Moving to Canada for Work or PR: The First-90-Days Money Guide for Indians, From SIN to the Cost-Base Reset on Your Indian Assets

You have a Canadian job offer or a confirmation of permanent residence, a one-way ticket, and a vague plan to "sort the money side out once I land". That plan is where Indians arriving in Canada lose the most, not to fraud or bad luck, but to two or three decisions made in the wrong order in the first three months. The newcomer who opens a bank account before getting a SIN, lets the bank pull a credit check that finds nothing and dings a thin file, sells Indian mutual funds in month two without recording their landing-day value, and tells the Indian bank nothing about the move, has quietly created four problems that a different sequence would have avoided entirely.

The 30-second answer: Land, then in week one get your SIN (free, same-day at a Service Canada office or via the new SIN@Landing desks at major airports), open a newcomer chequing account with no fee for 12 months at RBC, TD or Scotiabank, and take a secured or newcomer no-credit-history credit card to start a Canadian credit file from zero. From your landing date you are a Canadian tax resident taxed on worldwide income, but Income Tax Act section 128.1(1)(c) deems you to have acquired your Indian shares, funds and gold at their fair-market value on landing day, so Canada taxes only post-landing gains. Record every landing-day value. The India-Canada DTAA caps Indian tax on NRO interest at 15% and gives you a foreign tax credit so no rupee is taxed twice.

This guide is for the Indian professional who is actually moving, on a closed or open work permit, or as a new PR, not someone still dreaming about it. It assumes you already know the difference between an NRE and an NRO account; if you do not, read the NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts guide first. What follows is the part that costs real money: the exact order to do things in your first ninety days with Canadian dollar figures, the landing-day cost-base reset almost no relocation blog explains, how the India-Canada treaty actually works on your Indian accounts, and what to do with the PPF and the NRE deposits you are leaving behind.

The first 90 days, in the order that actually matters

Most relocation checklists are alphabetical or random. The order matters because each step unlocks the next, and getting it wrong wastes weeks. Here is the sequence I would run, with the money attached.

Week one is documents. The single most important number you will get in Canada is your Social Insurance Number (SIN), the nine-digit identifier Service Canada issues to everyone who works, files taxes, or claims federal benefits here. It is free. By federal rule your employer needs it within three days of your start date, so this is not optional and not slow. As a PR your SIN starts with a digit from 1 to 8 and never expires. On a work permit it starts with 9 and carries an expiry date that matches your permit, which matters later when you renew. Three routes exist: in person at a Service Canada Centre, often issued the same day; online via eSIN, about five business days; or by mail, up to twenty business days. As of 2025-2026 there is also SIN@Landing at select airports, where PRs and temporary residents can get the SIN before they leave arrivals, and SIN@Entry, which bundles the SIN into your IRCC secure account so the confirmation letter appears there without a separate application. Use the airport desk if it is offered; otherwise go in person in week one.

Week one or two is the bank account. Do not walk into a branch and open a standard account; ask specifically for the newcomer package. RBC's Newcomer Advantage, TD's New to Canada banking, and Scotiabank's StartRight all waive the monthly chequing fee for the first 12 months and bundle a credit card you can get with no Canadian credit history. Concretely, that saves you roughly CAD 16.95 a month, about CAD 200 over the year, on a Scotia Preferred Package that otherwise demands a CAD 4,000 minimum balance to waive the fee. Bring your passport, work permit or PR confirmation (the COPR or PR card), and proof of a Canadian address if you have one. You do not need a job letter to open the account. Open the account before your salary starts so the first paycheque has somewhere to land.

Weeks two to four is credit. This is where the lifelong-resident advantage is invisible and brutal: your Indian CIBIL score, however pristine, does not cross the border. Every newcomer starts with no Canadian credit file at all, and the score range you are climbing toward runs from 300 to 900, tracked by Equifax and TransUnion. A score below the low 600s gets you declined or charged punitive rates on a phone plan, a car lease, and eventually a mortgage. The fix is to start a file deliberately. The newcomer credit cards from the three big banks are issued without a credit history, often with limits up to CAD 15,000, because the bank holds your account relationship as comfort. If you are declined, take a secured credit card, where you deposit (say) CAD 500 and that becomes your limit. Either way, the behaviour that builds the score is the same: charge a small recurring bill to it, pay the statement in full and on time every month, and keep utilisation under about 30% of the limit. Most newcomers establish a credit file within 3 to 6 months and reach the 650 to 700 range within 12 to 18 months of disciplined use. There is no shortcut and no point paying anyone who promises one. The mechanics, including the trap of closing your first card too early, are in building credit history abroad.

Put the first ninety days on a single arrival budget so you are not surprised. A realistic newcomer cash runway in a city like Toronto or Vancouver looks like this. First-and-last-month rent on a one-bedroom runs about CAD 2,200 a month, so CAD 4,400 up front. A phone plan is CAD 40 to 60 a month. Transit is roughly CAD 150 a month. Groceries for one, CAD 400 to 500 a month. A basic furniture and kitchen setup, CAD 1,500 to 2,500 if you buy mostly used. Provincial health coverage has a waiting period in some provinces (Ontario removed its three-month OHIP wait, but British Columbia's MSP has historically had one), so budget CAD 100 to 200 a month for private interim health insurance until your provincial card is active. Add it up and a single professional should land with about CAD 12,000 to 15,000 of accessible funds to cover the first three months comfortably, more for a family. The proof-of-funds figure IRCC requires for Express Entry is a separate, regulated minimum and is covered in Canada Express Entry for Indians; this is the real cash-flow number, which is usually higher than the bare minimum.

The day you land, Canada starts taxing your worldwide income

This is the conceptual shift that catches Indians hardest, because as an NRI you got used to India taxing only your Indian income. Canada is the opposite. From the day you become a Canadian tax resident, Canada taxes your worldwide income: your Canadian salary, yes, but also your Indian rent, your NRO interest, your NRE interest, your Indian dividends, and your capital gains, whether or not a single rupee ever leaves India.

When does residency start? Not on a fixed day count like India's 182-day test, but on the day you establish significant residential ties: a home you can live in, a spouse or dependants who move with you, and to a lesser extent a Canadian bank account, a driving licence, provincial health coverage. For someone arriving with a job and a lease, that is effectively the landing date. The relief in year one is that you are a part-year resident: you only report worldwide income from the date residency begins, not for the whole calendar year. Income you earned as a pure non-resident before you landed stays outside the Canadian net.

Here is the part that matters for your Indian portfolio and that almost no relocation guide states plainly. Under Income Tax Act section 128.1(1)(c), the moment you become a Canadian tax resident you are deemed to have acquired most of the property you own at its fair market value on that date. This is the deemed-acquisition rule, and it is a gift. It gives every asset you carry into Canada a fresh Canadian cost base equal to its value on landing day. Canada will only ever tax the gain that accrues after you land. The years of growth you built up as an NRI are simply not Canada's to tax.

Put real numbers on that. Suppose Arjun lands in Toronto on 15 June 2026 holding Indian equity mutual funds he bought years ago for Rs 20,00,000, now worth Rs 50,00,000 on landing day, which at roughly Rs 61 to the Canadian dollar is about CAD 82,000. Two years later he sells them for the equivalent of CAD 95,000.

Because of section 128.1(1)(c), his Canadian cost base is the landing-day value, CAD 82,000, not what he originally paid. His Canadian capital gain is CAD 95,000 minus CAD 82,000 = CAD 13,000. Only 50% of a capital gain is taxable in Canada, so CAD 6,500 is added to his income and taxed at his marginal rate, say 30%, costing about CAD 1,950.

Now the counterfactual that shows the size of the gift. Had the deemed-acquisition rule not existed and Canada taxed him from his original Rs 20,00,000 cost (about CAD 33,000 at landing-day rates), his taxable gain would have been CAD 95,000 minus CAD 33,000 = CAD 62,000, half of which, CAD 31,000, is taxable, costing roughly CAD 9,300 at the same rate. The reset saved him about CAD 7,350 in Canadian tax on a single holding, purely for having recorded the landing-day value. The catch is that the value is your burden to prove. The CRA does not stamp your portfolio on arrival. So on or very close to your landing day, take a dated screenshot or statement of every holding's value: your demat account, every mutual fund folio, gold, and any other investment. That dated record is your future tax shield, and reconstructing it three years later when you sell is far harder.

One genuine wrinkle to be honest about: Indian real estate is treated differently in mechanics from a deemed disposition standpoint (it is "taxable Canadian property" only by analogy, and the technical path differs from listed securities), but the practical outcome is the same, Canada taxes the post-landing gain, and the same imperative applies, get a dated valuation of any Indian property on your landing date. For property, an arm's-length valuation from a registered valuer near the landing date is worth the few thousand rupees it costs.

The India-Canada DTAA: how the same rupee avoids being taxed twice

Once Canada taxes your worldwide income and India still taxes the income that arises in India, you face the obvious risk of paying tax twice on the same rupee. The India-Canada Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement exists to stop that, and the mechanism for a Canada-resident NRI is almost always the foreign tax credit: you pay the Indian tax, then Canada gives you a credit for it against the Canadian tax on the same income, so you effectively pay the higher of the two rates, not the sum.

The treaty also caps Indian withholding on certain income. Under Article 11, India's tax on your NRO account interest is capped at 15% for a Canadian resident, against the 30%-plus that domestic Indian rules would otherwise apply. To claim the 15% cap you must give your Indian bank a Tax Residency Certificate (TRC) from the CRA and a completed Form 10F filed on the Indian tax portal, and you need an Indian PAN. Without those, the bank deducts at the higher domestic rate and you chase the difference as a refund. The full documentation walkthrough is in DTAA relief for NRIs.

Now the asymmetry that surprises people, and it is the opposite of the UAE story you may have read. The India-UAE treaty can take Indian tax on share gains to zero. The India-Canada treaty does not. India retains the right to tax your Indian capital gains and your NRO interest, so as a Canada resident you pay the Indian tax and claim the Canadian foreign tax credit. There is no zero-tax route here; the treaty's job is to prevent double tax, not to eliminate tax.

And the line that catches almost every new arrival: your NRE interest, which is fully exempt in India, is fully taxable in Canada. The Indian exemption is a domestic Indian rule; it does not bind Canada, and the treaty does not exempt it either. So the NRE fixed deposit you set up precisely because it was tax-free now generates taxable Canadian income at your full marginal rate, with no Indian tax paid against which to claim a credit (because India charged none). For many newcomers this quietly makes the once-attractive NRE FD one of the worst places to hold money after landing.

See how that plays out. Priya keeps a large NRE fixed deposit earning Rs 4,00,000 of interest in a year, about CAD 6,550. In India she pays zero tax on it. In Canada she must declare the full CAD 6,550 as income, and at a 30% marginal rate that is roughly CAD 1,965 of Canadian tax, with no foreign tax credit to offset it because India levied nothing.

Compare that with an NRO deposit earning the same Rs 4,00,000. India taxes the interest, capped at 15% under Article 11 with her TRC and Form 10F in place, so she pays about CAD 980 in India. In Canada she declares the same CAD 6,550, computes roughly CAD 1,965 of Canadian tax, and claims a foreign tax credit for the CAD 980 already paid in India, leaving about CAD 985 of Canadian tax. Her total tax across both countries is about CAD 1,965 either way, the Canadian rate, because the FTC equalises it. The point is not that NRO is cheaper overall, it usually nets to the same total, but that with the NRE deposit you get no credit for the Indian exemption, and the planning move is to stop treating NRE FDs as tax-free once you are a Canadian resident and to weigh whether that money is better deployed in a TFSA or paying down Canadian debt.

What to do with your Indian accounts and the PPF

The first compliance step is one almost nobody does: when your status changes to non-resident, you are required to inform your Indian bank and convert your resident savings accounts to NRO (and open an NRE account for repatriable income). Leaving a resident savings account running after you become an NRI is technically non-compliant under FEMA, and it complicates everything downstream. Do this in the first month or two.

The PPF is the account that trips up the most people, so be precise. If you opened your PPF while you were a resident Indian, you may continue contributing to it until its 15-year maturity, you do not have to shut it the day you become an NRI. What you cannot do as an NRI is extend it in five-year blocks the way a resident can. At maturity, closure is mandatory for an NRI, with no exception, and the proceeds can be credited only to your NRO account. You must also notify the bank or post office of your change in status within a month. The honest framing: let an existing PPF run to maturity if you are close, because the returns are decent and tax-free in India, but the Canadian side is the catch, the PPF interest is taxable in Canada year by year as it accrues for a Canadian resident, even though it is tax-free in India, so the headline PPF return is not the after-Canadian-tax return. Do not open a new PPF expecting an NRI to be able to; you cannot open one as a non-resident anyway.

There is one large reporting obligation that catches Indians with assets back home: Form T1135. If the total cost of your specified foreign property exceeds CAD 100,000 at any point in the year, you must file T1135 with your Canadian return. That threshold is easy to cross. NRE and NRO balances, Indian shares, mutual funds, the PPF, rental property, even Indian LIC policies count toward it. The penalty for not filing is CAD 25 a day, up to CAD 2,500 per year, and it climbs for repeated or grossful failures. Critically, the first-year part-year residents get a break: in the year you land, you generally do not have to file T1135 for that first year, but from the next full tax year onward you do if you cross the threshold. Track your aggregate Indian holdings against the CAD 100,000 line from day one so the filing is never a surprise.

Two more points on the Indian side. First, your FCNR deposits, if you hold any, retain their character and the interest is generally tax-free in India, but like NRE interest it is taxable in Canada, so the same logic applies. Second, if you have Indian mutual funds and any prospect of later moving to the United States, be aware that the US treats most Indian mutual funds as PFICs with punitive tax, and Canada does not have that regime, so do not casually keep accumulating Indian funds if a US move is plausible.

RRSP, TFSA, and where a newcomer actually saves first

Canada gives residents two flagship tax-advantaged accounts, and newcomers consistently get the order wrong. The TFSA (Tax-Free Savings Account) lets money grow and be withdrawn entirely tax-free, with a 2026 annual room of CAD 7,000. The RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan) gives you a tax deduction now and taxes withdrawals later, with 2026 room of up to 18% of your prior year's earned income, to a maximum of CAD 33,810.

The newcomer trap is assuming you can max both immediately. You cannot. RRSP room is built from the previous year's Canadian earned income. In your first calendar year of work you had little or none, so your RRSP room for that year is minimal, and the meaningful RRSP room appears in your second year, once a full year of Canadian salary has generated it. The TFSA is friendlier but not as generous as you might hope: you start accruing TFSA room from the year you become a resident, at CAD 7,000 a year, and you do not inherit the back-years that a lifelong resident has accumulated (a Canadian resident since 2009 has CAD 109,000 of room; you start fresh from your arrival year).

So the practical first-year sequence is: build a cash emergency buffer of three to six months' expenses (roughly CAD 9,000 to 18,000 for a single professional), then fund the TFSA up to CAD 7,000 with money you will not need short-term, then from year two layer in RRSP contributions as room appears, ideally enough to push you below a tax bracket threshold. One honest caveat that matters for the mobile Indian professional: the US does not recognise the TFSA and treats it as a foreign trust with onerous reporting, so if there is a realistic chance you move from Canada to the US later, do not load up a TFSA you may have to unwind. For that reader the RRSP, which the US-Canada treaty does respect, is the safer long-term vehicle. The cross-border retirement trade-offs are in NRI retirement planning across two countries.

Remitting your savings, and the order to bring money in

Most people arrive with a chunk of rupee savings they want to deploy in Canada, and the instinct is to wire it all over on day one. Slow down, because two things interact: the exchange rate and the tax base.

On the tax side, money you already owned before landing is capital, not income, and bringing your own savings into Canada is not a taxable event, you are moving your own money, not earning anything. So there is no Canadian tax cost to remitting your pre-landing savings whenever you like. The thing to get right is the landing-day record again: if those savings sit in Indian deposits and earn interest after you land, that post-landing interest is taxable in Canada, which is another reason not to let large idle balances sit in NRE FDs once you are a resident.

On the mechanics, do not use your bank's retail wire for large transfers; the spread is brutal. Specialist remittance services routinely beat a bank's telegraphic-transfer rate by 1 to 2%, which on a CAD 50,000 transfer is CAD 500 to 1,000 saved for ten minutes of comparison. Repatriating from an NRE account is freely allowed; from an NRO account you can remit up to USD 1 million per financial year with the Form 15CA/15CB certification, the standard NRI repatriation route covered in the NRE, NRO and FCNR guide. Stagger large transfers across a few tranches rather than one lump if the rupee is volatile, and time them to your actual Canadian cash needs (rent deposit, furniture, the emergency buffer) rather than parking converted CAD in a low-interest chequing account.

Edge cases

You arrive partway through the year and still have an Indian residency overlap. In the financial year you leave India, you may still be an Indian tax resident or fall into RNOR status depending on your day count under Section 6. That can mean you file both an Indian return for part of the year and a Canadian part-year return for the rest. The two systems run on different calendars (India's financial year is April to March; Canada's tax year is the calendar year), so a single move spans up to three filing periods. The residency mechanics on the India side are in NRI residency and RNOR rules.

You are on a closed work permit, not PR. Your SIN starts with 9 and expires with your permit, so when you renew the permit you must also update the SIN expiry with Service Canada, or you become unable to be legally paid. Set a reminder ninety days before permit expiry. Your tax residency, the deemed-acquisition reset, and the worldwide-income rule work the same regardless of permit type; they key off residential ties, not immigration status.

You keep Indian property and rent it out. That rent is taxable in India (subject to TDS) and, from your landing date, also taxable in Canada on your worldwide income. You claim a foreign tax credit for the Indian tax. Keep the landing-day valuation of the property for the eventual capital-gains computation, and remember the property pushes you over the T1135 threshold almost on its own.

You sell Indian assets in the same window as landing. If you sell before you become a Canadian resident, the gain is outside Canada's net entirely (only India taxes it). If you sell after, the deemed-acquisition reset means Canada taxes only the gain above landing-day value. The few days around your landing date can therefore change which country taxes a large gain, so if a big sale is imminent, get the timing advised rather than guessed.

The closing read

The honest read is that moving to Canada is the rare case where doing the boring admin in the right order genuinely saves you thousands of Canadian dollars, and where the single most valuable thing you can do takes ten minutes and costs nothing: on your landing day, record the fair-market value of every Indian asset you own. That dated record is the cost-base reset under section 128.1(1)(c), and it is the difference between Canada taxing only your post-landing gains and Canada taxing years of growth you accumulated as an NRI.

So for the typical Indian professional landing on a job or PR: get the SIN in week one (use the airport desk if offered), open a newcomer bank account with the fee waived for a year, start a Canadian credit file immediately with a newcomer or secured card and never miss a payment, and treat your landing date as the line in the sand for tax, capturing every asset value that day. On the Indian side, convert your resident accounts, let an existing PPF run to maturity but stop expecting it to be tax-free once Canada taxes the interest, and stop treating NRE deposits as tax-free, because they are not once you are a Canadian resident. Fund a cash buffer, then the TFSA, then the RRSP from year two, with the one exception that a possible future US move argues for the RRSP over the TFSA. And file T1135 from your second year if your Indian holdings cross CAD 100,000, because the CAD 25-a-day penalty is pure avoidable loss. The genuinely complex cases, a large asset sale straddling the landing date, a property with no clean valuation, an overlap year with India, are the moments to pay a cross-border accountant who handles India-Canada files, not to rely on a blog, this one included.

Related guides

• The financial checklist for moving abroad
• Canada Express Entry for Indians
• Building a credit history abroad from scratch
• NRI residency and RNOR rules
• DTAA relief for NRIs
• NRI retirement planning across two countries
• NRE, NRO and FCNR accounts explained
• All Jobs and relocation guides
• All Taxation guides
• All Banking guides
• All Visa guides

This guide is educational and general in nature. It is not individual tax or immigration advice. Cross-border outcomes depend on your exact residency dates, holdings, province, and treaty position, and Canadian and Indian rules change, so confirm your specific situation with a qualified cross-border accountant and, where relevant, an immigration professional before you act.