Ontario Trillium Benefit Payment Dates 2026: All 12 Dates + Max Amounts ($378 to $1,488)

All 12 Ontario Trillium Benefit Payment Dates for 2026

The OTB is normally deposited on the 10th of each month. When the 10th lands on a weekend or statutory holiday, the CRA pays on the last working day before the 10th — never after. In 2026 that happens three times: January 10 is a Saturday, May 10 is a Sunday, and October 10 is a Saturday, so those payments arrive on the 9th, the 8th, and the 9th. Here is the full year, straight from the CRA payment schedule:

The third column is the part most people miss. The OTB benefit year runs July to June, not January to December. The January through June 2026 deposits are the tail end of the 2025 OTB, calculated from your 2024 tax return. Everything from July 10, 2026 onward is the 2026 OTB, recalculated from your 2025 return. Same deposit label, different math.

July 10, 2026 Is the Most Important Date on the List

Every July, the CRA re-runs your entitlement using the prior year's return. If your 2025 income rose — a raise, a bonus, a severance, a one-time capital gain — your monthly OTB drops in July 2026 even though your rent and property tax did not change. If your income fell, the opposite happens, and some households that got nothing in the 2025 benefit year quietly become eligible.

The filing deadline drives the payment timing. If your 2025 return is assessed by June 19, 2026, your 2026 OTB starts on time with the July 10 payment. Assessed after June 19? The CRA issues your first payment within four to eight weeks of the assessment, with every missed month from July onward folded in. You are not penalized permanently for filing late — but a household relying on a monthly $150 deposit can end up waiting until autumn for a catch-up lump sum.

The Three Credits Inside Your OTB — 2026 Maximums

The Trillium payment is not one benefit. It is three separate Ontario credits the CRA bundles into a single deposit. For the benefit year that starts July 10, 2026 (based on your 2025 return), the maximums are:

The OSTC works the way the federal GST/HST credit does — fully automatic, no application, calculated per household member from your return. The OEPTC and NOEC are different: both require Form ON-BEN filed with your return every single year, reporting your rent, property tax, long-term-care, or reserve energy costs. A renter who files without ON-BEN still gets the $378 OSTC and assumes the system is working — while leaving up to $1,307 of OEPTC unclaimed. That is the single most expensive OTB mistake, and it repeats annually.

The maximums also crept up with indexation: the OSTC for the year now ending was $371 with phase-out thresholds of $28,506 and $35,632. From July 2026 those become $378, $29,047, and $36,309. Small per person — but for a family of four, the OSTC alone is now worth up to $1,512 a year.

What a Real Household Actually Receives

Three worked examples, using the July 2026 to June 2027 maximums and assuming income below the phase-out thresholds and enough rent or property tax paid to support the full OEPTC:

• Single renter in Toronto: $378 OSTC + $1,307 OEPTC = $1,685 a year, about $140 a month.
• Single senior homeowner in Mississauga: $378 OSTC + $1,488 senior OEPTC = $1,866 a year, about $155 a month.
• Family of four in Sudbury: $1,512 OSTC (4 × $378) + $1,307 OEPTC + $290 family NOEC = $3,109 a year, about $259 a month.

Notice what drives the differences: household size moves the OSTC, age moves the OEPTC, and geography turns the NOEC on or off entirely. The NOEC exists only for Northern Ontario residents — the CRA defines the eligible districts — so an identical family in Brampton receives $290 less than the Sudbury family with the same income and housing costs.

The $500 Rule: Why Some People Get One Payment Instead of Twelve

If your annual OTB entitlement works out to $500 or less, the CRA does not bother splitting it into 12 deposits. You receive the entire amount as a single lump sum in the first payment month of the benefit year — usually July. A single person whose income puts them at, say, $420 of annual entitlement gets one $420 deposit on July 10, 2026, and then nothing for the next 11 months. Every year, people in this position assume their benefit was cut off in August. It was not — it was prepaid.

There is also a deliberate version of this. On your return, you can elect to receive your OTB as one payment at the end of the benefit year instead of monthly. For the 2026 OTB, that election applies when your entitlement is over $500, and it means a single payment on June 10, 2027. I rarely recommend it: you are giving the province an interest-free loan for 11 months to receive money you could have had in July. The only household it suits is one using the lump sum as forced savings for a fixed June expense, like a property tax instalment.

Seniors: The OTB Stacks With Three Other Payments

For retirees, the Trillium deposit is one line in a larger monthly picture, and the same income number drives several of them. The senior OEPTC maximum of $1,488 sits on top of OAS, CPP, and — for lower-income seniors — the GIS top-up, each with its own payment schedule and its own income test. Senior homeowners get one more: if you were 64 or older on December 31, 2025 and paid property tax on a home you own, the Ontario senior homeowners' property tax grant adds up to $500 a year, applied for on the same ON-BEN form but paid separately from the OTB, four to eight weeks after your notice of assessment.

Here is where the planning lever sits. The OTB phase-out runs on adjusted net income, so a discretionary RRIF withdrawal in 2025 above your minimum doesn't just create taxable income — it trims your OTB from July 2026 (4% of every dollar over $29,047 for a single person, against the OSTC) and, far more painfully, claws back GIS at 50 cents on the dollar. Before taking more than the RRIF minimum for your age, check where your income lands against the GIS income thresholds — the OTB reduction is the smaller of the two costs, but they hit together, in the same July reset.

One genuinely good feature: the OTB is tax-free. It never appears as income on your T1, which means receiving it cannot reduce your GIS or any other income-tested benefit. The credits only flow one way.

Families: The OTB Is Separate From Your CCB and Ontario Child Benefit

Parents often conflate the two big monthly deposits. The OTB arrives on the 10th. The Canada Child Benefit arrives on its own schedule later in the month, and the Ontario child benefit — up to $146.66 per child per month for July 2026 to June 2027, with partial amounts above $26,865 of adjusted family net income — is folded into that CCB deposit, not into the OTB. So a lower-income Ontario family with children sees the province in two places: per-child support inside the CCB payment, and the household OSTC/OEPTC inside the Trillium payment. If one deposit changes and the other does not, that is normal — they run on separate calculations from the same return.

The Bottom Line: Mark July 10, Then Check Your ON-BEN

The 2026 payment calendar itself is simple — the 10th of each month, with January 9, May 8, and October 9 as the early exceptions. What actually determines whether those deposits are $31 or $259 a month is the paperwork and the income year behind them: the 2025 return you filed this spring, the ON-BEN form that unlocks the OEPTC and NOEC, and the income decisions — RRIF draws, capital gains, severance timing — that set your adjusted net income against the $29,047 and $36,309 thresholds. The dates are fixed. The amounts are not. Treat the July 10, 2026 deposit as your annual report card: if it dropped and you don't know why, the answer is somewhere in your 2025 income, and the time to fix the 2027 version is now.