The RL-10 Arrives Twice: The Québec Slip That Reopens a Finished Client File

Short answer: the RL-10 is issued by only two institutions in Québec — the Fonds de solidarité FTQ and Fondaction — and it comes in two separate mailings: one around mid-January for the previous year's contributions, and one around mid-March for contributions made in the first 60 days. Almost every other slip is out by the end of February. So a client file that looks finished in early March is missing a document that has not been issued yet — and the same piece of paper carries both a tax credit and an RRSP receipt, which means it has to be found twice inside the file.

Most late-slip problems are the client's fault: something sat unopened, or was never downloaded from a portal. This one is not. The document does not exist yet when the file is assembled, and nothing about the file's appearance will tell you so.

This page is about that slip: who issues it, why it arrives twice, why it feeds two different tax returns, and where to put it so a re-merge in March costs a minute instead of an afternoon.

What the RL-10 reports, and who is allowed to issue it

The RL-10 reports the tax credit relating to a labour-sponsored fund. Unlike a T4 or an RL-1, which any employer can produce, this slip has essentially two authors in the entire province: the Fonds de solidarité des travailleurs et des travailleuses du Québec (FTQ) and Fondaction, the development fund of the Confédération des syndicats nationaux (Revenu Québec — Relevé 10).

That narrowness is useful to a preparer. If a Québec client holds retirement savings through a union-linked fund, you already know which two envelopes to expect and roughly when. There is no long tail of obscure issuers to chase.

What there is instead is a timing trap.

Two mailings, and the second one lands after the file is closed

Shares can be bought for a given tax year in two windows — during the year itself, and in the first 60 days of the following year, the same rule savers know from RRSPs. The issuers therefore mail twice. The Fonds de solidarité FTQ states its schedule plainly:

"Around mid-January, for contributions made between March 1 and December 31 of the previous year […] Around mid-March, for contributions made in the first 60 days of the current year."

— Fonds de solidarité FTQ, What is the Relevé 10?

Fondaction publishes the same split in French: « Mi-janvier : cotisations faites après le 60^e jour de l'année » and « Mi-mars : cotisations faites pendant les 60 premiers jours de l'année » (Fondaction — Relevés et impôt).

Put that beside the calendar every other slip follows. T4, RL-1, RL-8, T2202 and RL-31 are all information returns due by the last day of February. A preparer who assembles a Québec file in the first week of March is, for almost every client, working with a complete set of documents.

Worse, the client who triggers this is the ordinary one: payroll deduction through the year produces the January slip, and a lump-sum contribution before the 60-day deadline produces the March slip. Contributing at the last minute to maximise the credit is exactly the behaviour that splits the paperwork.

One piece of paper, two tax returns, two lines

The second oddity is that the RL-10 does double duty. The Fonds de solidarité FTQ describes the document as carrying two things at once:

"The relevé 10 covers two items in two sections: relevé 10 (tax credit) and RRSP receipt (tax deduction)."

— Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Understanding key documents when investing in an RRSP

So one scan supports a credit and a deduction, provincially and federally:

The fund puts the combined credit at 30% — 15% Québec and 15% federal — limited to $1,500 per fiscal year, which represents a $5,000 subscription for shares. The federal half reconciles with the CRA's own published cap: 15% of the net cost entered on line 41300, to a maximum of $750 (CRA — Labour-sponsored funds tax credit). The CRA also notes that approved shares may be acquired through an RRSP, including a spousal or common-law partner RRSP, which is how the two functions come to sit on one slip (CRA — Example: RRSPs and the labour-sponsored funds tax credit).

For document handling, the consequence is blunt: filing this slip in one place files it in the wrong place. Drop it under "RRSP receipts" and the credit is invisible at review; drop it under "Québec slips" and the deduction is. It needs to be findable from both.

The filing problem, stated precisely

Three properties combine here, and no other Québec slip has all three:

• It arrives in two instalments, six to eight weeks apart, and the two are not duplicates.
• The second instalment arrives after the normal assembly window, so it lands in a file somebody has already ordered and merged.
• It serves two tax functions at once, so it has a legitimate claim to two positions in the file.

In a practice that merges client documents into one reviewable PDF, that is the worst possible shape. A file merged on March 3 and re-merged on March 18 is re-done by hand: re-open the folder, find where the new slip goes, rebuild the order, regenerate the bookmarks. Multiply by the number of clients who hold union-fund shares — in Québec, not a small number — and a mid-March week disappears into re-assembling files that were already correct.

Where the RL-10 goes in the merged client PDF

The RL-10 reports neither employment nor investment income, so it does not belong in the income block. It supports a credit and a deduction, which places it with the other support documents:

1. Federal income slips — T4, T4A, then T5 / T3 / T5008.
2. Matching Québec slips — each RL-1 after its T4, then RL-2 and RL-3.
3. Credit and deduction support — RRSP contribution receipts and the RL-10 mailings, in date order, kept together; then RL-31, T2202 and RL-8, RL-24, medical and donation receipts.
4. Everything else — notices of assessment, instalments, correspondence.

Two habits make March cheap rather than expensive. First, leave the slot open: order the file as though the second RL-10 were already there, so inserting it later does not move anything else. Second, keep the January and March slips adjacent and dated — they look nearly identical, and the fastest way to lose the credit is to treat the second one as a re-send of the first and discard it.

And if the client withdrew from the fund rather than contributing to it, the documents change entirely: a withdrawal produces a T4RSP and an RL-2, which report income and belong up in the income block. A client who did both in one year generates paper in two separate parts of the file.

The wider context: an electronic pipeline fed by hand

During the 2025 tax season the CRA processed 33,839,390 individual returns, 93% of them electronically — 60% through EFILE by preparers and 33% through NETFILE, against 7% on paper (CRA — individual income tax return statistics).

The return itself leaves the office in minutes. The documents behind it still arrive in two mailings, six weeks apart, in envelopes and PDF downloads named releve10.pdf and releve10(1).pdf. The slowest part of a Québec file in March is not the filing — it is finding out what changed since the file was closed.

PDF Insight handles this on your own machine. It reads the content of each page rather than the file name, so it tells the January RL-10 from the March one by the period printed on the slip, places both with the deduction support in the right order, and re-merges a file when a late document arrives without you rebuilding the sequence. Nothing is uploaded to identify a page, which matters for a slip that carries a client's name, social insurance number and retirement savings.