Taxpayers could wait up to a year for refunds as CRA complaints hit 3-year high — data reveals the best times to call

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has sat on hold trying to sort out a delayed refund, a stuck disability tax credit application or a locked-out CRA account. But an informal, crowdsourced look at CRA call centre wait times suggests the time of day you when you try to call could matter almost as much as your patience.

Complaints are climbing, and calls are still the sticking point

The CRA redirected roughly 8.6 million calls to its automated services between April 2024 and March 2025. In April 2025 alone, more than 4 million callers hit long wait times before getting an answer. Based on published service expectations, taxpayers should wait no longer than 20 weeks for a resolution, yet the tax Ombudsperson found that some Canadians were waiting as long as 50 weeks — nearly a year — for a decision or resolution.

The gap between what the CRA says publicly and what taxpayers experience has also drawn scrutiny. According to the OTO’s annual report, the CRA answered only 35% of unique callers to its general inquiries line during the week of June 30 to July 4, 2025, yet the agency’s public messaging suggested only occasional delays.

Why so many calls are about delays, not just questions

A big driver of the call volume is processing speed.

In the 2025-26 fiscal year, the CRA was taking up to 50 weeks to process complex T1 adjustment requests, more than double its own published service standard of 20 weeks. According to OTO data, more than half of all complaints involved timeliness in some form.

Even complaining can be slow. The CRA’s own Service Feedback Program, the first stop for a service complaint, took up to 100 business days — more than four months — to respond, as of November 2025. Since the Ombudsperson’s office generally only steps in once that internal process has finished or stalled, those delays can push a full resolution well past a year.

So when should you actually pick up the phone?

The CRA’s individual and business enquiry lines are open from 8 am to 8 pm on weekdays and 9 am to 5 pm on Saturdays, based on a taxpayer’s local time. Based on this information, a contributor to the Reddit Canadian tax discussion forum, r/cantax, tracked CRA call centre wait times through early-to-mid March 2026 and found a pattern.

Calling right when the lines open, at 8 am, produced the shortest waits, often around 10 minutes. The hour after opening and the early evening window, roughly 6 pm to 7 pm, were also comparatively quick, at 20 to 30 minutes. However, anyone calling the CRA enquiry lines between 11 am and 5pm were consistently met with longest wait times — climbing well past 30 minutes on hold and approaching 50 or 60 minutes before talking to a CRA representative.

While, Reddit user 1bmathiethrowaway, isn’t releasing official CRA wait time data, the analysis could help taxpayers navigate official CRA help lines in a more expedient manner.

Need to call the CRA? What to know before you dial

The CRA and others highlight that there are several tools that can resolve simple issues without the need to call the agency, although each comes with caveats the Ombudsperson has flagged directly to the CRA.

For instance, you can use the ‘Check CRA processing times’ tool; however, this tool doesn’t account for common exclusions, such as late-filed, deceased or non-resident returns, so it can understate how long a request will really take.

Using the ‘Progress tracker’ inside the CRA ‘My Account’ and ‘My Business Account’ can help, although sometimes this tool shows a shifting target date, or none at all.