If You Missed the RRSP Deadline, Here’s the Most Important Move to Make Next

Did you miss the registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) deadline for 2025?

The deadline was March 2, 2026. Contributions made up until that date count toward last year. If you didn’t make your last 2025 RRSP contributions by then, you can no longer make them.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t still make RRSP contributions for any year, or that you’ve lost RRSP contribution room.

RRSP contribution room “rolls over” to future years and increases over time (provided you don’t max out your contributions). So, you can still get in those last-minute RRSP contributions. You haven’t lost the room; the contributions will just count towards 2026 or some other future year.

In fact, you’re not even out of options for lowering your 2025 taxes. There are literally dozens of different tax breaks that all Canadian citizen-residents are eligible to take advantage of. By being extra careful about your paperwork, you may be able to find some tax breaks you can count toward 2025, which can make up for the RRSP contributions you forgot to make.

In the ensuing paragraphs, I’ll explore what you can do if you’ve missed the 2025 RRSP deadline.

Find any other possible tax deductions you’re eligible to claim

Let’s get this out of the way first:

If you want to make RRSP contributions to lower your 2025 taxes owing, or trigger a larger 2025 refund, you can no longer do that.

However, you can still work toward lowering your 2025 tax bill… by counting your receipts.

There are dozens of tax breaks that the Federal government allows Canadian tax residents to claim. Some of them you might not even know about. Examples include tuition, student loan interest, work-related moving expenses, and several medical expenses. Look up the many available tax deductions on the CRA website at Canada dot ca, then scour your receipts, correspondence, and email inbox to see how many expenses you have that qualify. Who knows? By being diligent, you might find hundreds of dollars worth of tax breaks you didn’t know about.

Start making contributions for the next year

After taking care of your 2025 tax return, you need to start making contributions for 2026. No, you can’t make these contributions count for 2025 – the advice in the previous section will take you as close as you can get to that – but you can recover any 2025 contribution room you didn’t use. So, any RRSP contributions you forgot to make by March 2, you can make now and have them count toward 2026.

How to invest in your RRSP

Speaking of RRSPs:

Managing your RRSP is about much more than just making contributions. You also need to invest wisely in your RRSP to make the most of the account. That’s largely about picking wise investments.

Consider the iShares S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index Fund (TSX:XIC), for example. It’s an index fund that many Canadians hold in their portfolios. It tracks the S&P/TSX Capped Composite Index, an industry-leading index of 240 large cap Canadian stocks. It holds 220 of the 240, which means that it tracks its underlying index well. It has just a 0.05% management fee and a 0.06% total expense ratio, meaning that it is fairly cost-effective. Finally, XIC is liquid, with a narrow bid-ask spread. The bid-ask spread forms a “hidden fee” that market makers charge. So, there’s a second, “hidden” form of cost saving you get with XIC, on top of the low fee.

With a diversified portfolio of index funds like XIC, you can grow your RRSP over time. So, who cares if you didn’t get your last contribution in by the 2025 deadline. In investing, it’s the long-term compounding that counts.

The post If You Missed the RRSP Deadline, Here’s the Most Important Move to Make Next appeared first on The Motley Fool Canada.

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More reading

• How to Build a Meaningful Passive Income Portfolio Starting With Just $25,000
• Maximizing Returns: How to Best Use Your TFSA in 2026
• Just Starting Out? 2 Simple ETFs That Any Canadian Investor Can Use
• How Does Your TFSA Compare to the $109,000 Milestone?

Fool contributor Andrew Button has no positions in the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.