter of Canadian workers would accept a pay cut to work fully remotely, rising to 32 percent among working parents. Its 2026 data shows how tight the supply has become: 3 percent of new professional job postings in the second quarter of 2026 were fully remote and 13 percent were hybrid. Among workers not currently job hunting, 46 percent said the reason was that they did not want to lose the flexibility they have.
The individual accounts are more concrete than the percentages. Tania Marcil, a Halifax based federal worker with three children, told Global News she was left scrambling for before and after school spots when her office days increased, and that a waitlist place she had been promised the previous year never materialised. In Ottawa, public servant Cory Hall described spending an extra hour circling for parking after being turned away from a full garage, at a site where the operator moved to requiring $195 monthly passes. Radio-Canada timed a Gatineau to downtown Ottawa run that normally takes 20 to 30 minutes at two hours during the same week.
On forums like r/PersonalFinanceCanada and the Blind boards, the recurring line from parents is that once you have children the remote option is worth more than a 20 to 25 percent pay difference. Those are anecdotes rather than survey data, and self selected ones. They point the same direction as the research, which is the most that should be claimed for them.
Run your own number in five minutes
- Count your realistic commuting days per week, then multiply by 46.
- Price the drive at marginal cost, not the CRA rate. Fuel consumption times local pump price, plus about 10 cents per kilometre for tires, brakes and servicing.
- Add parking or the transit fare, and only the food you buy because you are out.
- Add any care hours that exist only because you are commuting, then reduce that figure by the lower earning spouse’s marginal rate, because you lose the T778 deduction along with the cost.
- Divide the annual total by one minus your marginal rate, including CPP and EI if you are under the ceilings. That is the raise that makes you indifferent.
Anything the employer offers below that number leaves you worse off in cash terms, before you have priced the commuting hours at all. Anything above it is a genuine offer worth weighing. The income after tax pages will give you the take home figure for any salary and province if you want to compare two offers side by side.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I deduct my commute to work in Canada?
No. Travel between your home and your regular workplace is a personal expense, and that includes fuel, parking and transit passes. The only travel that can be deductible is travel required by your job away from your regular workplace, and that needs a signed Form T2200 from your employer.
Can I still claim the $2 per day working from home deduction?
No. The temporary flat rate method was available for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 tax years only and was eliminated from 2023 onward. Employees now have to use the detailed method with a signed Form T2200 and Form T777. Some finance sites have not updated this.
How big a raise do I need to offset returning to the office?
Take your annual out of pocket commuting and care costs and divide by one minus your marginal rate. In Ontario at $90,000 the marginal rate is just under 30 percent, so $3,000 of costs needs a raise of about $4,270. Below the CPP and EI ceilings the required raise is larger, because those contributions come off a raise too.
Is before and after school care tax deductible in Canada?
Yes. Before and after school programs qualify as child care expenses on Form T778, claimed on line 21400, up to $8,000 per child under 7 and $5,000 per child aged 7 to 16. The parent with the lower net income normally has to make the claim, and it is capped at two thirds of that person’s earned income. Because it is a deduction rather than a credit, its value depends on that parent’s marginal rate, which you can check with the tax calculator.
Do employers in Canada pay less for remote roles?
Some do, and the economics research on wage growth moderation suggests employers capture part of the value of the amenity over time. In the current Canadian market the more common pattern is scarcity rather than a discount, with only a small share of professional postings advertised as fully remote.
Does working from home affect my CPP or EI?
No. CPP and EI are calculated on your employment income regardless of where you perform the work. Where you live on December 31 determines your provincial tax rate, which matters if a remote arrangement has moved you to another province. The take home pay figures by province show how much that can change.
Sources: Barrero, Bloom and Davis, Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, and Buckman, Barrero, Bloom and Davis, Measuring Work from Home (NBER, 2025); Aksoy et al., Working from Home Around the World and Time Savings When Working from Home; Statistics Canada, 2022 Time Use Survey and Labour Force Survey commuting data; Angus Reid Institute, July 2025; Robert Half Canada remote work research; Canada Revenue Agency, home office expenses for employees, Form T2200, Form T778 and 2026 automobile allowance rates; Canada Employment Insurance Commission, 2026 premium rate; CBC and Global News reporting on return to office in Canada. Last updated: September 2026.