SR&ED for physicians
Your professional corporation may have research costs that nobody has claimed.
If your corporation paid you or your team to perform eligible medical research, those costs may support an SR&ED tax credit. Medical SR&ED claims often begin inside a hospital appointment, university project, or medical practice. The claimant and the costs still have to be right.
Good research is only the start. The right corporation has to make the claim.
A publication, grant, ethics approval, or hospital affiliation does not decide SR&ED eligibility. The work must address scientific or technological uncertainty through a systematic investigation or search.
Then the financial side has to match. Who undertook the work? Which corporation paid the salary or contract? What do the employment, research, and funding agreements say? Those details can determine whether a professional corporation has a supportable claim.
A practical first screen
Four signs the research deserves a closer look
The answer was not already available
The team faced a scientific or technical problem that standard knowledge, practice, or available methods could not resolve.
You tested a way forward
There was a hypothesis or technical objective, a method, observations, and conclusions that informed the next attempt.
Your corporation carried costs
The professional corporation paid salary, an arm's-length contractor, materials, or another cost tied to the eligible work.
The work left a record
Protocols, notebooks, emails, datasets, analyses, payroll, and agreements can show what happened and who paid for it.
Separate the research problem from the surrounding clinical work.
A defensible claim is usually narrower than the full project. The point is to identify the experimental work and the costs that belong to it, while leaving routine care and administration outside.
Work to examine
- Experiments or analyses aimed at a genuine scientific or technological uncertainty
- Direct support work that is commensurate with the eligible experimental work
- Eligible salary, materials, and qualifying arm's-length contract expenditures
- Failed attempts when they were part of the systematic investigation
Work to keep outside the claim
- Routine clinical care or services delivered using established methods
- Ordinary data collection with no unresolved scientific or technical problem
- Market research, administration, and general business development
- Costs paid by another entity or unsupported by the agreements and records
How the claim is built
Start with the work. Then prove which costs belong to it.
- 01
Screen the projects
Together, we talk through the research questions, failed approaches, changes in method, and what was not known at the outset.
- 02
Confirm the claimant
I review the corporation's role, payroll, contracts, grants, and agreements before assigning any expenditure to the claim.
- 03
Prepare the record
I draft the technical project descriptions and expenditure support. Your accountant handles the corporation's tax return filing.
- 04
Stay through review
If the CRA asks questions, I help explain the work, organize the evidence, and respond to the review.
Questions physicians usually ask
- Can a physician's salary be included?
- It can be relevant when the professional corporation paid the salary and the time relates to eligible SR&ED work. The corporate, employment, and research arrangements must support that position.
- Do grants rule out an SR&ED claim?
- Not automatically. Government and non-government assistance can affect the expenditure or credit calculation, so the funding terms and accounting treatment need to be reviewed.
- What if the research happened in a hospital or university?
- The location and affiliation do not settle who can claim. The analysis looks at who undertook the work, who controlled it, who paid the costs, and what the agreements establish.
- What if my corporation has never claimed before?
- Past silence does not decide whether current open years contain eligible work. The first step is to screen the work and confirm that the filing deadline has not passed.
Official sources
Program guidance reviewed August 1, 2026.
Keep reading
The filing window is limited: A corporation generally has 18 months after its tax year end to report SR&ED expenditures. After that, even eligible work may no longer be claimable.