It appears the tax software is allowing the taxpayer to claim this credit on attendant care expenses at a long-term care facility. Does this make sense? I thought the tax credit offered intended to keep individuals out of long-term care facilities. What are your thoughts?
You can claim the Disability Tax Credit OR the nursing home costs, but NOT both.
Pat Gamborg
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I wondered the same thing. Just a poorly named refundable medical expense credit.
Credit to @snoplowguy for straightening me out.
There is no requirement for the senior to be living in their own home in order to qualify for the Seniors Care at Home Tax Credit.
Notice the word “including” expenses that support aging at home?
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Overview
The Ontario Seniors Care at Home Tax Credit is a refundable personal income tax credit to help low- to moderate-income seniors with eligible medical expenses, including expenses that support aging at home.
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We have been struggling with this at our office too! The verbage on the website definitely makes it vague, but I definitely agree that it seems like all eligible medical expenses, including nursing homes, would be eligible based on that key word “including”. We have submitted a request to the CRA for an official ruling on this and should have it within 3-5 biz days. Will post the ruling!
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Looking forward to getting that clarification. The cutoff is $65,000 for combined family income. Seems that someone staying in a public funded senior facility will be getting a refund, which seems odd.
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Hi all! We got an answer from the CRA. They basically (bluntly) referred us to the eligibility of what goes onto the 479. So if it’s an eligible medical expense in Ontario, it can be claimed. As mentioned above, the key word is “including.”
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Thanks for posting your answer from CRA.
Another interesting scenario for this credit is that the taxpayer passes away in the year and has nursing home expenses; therefore, the estate would qualify to receive this refundable tax credit. I do not see any exclusions in the year of death.
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There are no exclusions in the year of death.
Either the deceased individual can make the claim or if there is a surviving spouse they can make the claim.
Another interesting scenario … it also seems the medical expenses can be split between spouses in order to further leverage the Ontario seniors care at home tax credit… and make the claim for both spouses. 
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But in this same scenario…year of death (death occurred on July 12, 2022); it says on the “Ontario Information Guide” at Canada.ca not to include the net income of the deceased person in the calculation of your family’s net income,yet Tax Cycle adds the income on line 8 of Form ON479.
I posted this software bug back in March but the response was crickets.
The workaround if you are using TaxCycle is to over-ride line 8 to make it zero on the Seniors Care at Home Tax Credit worksheet. I had attached a screenshot in my topic.
How is the Ontario Seniors care at home tax credit different than the Ontario Senior’s home safety tax credit? In the example of eligible expenses, it seems that most items in the latter are attached to the home but there are some duplicates in both (ie “bathroom aids for example, grab bars, grips, rails”). Can one claim BOTH credits? They are both refundable and the Home Safety credit is not indexed on income.
Did you ever receive a response on this? We are now having Notice of Assessments come in from CRA for deceased individuals who are claiming the credit and having the amount calculated/assessed by CRA to include both souses’ net incomes - not just the net income of the deceased spouse (FYI we use a different tax prep. software that wasn’t including the surviving spouse’s net income in the calculation of the amount of the tax credit – i.e. no override required).
I had the opposite. One which I filed including both incomes was assessed removing the spouse income.
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I had two of these. In both instances I did not include the deceased spouse’s income (had to do an over-ride in TaxCycle) and they were both assessed as filed.
This is very black and white. TaxCycle is not calculating it properly.
My feeling is you should print the part of the guide that I referenced above and send it into the CRA with a notice of objection, as it seems they likely assessed the return(s) improperly.
Now fixed in the latest release.
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