The RL-31 Slip: The One Québec Document Missing From Your Client File

Short answer: The RL-31 reports information about a leased dwelling. A landlord issues it to a tenant who was on the lease on 31 December, and the tenant needs it to claim the housing component of the Québec solidarity tax credit. It is due at the end of February, like the T4 and the RL-1 — but unlike them it comes from a private individual rather than a payroll department, which is exactly why it is the slip most often missing when a Québec file lands on your desk.

Every checklist for a Québec personal tax file lists the same string: T4, RL-1, RL-31, receipts. The first two are explained everywhere. The third is usually just a line item — mentioned constantly, explained almost nowhere — and it is the one that holds up files in March.

This page is about that slip specifically: what it is, who has to produce it, when, why it goes missing, and where it belongs once you finally have it.

What the RL-31 actually reports

The RL-31 is unusual among Québec relevés because it reports no income at all. Where the RL-1 mirrors employment income already on a T4, and the RL-3 mirrors investment income already on a T5, the RL-31 has no federal counterpart. It exists solely to substantiate a provincial credit.

Its subject is a leased dwelling: the address, the number of tenants named on the lease, and the landlord's identification. That information lets Revenu Québec confirm who occupied the unit on 31 December, which is the qualifying date for the housing component of the solidarity tax credit. Without the slip, a tenant client is generally unable to claim that component.

Who has to issue one

The obligation falls on the owner of the immovable. Any person or company that leased a dwelling for which rent was paid or payable on 31 December must file the RL-31 with Revenu Québec and provide a copy to the tenant or subtenant (Revenu Québec — RL-31 slip obligations).

The word doing the work there is any. This is not a rule aimed at property-management companies. It applies equally to a retired couple renting out the lower duplex they have owned for thirty years, who have no payroll system, no accountant, and no annual reminder that February carries a filing obligation. Revenu Québec provides penalties for failure or delay under the Tax Administration Act, but a penalty regime does not help your client in March.

The deadline, and why late February is the pivot

The RL-31 is due at the end of February following the year concerned — the same window as the federal and Québec income slips. The CRA states the federal rule plainly:

"The filing due date is the last day of February after the preceding calendar year."

— Canada Revenue Agency, When to file information returns

When the last day of February falls on a weekend, the deadline rolls to the next business day. For the 2025 tax year that pushed both the T4 and the Québec relevés to Monday 2 March 2026.

The practical consequence for scheduling: a Québec file is not reviewable before the first week of March, and the RL-31 is the item most likely to still be outstanding when the rest of the package is complete. Firms that open Québec files in mid-February generally end up handling the same client three separate times.

Why this particular slip goes missing

It is worth being precise about the mechanism, because it determines how you chase it.

• No institutional sender. A T4 is produced by payroll software that generates every slip at once. An RL-31 may be produced by one person, by hand, once a year.
• No relationship with the preparer. A landlord has no reason to know their tenant has an accountant, and no channel to send anything to that accountant.
• The client may not know it exists. Tenants who have always claimed the credit through a previous preparer often do not know the slip is what makes it possible.
• It is not in any portal. Clients who now expect to download slips from an employer or bank portal have nowhere to look for this one.
• It arrives late and loose. When it does come, it is typically a single photographed page in a text message, well after the rest of the file was assembled.

That last point is the document-handling problem. The RL-31 almost never arrives with the rest of the package — it arrives afterwards, as a phone photo, and has to be inserted into a bundle you have already assembled and possibly already exported.

Where it belongs in the merged client PDF

Because it substantiates a credit rather than reporting income, the RL-31 belongs with credit-support documents, not with the income slips. A workable default order:

1. Federal income slips — T4, T4A, then T5 / T3 / T5008.
2. Québec mirror slips — each RL-1 directly after its matching T4, then RL-2 and RL-3.
3. Credit support — RL-31 first, then RL-24 (childcare), then medical and donation receipts.
4. Everything else — notices of assessment, instalment records, correspondence.

Putting the RL-31 at the head of the credit-support section is a small habit with real payoff: it is the item most likely to be absent, so if it is always in the same position, its absence is visible at a glance instead of being discovered at review time.

Handling the late phone photo without redoing the bundle

The workflow problem is narrow and recurring: a merged client PDF exists, and a single rotated JPEG of an RL-31.CS arrives three days later.

Done by hand, that means opening the export, rotating the image, converting it, finding the right insertion point among forty pages, re-bookmarking and re-exporting — five to ten minutes for one page, repeated across however many tenant clients a Québec practice carries.

PDF Insight handles this on your own machine: on-device OCR reads the photographed slip even when it was captured at an angle, recognises it as an RL-31, and places it in the credit-support position in the client's merged PDF. Nothing is uploaded in order to identify the page — which matters here, because an RL-31 carries the client's name and home address.

That privacy point is not abstract for this slip. A free online PDF tool is a tempting way to convert one photo, but an RL-31 identifies where your client lives. Sending it to an ad-supported third-party server to save five minutes is difficult to justify to a client who asks.

The wider context: a digital pipeline fed by hand

Slip handling is now the manual residue of an otherwise electronic process. In the 2025 tax-filing season the CRA processed 33,839,390 individual returns, of which 93% were filed electronically — 60% through EFILE by preparers and 33% through NETFILE, with only 7% on paper (CRA — individual income tax return statistics).

The return leaves the office in minutes. The documents that justify it still arrive as photographs from a landlord. For Québec preparers the RL-31 is the sharpest example of that gap — a single page, from a non-institutional sender, that can hold up an otherwise finished file.