Paying Influencers in Canada: Contracts and Tax Basics

A Toronto skincare brand pays a nano creator $300 for a Reel, over e-transfer, confirmed by a single DM. The post goes up, everyone's happy, and the brand forgets about it until March, when their bookkeeper asks for the paperwork on every contractor paid last year. There isn't any. No invoice, no written rate, no record of what the $300 was actually for. Nothing illegal happened, but the brand now has to reconstruct a transaction from a DM thread instead of pulling one document.

This is the least glamorous part of influencer marketing and the part almost nobody plans for before their first campaign. It isn't complicated once you know the shape of it. Here's what to have in writing, and what actually needs to happen for tax purposes when a Canadian business pays a creator.

This isn't tax or legal advice

Every business's situation differs by province, structure, and how much they're paying out in a year. What follows is the general shape of how the CRA treats payments to independent contractors, written so you know what questions to ask. Confirm the specifics with your accountant before you rely on any of it, especially once you're paying more than a handful of creators a year.

What needs to exist before any money moves

Two documents, not one. The first is the brief and the price: what the creator is making, by when, and for how much. How to brief an influencer covers what goes in that document, and it doubles as the paper trail that a payment was for a specific, agreed piece of work rather than an undefined gift.

The second is usage rights: whether the brand can only leave the post up, or also run it as a paid ad, and for how long. That's a separate agreement from the price, covered in what an ad rights rider is. Skip it and the $300 Reel from the story above can turn into a dispute three months later when the brand quietly boosts it as an ad and the creator finds out from a follower.

Neither of these needs to be a lawyer-drafted contract for a first, small campaign. A confirmed email or a shared document naming the deliverable, the price, the deadline, and what the brand can do with the post afterward covers most of what matters. What it can't be is a DM thread with no clear final agreement, because that's the version nobody can produce later.

Contractor, not employee

A creator you pay for a post is almost always an independent contractor, not an employee: they use their own equipment, choose how they shoot and edit, and typically work with other brands too. That distinction matters because it's the difference between payroll (source deductions, a T4, EI and CPP contributions) and a simple invoice paid to an independent business. Most brands never need to think about payroll here at all, but if you're structuring an ongoing, exclusive, closely-directed relationship with one creator, that's worth a specific conversation with your accountant rather than an assumption.

Get an invoice, every time

Ask for one before you pay, not after. A usable invoice has the creator's name or business name, the date, what was delivered, the amount, and their GST/HST number if they have one (more on that below). This is the single habit that fixes the March-bookkeeper problem: an invoice is a record that a payment was for a specific service, filed the way any other contractor expense would be. If a creator has never invoiced a brand before, most are happy to send one once you ask; a plain PDF or even a clearly itemized email works.

When a T4A applies

The commonly cited CRA guideline is that a business issuing fees for services to an unincorporated contractor, in this case a creator who isn't running through a corporation, should issue a T4A slip (box 048, "Fees for services") once total payments to that person hit $500 or more in a calendar year. Below that threshold, most brands don't bother; above it, the slip is the standard way of reporting what you paid.

Two things change this. If the creator invoices you through an incorporated business, you're paying a corporation, not an individual, and a T4A generally isn't the mechanism; you're just paying a business invoice like any other. And if you're working with several small creators who each individually stay under $500 for the year, each payment can fall under the informal threshold even while your total influencer spend for the year is well above it, because the $500 test applies per creator, not per campaign.

When HST comes into it

Most nano and micro creators in Ontario won't charge HST, and that's not them cutting corners: a business only has to register for and charge GST/HST once it earns $30,000 or more in revenue over four consecutive calendar quarters. A creator making a few hundred dollars from a handful of brand deals a year is almost always under that "small supplier" line, which is why their invoice won't show tax and doesn't need to.

Once a creator's total business revenue, not just what you're paying them, crosses that threshold, they're expected to register and start charging HST on new invoices. That's the creator's obligation to track, not yours, but it's worth asking a creator directly if their invoice should include HST rather than assuming either way. If it should and doesn't, or shouldn't and does, that's a five-minute conversation before you pay, not after.

What escrow does and doesn't solve

Holding a fee in escrow until a post goes live, the model our own product uses, protects both sides against the actual payment: the creator doesn't have to chase an invoice, and the brand doesn't pay for work that never happens. It doesn't change anything about the paperwork above. A payment that moved through escrow still needs the same invoice and the same T4A treatment as one that moved by e-transfer. Escrow is about trust between the two parties, not a substitute for your own books.

A simple checklist for a first campaign

For a $600 budget split across two Toronto nano creators:

• A brief and price for each, in writing, before anything is shot.
• A usage-rights line for each: organic only, or also usable as a paid ad, and for how long.
• An invoice from each creator once the post is confirmed live, before you pay.
• A running total per creator across the year, so you know if either one crosses $500 and needs a T4A.
• A quick check on whether either invoice should carry HST, if you're not sure why it doesn't.

None of this takes more than a few minutes per creator if you do it at the time, instead of trying to reconstruct it the following March.

Where Sixth Degree fits

We built the platform around this exact gap: a brief and a price agreed upfront, usage rights spelled out before any content is made, and a fee held in escrow until the post is confirmed. That's the half of the paperwork problem a product can actually solve. The invoice and the T4A are still yours to handle the way this post describes.

We're in private beta, opening Fall 2026, so none of this is live yet. If you're setting up your first few creator payments in the meantime and want to sanity-check the paperwork, email hello@sixthdegree.app. We're not accountants, but we've set up enough of these to know what a real invoice looks like.