Most registered accounts in Canada close their books on December 31. The RRSP does not, and that single exception is the source of both its most useful feature and its most common piece of confusion. You can lower your 2026 taxes with a contribution made in February 2027. That is the first-60-days rule, and it is worth understanding precisely, because the same rule hides a reporting requirement that trips people up.
This guide gives the exact deadline dates for the next few years, explains why the rule exists, and covers the reporting trap, the age-71 hard stop, and what happens if you miss the date. The authoritative source is the CRA page on contributing to an RRSP; this is the plain-language version.
The deadline is the 60th day of the following year
The rule is simple to state: a contribution counts for a given tax year if it is made by the 60th day of the following calendar year. If that day lands on a weekend, the deadline moves to the next business day.
Because January has 31 days and February usually has 28, the 60th day is normally March 1. In a leap year it is February 29, because the extra day pulls the count forward. Worked out for the tax years around now:
- 2025 tax year: the 60th day of 2026 was Sunday, March 1, so the deadline was Monday, March 2, 2026. (This has passed.)
- 2026 tax year: the 60th day of 2027 is Monday, March 1, a business day, so the deadline is Monday, March 1, 2027.
- 2027 tax year: 2028 is a leap year, so the 60th day is Tuesday, February 29, 2028.
If you are reading this in the second half of 2026, the deadline that matters to you is March 1, 2027, for reducing your 2026 taxes.
Why the RRSP gets this rule and other accounts do not
The first-60-days rule exists so that RRSP planning can happen after you know your numbers. When the calendar year ends, you do not yet know your exact income, your bonus, or your marginal rate. The 60-day window lets you finish the picture, calculate the contribution that optimally reduces last year's tax, and make it in the new year while it still counts for the year that closed.
No other Canadian registered account works this way:
- The FHSA deadline is December 31, full stop. A January FHSA contribution counts for the new year, never the old one.
- The TFSA is a pure calendar-year account; there is no concept of a contribution "for" a prior year, only room that carries forward.
So the RRSP is the one account where the tax year and the contribution window do not line up, and that is a feature. It is also why "the RRSP deadline" is an early-March event that dominates Canadian financial news every February.
The reporting trap inside the rule
Here is the part that catches people. A contribution made in the first 60 days of a year must be reported for the prior year, even if you decide to deduct it in a later year.
Reporting and deducting are two different acts. Reporting means disclosing the contribution to the CRA on Schedule 7 of your prior-year return. Deducting means actually subtracting it from your income. The rule is:
- All first-60-days contributions must be reported on the prior-year Schedule 7. This is not optional. If you contributed in January or February 2027 and want it to have the option of counting for 2026, it goes on your 2026 return's Schedule 7.
- You then choose when to deduct it. You can deduct it for the prior year, or carry the deduction forward to a higher-income year, exactly as covered in the companion piece on RRSP contribution room vs deduction limit.
The mistake is contributing in February, deciding to carry the deduction forward, and therefore not reporting the contribution at all on the prior-year return. The CRA receives the contribution slip from your institution regardless, notices it was never reported, and sends a query. Report every first-60-days contribution on the prior-year Schedule 7, then deduct whenever it suits you. Reporting is mandatory; deducting is a choice.
The age-71 hard deadline
Every RRSP has a final deadline that no first-60-days rule extends: December 31 of the year you turn 71. By the end of that year, the RRSP must be collapsed, converted to a RRIF, or used to buy an annuity. There is no early-March grace period for this one, because the account itself ceases to exist as an RRSP.
A well-known last move applies here. If you are still earning income in the year you turn 71, that income generates new RRSP room for the following year, room you will never have an RRSP to use. Some people make a deliberate one-time overcontribution in December of their 71st year: they contribute the next year's room in advance, accept one month of the 1% overcontribution penalty on the amount above the $2,000 buffer, and then the new room the following January absorbs it, leaving the money sheltered inside the RRIF. It is a narrow, advanced play, and worth a conversation with an accountant, but it is a real reason the December-of-71 timing matters.
What happens if you miss the March deadline
Missing the deadline is not a catastrophe, and it is not a lost-room event. RRSP room never expires; it carries forward indefinitely. What you lose by missing the early-March date is only the ability to apply the contribution to the tax year that just closed.
Concretely: if you meant to reduce your 2026 taxes and you contribute on March 5, 2027, four days past the deadline, the money still goes in, still uses room, still grows tax-sheltered. It simply counts for the 2027 tax year instead of 2026. If your 2026 income was unusually high and that was the whole point, you have pushed the benefit forward a year. If your income is steady year to year, the practical difference is close to nothing.
The one real cost of cutting it close is processing time. A contribution is dated when your institution receives and records it, not when you click submit. Electronic transfers between institutions can take days to settle, and a transfer initiated on the deadline can land after it. Do not contribute on the final afternoon. If you are moving money from another institution or contributing in-kind (transferring existing securities into the RRSP rather than cash), give it a full week of buffer.
A simple calendar
Four dates keep you clear of every RRSP timing mistake:
- Early March each year: the deadline to contribute for the year that just ended. March 1, 2027 for the 2026 tax year; February 29, 2028 for the 2027 tax year.
- December 31 each year: the cutoff for the current year's contributions if you do not want to rely on the 60-day window, and the hard deadline for the FHSA and TFSA.
- Filing time (Schedule 7): report every first-60-days contribution on the prior-year return, whether or not you deduct it then.
- December 31 of the year you turn 71: the final RRSP contribution deadline, no extension.
Note them once and the annual February scramble becomes a non-event.
How Mozaic helps
The Mozaic RRSP tracker reads your RRSP contributions from the major Canadian banks and brokerages (read-only, via SnapTrade and Plaid) and puts them on a single dated timeline in Canadian dollars. When you hold RRSPs at more than one institution, that timeline is what tells you whether a first-60-days contribution actually landed before the deadline and how much you have put in across every account this season, instead of you cross-checking three separate statements in late February.
The connection is read-only, so Mozaic cannot make a contribution on your behalf or move money; it only shows you what has settled. Data is stored in Google Cloud's Montréal region under PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 (/security). For the full picture across RRSP, TFSA, FHSA, and non-registered accounts, the net-worth tracker rolls them into one number.
The bottom line
The RRSP deadline is the 60th day of the following year, which normally means early March, bumped to the next business day when it lands on a weekend: March 1, 2027 for the 2026 tax year, February 29, 2028 for the 2027 tax year. The early date is a gift, letting you optimize last year's taxes after the year has ended. The catch is that first-60-days contributions must be reported on the prior-year return even when you defer the deduction. Miss the date and you lose nothing but the ability to apply the money to the closed year.
Note the dates, report every contribution, and give your transfers a week of runway. If you would like to see your RRSP contributions tracked across every institution as the deadline approaches, the 14-day free trial needs no card, and the companion guide on RRSP room vs deduction limit covers the other half of the equation: how much you can actually put in.