The 20% Toronto property tax cut you don't apply for
Toronto cuts the commercial tax rate by 20% for eligible small business properties — and applies it automatically from a list of 28,222 addresses. Here's who's on it, what it's worth, and how to check yours.
Two buildings on the same street, both assessed at $900,000. One is a house. One is the shop next door.
The house pays $6,906 a year. The shop pays $20,718.
Same city, same assessed value, three times the bill — because Toronto doesn't tax property at one rate. It taxes it by class, and commercial sits near the top.
| Class | 2026 rate | Tax on $900,000 |
|---|---|---|
| Residential | 0.767311% | $6,906 |
| Multi-residential | 1.208792% | $10,879 |
| Commercial | 2.301986% | $20,718 |
| Industrial | 2.416774% | $21,751 |
That gap is the whole reason the next part exists.
The cut nobody applies for
Toronto knocks 20% off the commercial rate for small business properties. For 2026 Council raised it from 15%. It takes the commercial rate from 2.301986% down to 1.841589%.
The unusual part isn't the discount. It's the delivery. There is no application. No form, no deadline to meet, no accountant required. The City builds a list of eligible properties, publishes it, and applies the reduction to every address on it.
The 2026 list has 28,222 properties on it and was published on 2 January 2026.
Which is excellent if you're on it, and quiet if you're not. Nobody writes to tell you that your address was left off a list you didn't know existed.
On that $900,000 shop, the subclass is worth about $4,144 a year. At $1M it's roughly $4,604. At the $7M ceiling it's about $32,228.
Who's on the list
Every route requires the property to be in the commercial or new commercial tax class (CT or XT on your assessment notice). After that it comes down to assessed value, and outside the citywide band, location and size:
| Route | Assessed value | Also required |
|---|---|---|
| Anywhere in the city | $10,000 – $1,000,000 | — |
| Downtown, Central Waterfront, a Growth Centre, or an Avenue | $10,000 – $7,000,000 | Lot 7,500 sq ft or less (condos: 2,500 sq ft gross floor area) |
| Strip plaza, anywhere | $10,000 – $7,000,000 | Site or gross floor area 25,000 sq ft or less |
Some property types are excluded outright, however small: office buildings, shopping centres, parking lots and vacant land, plus anything already in the Creative Co-location or Vacant Land subclass, land with no building on it, and land with a demolition permit issued.
The pattern is deliberate. It's aimed at the storefront and the strip-plaza unit — the small commercial property where a three-times-residential tax rate lands hardest on an owner who is also the business.
Check your address
Our small business tax subclass checker holds the City's 2026 list and tells you whether an address appears on it.
Worth being precise about what that answers. On the list means the City is already applying the reduction — nothing to do. Not on the list means exactly that, and no more. It might be right: an office building or a parking lot is meant to be off it. Or the property might meet the criteria and have been missed.
We can check the list and check a value you enter against the published bands. We can't determine eligibility — lot size, property type and assessed value are things only you and MPAC can confirm. We screen. The City decides.
One thing we genuinely can't look up: your assessed value. MPAC's figures aren't open data, so both our property tax calculator and the subclass checker ask you to enter the number from your own Property Assessment Notice (also at mpac.ca, under About My Property).
If you think you've been missed
Here's the part that matters for timing, and it's not the answer you want in August.
When the City publishes the list, owners who believe they were wrongly left off get 90 days to file a Request for Reconsideration. For the 2026 list, published 2 January, that window closed on 2 April 2026.
So for the 2026 tax year, that door is shut. If you're not on the current list, there is no form that fixes this year.
What there is: the next list, published each December or January, and a fresh 90-day window that opens with it. That's the date worth putting in a calendar, and the months before it are when to do the useful work — confirm your tax class on your assessment notice, check your assessed value against the bands above, and know your lot size or gross floor area. Going into the next publication knowing whether you should be on the list is worth considerably more than discovering it in April.
While you're looking at the bill
Two things about commercial assessment that surprise people, both covered in more depth elsewhere:
Your 2026 bill is still calculated on what the property was worth on 1 January 2016. Ontario paused reassessment and hasn't restarted it, so a decade of drift sits between the assessed value and reality — which is a bigger deal than it sounds, and a common reason commercial owners appeal.
And the appeal route itself is shorter for commercial than residential. The Assessment Review Board deadline is 31 March each year, and commercial, industrial and multi-residential owners can file with the ARB directly — no MPAC Request for Reconsideration first, which residential owners do have to go through.
None of this is tax advice, and none of it substitutes for the City's own process — the City's subclass page has the criteria and the forms.
Start with the address
If you own commercial property in Toronto, two minutes gets you most of the way:
- Is it on the small business subclass list?
- What does it actually pay, by class? Try the property tax calculator.
- What else is on file — open orders, permit history, or the full snapshot?
And if you're comparing a commercial bill against a home, start with how residential property tax works. The arithmetic is identical. Only the rate changes — by a factor of three.