CA 
England
Estonia
Turkiye
What Work Qualifies for SR&ED?
To qualify for Canada’s SR&ED tax incentives, your project must:
- Advance scientific or technological knowledge
- Be a systematic investigation
- Both must happen in Canada.
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1 - Advancing Knowledge
- What “advancement” means: Generating or discovering new scientific or technological insights.
- When is it needed? If, at the start of your project, it isn’t known whether a result can be achieved—because existing knowledge isn’t enough—you have a “scientific or technological uncertainty.”
- Why “failure” still counts: Even if your experiment shows that an idea won’t work, you’ve still learned something new. What matters is that this learning pushes science or tech forward, not just your business.
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2 - Systematic Investigation
You must follow an organized R&D process, not just “try things out.” At a minimum, you should:
- Define the problem you’re trying to solve.
- Formulate a hypothesis (an educated guess) on how to solve it.
- Test your hypothesis through experiments or detailed analysis.
- Draw conclusions based on your results.
Types of Eligible Work
- Goal: Expand scientific knowledge without a direct practical goal.
- Example: Studying a newly discovered virus’s structure.
- Goal: Advance knowledge with a specific practical outcome in view.
- Example: Using what you learn about that virus to design a vaccine.
- Goal: Create or improve materials, devices, products, or processes.
- Example: Scaling up vaccine production and optimizing the process.
- Must directly back one of the above R&D types.
- Includes engineering, design, data collection, testing, computer programming, etc.
- Example: Example: Testing your new vaccine manufacturing process as you scale up.
Basic Research
Applied Research
Experimental Development
Support Work
What Does Not Qualify
- Market research or sales promotion
- Quality control or routine testing
- Commercial production or routine data collection
- Style or cosmetic changes
- Research in the social sciences or humanities
- Drilling or producing minerals, oil, or gas
- Training, on-the-job learning, or simply applying existing expertise
You cannot claim ordinary business activities or routine tasks, such as:
Even if these activities help your business, they don’t meet the SR&ED requirements unless they’re directly and substantially part of your R&D process as defined above.
Bottom Line:
To claim SR&ED credits, make sure your project:
- Seeks new scientific/technological knowledge or solves a technical uncertainty, and
- Follows a clear, step-by-step R&D approach in Canada.
