The CRA medical travel rate is not one number. It changes by the province or territory where your travel began, from 55.5 cents per kilometre in Saskatchewan to 70.5 cents in Nunavut and Yukon. This is the simplified method, and it is a genuinely different rate table from the 73 cents per kilometre business allowance most people find first.
Source: Canada Revenue Agency, Meal and vehicle rates used to calculate travel expenses. Rates shown are for the 2025 tax year, the most recent table CRA has published. Verified August 2026.
The rate table, by province and territory
Multiply your medical-travel kilometres by the rate for the province or territory in which the travel began, not where the clinic is.
- Alberta: 56.5 cents per kilometre
- British Columbia: 59.5 cents
- Manitoba: 56.0 cents
- New Brunswick: 59.5 cents
- Newfoundland and Labrador: 61.5 cents
- Northwest Territories: 70.0 cents
- Nova Scotia: 59.5 cents
- Nunavut: 70.5 cents
- Ontario: 62.0 cents
- Prince Edward Island: 58.5 cents
- Quebec: 60.5 cents
- Saskatchewan: 55.5 cents
- Yukon: 70.5 cents
The spread is wider than it looks. A resident of Saskatchewan and a resident of Nunavut driving the same 1,000 kilometres claim $555 and $705 respectively, a difference of $150 on identical travel.
The 40 kilometre and 80 kilometre thresholds
Distance decides whether you can claim anything at all, and it is measured one way from your home.
- Under 40 kilometres one way: you cannot claim travel expenses as a medical expense.
- At least 40 kilometres one way: you may claim transportation costs, provided the medical services were not available closer to home.
- At least 80 kilometres one way: you may additionally claim accommodation, meals, and parking.
Two conditions sit underneath both thresholds. The services have to have been unavailable in your own community, and at the 40 kilometre tier CRA expects public transportation to have been used where it was reasonably available, with vehicle expenses claimed only where it was not. One more exclusion catches people out: travel purely to pick up a device or a prescription does not qualify.
Simplified method or detailed method
The per-kilometre table above is the simplified method. You keep track of the kilometres driven for medical travel and multiply. You do not need to keep fuel and maintenance receipts, though CRA may still ask for documentation supporting the trips themselves.
The detailed method works differently. You total your actual vehicle costs for the year, including fuel, oil, tires, licence, insurance, maintenance, repairs, depreciation, provincial tax, and finance charges, then claim the medical-travel share of that total. If you drove 12,000 kilometres in the year and 1,500 of them were medical travel, you claim 12.5 percent of your total vehicle costs.
There is a related simplification for meals. Under the simplified method you may claim a flat $23 per meal, to a maximum of $69 per day per person including sales tax, for the 2025 tax year, without receipts.
A worked example
An Ontario resident makes eight round trips to a specialist 95 kilometres away, because the treatment is not offered locally. Each round trip is 190 kilometres, so the year's medical travel is 1,520 kilometres.
- 1,520 kilometres at Ontario's 62.0 cents: $942.40 in vehicle expenses
- The trip exceeds 80 kilometres one way, so meals and parking are also claimable
- Meals on four overnight visits at $69 per day: $276
- Parking at the hospital, actual receipts: $96
- Total medical travel claim: $1,314.40
That amount is added to the person's other eligible medical expenses. It is worth remembering that Canada's medical expense tax credit is a credit against a threshold, not a straight deduction, so the total only produces a benefit above the applicable floor.
How this differs from the business rate
People searching for a CRA mileage figure usually land on the business allowance rate first, which is 73 cents per kilometre for the first 5,000 kilometres in 2026 and 67 cents after that. That rate exists for a different purpose: it caps the tax-free per-kilometre allowance an employer may pay an employee who uses a personal vehicle for work.
Medical travel is a personal claim on your own return, and it uses the province-specific simplified table instead. Using 73 cents for a medical claim would overstate every province's entitlement, in Saskatchewan's case by 31 percent.
Which province's rate applies if I cross a border for treatment?
The rate is set by where the travel began, so a Manitoba resident driving to Ontario for treatment uses Manitoba's 56.0 cents, not Ontario's 62.0. The destination does not change the rate.
Can I claim for driving a family member?
The medical expense rules allow a claim for an attendant's travel where the patient was certified as unable to travel alone. The distance thresholds and the same per-kilometre table apply to that travel.
What records should I keep?
Dates, distances, and the medical purpose of each trip, plus proof the service was unavailable closer to home. This is the same standard of record CRA expects for a business kilometre log, and reconstructing it at filing time from memory is exactly the position you do not want to be in.
Medical trips are easy to forget and hard to reconstruct a year later. TruMile logs every drive automatically with its date and distance, so the kilometres are already there when you file. Try TruMile →
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