CDCP eligibility comes down to four requirements you have to meet all at once, and the one that decides most cases is an adjusted family net income below $90,000. The other three are that you have no access to private dental insurance or coverage of any kind, that you and your spouse or common-law partner have filed your tax returns in Canada, and that you are both Canadian residents for tax purposes. What moves the answer for individual people is rarely the income figure. It is the insurance question, which is stricter than almost everyone expects, the code printed in box 45 of a T4 slip, whether a spouse’s plan quietly covers you, and, this year in particular, whether you renewed before the deadline that passed on June 1, 2026.

CDCP Eligibility and Application Facts for the 2026-2027 Benefit Period

• Income ceiling: adjusted family net income must be less than $90,000. This is not your gross salary. It is a calculated figure, and the Government of Canada publishes the exact equation using line numbers from your tax return.
• Co-payment at under $70,000: the plan covers 100% of eligible services at CDCP established fees, and your co-payment is 0%. You can still owe money beyond that, which is explained further down.
• Co-payment at $70,000 to $79,999: the plan covers 60%, you cover 40% of the established fees.
• Co-payment at $80,000 to $89,999: the plan covers 40%, you cover 60% of the established fees.
• Current benefit period: July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2027. Applications for it are open now.
• Renewals: closed. The renewal window for the 2025-2026 period ended June 1, 2026. Renewals for 2027-2028 open in spring 2027.
• If you missed the renewal: you submit a new application instead. There will be a gap in coverage, and care received during that gap is not covered and not reimbursed retroactively.
• The tax slip check: box 45 on a T4, box 015 on a T4A. Code 1 means no access to dental coverage. Codes 2, 3, 4 or 5 mean coverage was offered to you or your family.
• Eligibility review deadline: 45 days from the date on the Notice of Eligibility Review letter. Documents that arrive late may not be considered.
• Cost to apply: nothing. There is no fee to apply or renew, which is the fastest way to spot a scam.
• Enrolment in Ontario: 1,962,231 members in the 2026-2027 period as of August 31, 2026, against 2,604,265 in 2025-2026.
• Service Canada CDCP line: 1-833-537-4342, 8:30 am to 4:30 pm local time, Monday to Friday. Average wait in August 2026 was 13 minutes.

The Terms That Decide Your Application, in Plain Language

• Adjusted family net income: your family net income minus universal child care benefit and registered disability savings plan income received, plus any of those amounts repaid. It is the number the plan tests.
• Access to dental insurance: being offered coverage, whether or not you take it, use it, or pay a premium for it. Having access disqualifies you.
• Benefit period: the twelve months your coverage runs for. Every one of them ends on June 30.
• Renewal: the yearly confirmation that you still meet all four requirements. It is not automatic and it has a hard deadline.
• Co-payment: the percentage of the CDCP established fee that you pay to the provider instead of the plan.
• CDCP established fee: the amount the plan has decided a service is worth. It is not necessarily what a dental office charges.
• Attestation: your statement on the application that you have no access to private coverage. The plan accepts it up front and checks it later.
• Member eligibility review: the audit that follows if your attestation does not match your tax slips. It arrives as a letter in the mail.
• Preauthorization: approval the plan gives before certain treatments go ahead. Not every request is approved.
• MSCA: My Service Canada Account, the federal account you apply and renew through. It is not CRA My Account, and the two are often confused.
• Coverage start date: the date your benefits begin, which depends on when your application was received and processed. It is not the date you applied.

Whether you personally qualify is not something an article can settle, and the honest answer for a lot of households sits in the insurance question rather than the income one. Only Health Canada and Service Canada decide eligibility. A dental office does not, cannot, and should not be asked to. Your income figure comes from a tax return that has already been assessed, your insurance status comes from what your employer or pension plan reported on a tax slip, and those two things together produce an answer that may surprise you in either direction. One caution before you go further: do not cancel existing dental coverage to qualify. The Ontario Dental Association advises against cancelling existing coverage because the CDCP will not replace those benefits, and for some households care under the CDCP can cost more than care under a private plan.

Key Takeaways

• Four requirements, all of them at once: no access to private dental insurance, tax return filed, adjusted family net income under $90,000, Canadian resident for tax purposes. Missing any one of them ends the application.
• The insurance rule is the strict one. You are excluded if coverage was offered through work, a pension, a family member’s plan, a professional or student organization, or a health spending account, even if you never enrolled and never used it.
• There is one exception, and it is narrow. You may still qualify if you retired and opted out of pension dental coverage before December 11, 2023 and cannot opt back in. Opting out after that date does not help.
• Renewals closed on June 1, 2026. If you had coverage last year and did not renew, you re-apply now, and there is a gap until the new application is approved.
• Care received during a coverage gap is not reimbursed later. This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole plan.
• Check box 45 on your T4 or box 015 on your T4A before you attest, and check your spouse’s slips too. A mismatch is what triggers an eligibility review.
• A 0% co-payment does not mean free. The plan pays its own established fees, which may be lower than what a dental office charges, and the difference is yours.
• Coverage under a provincial program such as Healthy Smiles Ontario or ODSP does not disqualify you. Benefits are coordinated so nothing is paid twice.
• If you are selected for review you have 45 days from the letter date to send documents signed by the employer or pension plan that reported the coverage.
• Applying is free. Anyone asking you to pay a fee to apply, renew, or check your status is running a scam.

The four CDCP eligibility requirements, in full

The plan is unusually clear about this. There are four requirements, they are not weighted, and you must meet all of them. The Canadian Dental Care Plan information page for our Vaughan practice lists the same four, because they come straight from Health Canada and nobody gets to interpret them locally.

Notice how much of that table is about somebody else. Three of the four requirements reach into a spouse or common-law partner’s situation, and that is where a lot of applications quietly go wrong. People check their own payslip, their own tax return, their own benefits booklet, and never think to look at their partner’s.

Requirement 1: no access to private dental insurance or coverage

This is the requirement that disqualifies most people who think they qualify, and it is worth reading slowly. You are excluded if you have access to dental coverage through your work or pension plan, a family member’s work or pension plan, a professional or student organization, or any insurance purchased by you or a family member, including top-up and supplementary coverage. Health spending accounts that can be used for dental costs count as coverage.

The wording that catches people is “access”. You are not eligible even if you have never used the coverage, decided not to enrol in it, have to pay a premium for it, or if it does not cover the full cost of your dental care. Being offered it is enough.

There is exactly one exception. You may still be eligible if you are retired, you opted out of dental coverage through your pension plan before December 11, 2023, and you cannot opt back in. If you opted out after that date, the exception does not apply, whether or not you can rejoin.

Requirement 2: you filed your tax return in Canada

You and your spouse or common-law partner must have filed your tax returns in Canada for the previous year so that your family income can be assessed. This one is simple, but it has a timing consequence people underestimate. If you have not filed, you cannot be assessed, and if you cannot be assessed, the application stalls. For renewals in particular, the sequence is file, receive your notice of assessment, then renew.

Requirement 3: your adjusted family net income is less than $90,000

Not your salary. Not your household gross. Adjusted family net income, which is a specific calculation.

For most households with straightforward employment income and no UCCB or RDSP amounts, the adjusted figure is simply line 23600 added across both partners. For families receiving those benefits it can be meaningfully lower than the headline number, which occasionally puts a household inside the threshold when they assumed they were out. Give it two minutes with a tax return before deciding you do not qualify.

Requirement 4: you are a Canadian resident for tax purposes

You and your spouse or common-law partner must be Canadian residents for tax purposes so that your full family income can be assessed. Residency for tax purposes is a separate question from citizenship or immigration status. If yours is genuinely unclear, ask the Canada Revenue Agency, not a dental office.

The tax slip check almost nobody does before applying

This step prevents most eligibility reviews, and it takes about thirty seconds.

Under the Dental Care Measures Act, employers and pension plan administrators have to report whether they offered dental coverage to you and your family. That report shows up as a single digit on a tax slip.

If the code on your slip says you had access and you believe that is wrong, the fix is not to argue with Service Canada. It is to contact the employer or pension plan administrator who reported it and get the information confirmed or corrected before you complete the application. Doing it in that order saves a great deal of trouble later, because if you apply and the slip contradicts you, you may be asked to prove you no longer have access, and that proof has to come from the same employer or plan anyway.

I find this is the part people are most surprised by. The plan is attestation-based, which sounds relaxed, and it is at the front end. You tick a box, and the application may well be accepted. The checking happens afterwards, on a timeline you do not control.

Renewals are closed, and what that means if you are reading this now

This is the part of the CDCP picture that has changed most in 2026, and a lot of pages still describe the old situation.

The renewal period for the 2025-2026 benefit period closed on June 1, 2026. It is not reopening. Health Canada states that renewals for the 2027-2028 benefit period will open in spring 2027, which leaves a long stretch where the word “renew” simply does not apply to anybody.

If you had coverage for 2025-2026 and you did not renew by that deadline, you are not locked out. You submit a new application for the current 2026-2027 benefit period instead, and applications for it are open. What you cannot avoid is the gap.

The gap is the expensive part

Oral health care you receive during a gap in coverage is not covered and will not be reimbursed retroactively. That sentence does a lot of quiet damage every year. Someone whose coverage lapsed at the end of June books a cleaning in August, assumes the paperwork will sort itself out once the new application goes through, and discovers afterwards that the plan does not backdate. The claim cannot be submitted, and paying out of pocket does not create a reimbursement route either, because the CDCP pays providers rather than patients.

So the practical order is: apply first, wait for the coverage start date, then book anything that can reasonably wait. Anything that cannot reasonably wait is a different decision, and a genuine dental emergency should not be delayed for paperwork. If you are weighing that up, our guide on when dental pain needs urgent care and when it can wait for a dentist is a more useful place to start than a coverage calculator.

How many people this affected

There is a number attached to this, and it is larger than I expected when I went looking for it.

Health Canada publishes CDCP enrolment by province. As of August 31, 2026, Ontario had 1,962,231 enrolled members in the 2026-2027 benefit period. In the 2025-2026 period, Ontario had 2,604,265. Nationally the same comparison runs 4,764,250 against 6,321,601.

I want to be careful with this comparison rather than dramatic about it. The 2026-2027 figure is a snapshot taken two months into a twelve-month period, and the 2025-2026 figure is a full period that had a year to accumulate, so the two are not measuring quite the same thing and the gap will narrow as more applications are processed. But the shape of it still tells you something, particularly if you are one of the people in it. Renewal is not automatic, a lot of households did not complete it, and and the fix is an application, not a phone call asking to be reinstated.

How to apply for the CDCP, step by step

Applications for the 2026-2027 benefit period are open, and there are three routes in. None of them costs anything.

Before you start: what to have in front of you

You will need the following for each applicant, meaning yourself and any dependants, plus your spouse or common-law partner where applicable.

Something that confuses a lot of couples: you provide information about your spouse or common-law partner so the plan can confirm your marital status, calculate your adjusted family net income, and verify you do not have access to coverage through them. That is all it does. It does not enrol them. Your spouse or common-law partner has to submit their own application to be covered.

The three ways to apply

A note on the name, because it trips people up constantly: the account is My Service Canada Account, not CRA My Account. They are different federal accounts. Your tax information reaches the plan through the Canada Revenue Agency’s assessment of your return, but the application itself lives in MSCA.

If you choose the digital communications preference when you apply, notices come by email and through MSCA instead of by post. Given that eligibility review letters carry a 45-day clock, having them arrive somewhere you check regularly is not a trivial setting.

If somebody is helping you apply

Two different arrangements exist and they are not interchangeable.

A trusted person, which can be a friend, relative, caregiver, translator or interpreter, can help you apply as long as you are able to give clear consent that you agree to let them help.

A delegate is someone with legal authority to represent you and make decisions on your behalf, named on a document such as a power of attorney, mandate or trusteeship. A delegate has to prove that authority before they can apply for you. Original documents or certified copies go to Service Canada by mail or in person, with a cover letter giving your full name, your Social Insurance Number, a statement that the documents are for the CDCP, the delegate’s phone number, and a return address. For Ontario, the mailing address is Service Canada, Canadian Dental Care Plan, PO Box 5100, Station D, Scarborough, ON M1R 5C8. Once the documents are processed, Service Canada contacts the delegate to confirm, and only then can the delegate apply.

This matters most for families managing an application on behalf of an older parent, which is a large share of the plan given that people aged 65 and older are the single biggest group in it. Our guide to dental care for seniors and maintaining oral health later in life covers the clinical side of that same conversation.

What happens after you apply

The application is not the end of the process, and the two things people most want to know afterwards are whether it went through and when they can book something.

Checking your status

There is a CDCP Status Checker, and usefully, you do not need to sign in to MSCA to use it. You can also check by phone. Either way you need, for each person you are checking, an application code or client number, sometimes called a member ID, plus a Social Insurance Number.

The application code or client number is whichever of these you have: the number you received after applying online or by phone, the number in the top right corner of the CDCP letter Service Canada sent you by mail or through MSCA, or the number on the front of your CDCP member card. If a child does not have a SIN, you provide their full name and date of birth instead, and in that case the automated phone service will not work. You need either a representative or the online tool.

Your coverage start date

People who qualify receive a welcome package from Sun Life that includes a member card, co-payment information, and the date coverage begins. The Ontario Dental Association notes that the coverage start date is based on when your application is received and when you are enrolled, and varies for each person. It is not the date you applied and it is not a fixed processing interval that anybody can promise you.

Build your plans around that date. Book after the start date, not after the approval letter, and not in hopeful anticipation of either.

Managing your file afterwards

Through MSCA you can view your CDCP letters, view your information, update your access to other dental benefits, update contact information, and change communication preferences. Through the my Sun Life online account you can review plan details, view claims history, and download a printable member card. Sun Life also runs the CDCP Provider Search and a contact centre on 1-888-888-8110.

Updating your access to other dental benefits is the one that gets forgotten. If you start a job partway through the benefit period and it comes with dental coverage, that changes your eligibility, and the plan expects to hear about it before it turns up on next year’s tax slip.

What the plan pays, and what a 0% co-payment does not mean

Your co-payment is set by your adjusted family net income.

Now the part that causes the most disappointment at a front desk. A 0% co-payment does not mean free dental care. The plan covers a percentage of the CDCP established fee, which is the amount the plan has decided a service is worth. A dental office is free to charge its usual and standard fee, and where the two differ, the difference is yours to pay. Health Canada says this plainly, noting that you may still have to pay a portion of the cost even if the plan pays 100% of the CDCP established fees.

The Ontario Dental Association is blunter about the framing: the CDCP is a government dental benefit, not a free dental program.

The single most useful thing you can do about all of this is ask before treatment, not after. Ask what the office’s fee is, what the plan is expected to pay, and what you will owe on the day. Our breakdown of what a dental checkup and x-rays actually cost in Toronto gives a sense of the private fee picture that sits underneath those conversations, and there are equivalent breakdowns for root canal treatment by tooth type, tooth extractions, dental crowns and full and partial dentures.

There is also a structural point here. Only oral health providers get reimbursed under the CDCP. You should not be paying the full cost upfront and claiming it back, because there is no route for patients to be reimbursed. If you pay the whole thing yourself, that money does not come back.

What the plan covers, briefly

This article is about qualifying and applying, not coverage, and we have a separate and much longer piece on every service the CDCP covers, with its limits and exclusions. The short version is that the plan covers a wide range of ordinary dental care: examinations, x-rays, cleaning and scaling, fluoride, sealants, fillings, root canal treatment, treatment for gum disease including cleaning under the gum line, removal of teeth and roots, complete dentures, and nitrous oxide or oral sedation. Crowns, partial dentures, immediate dentures and overdentures are covered but need preauthorization first.

Some things are outside it entirely. Orthodontic services are currently not available under the plan, which is the answer to a question we get a lot and which our guide to what braces cost in Ontario deals with in more detail. Cosmetic treatment, including teeth whitening and veneers, is excluded, and so are dental implants. Exclusions are not appealable, which is a different thing from a preauthorization refusal.

The member eligibility review, and the 45-day clock

This is the least understood part of the CDCP and the part with the most money attached to getting it wrong.

The plan is attestation-based. When you apply or renew, you attest that you and your dependants have no access to private dental coverage, and the plan may accept that and enrol you. It then keeps reviewing applications after acceptance. If what you said does not match your T4 or T4A slips, or information from other sources, you may be selected for a member eligibility review.

You find out by letter in the post. The letter asks you to submit documents from your, or your spouse or common-law partner’s, work or pension plan showing that you and your dependants do not have access to private dental coverage.

The main document is the Canadian Dental Care Plan Member Eligibility Review Form, completed and signed by the work or pension plan that reported the access. If you provide alternative supporting documents instead, such as a letter confirming you were never offered coverage or the date your coverage ended, you still have to complete Section 1 of the form.

Whatever you send has to include your full name as it appears on the application, your CDCP Member ID, and a signature from an authorised representative such as a business owner, chief executive officer, human resources representative, or pension plan administrator. Only PDF, TIF, JPEG and PNG files are accepted by email. Multiple, duplicate or incomplete submissions are not processed, which is a strict rule and one to read twice before you hit send.

If the documents do not arrive by the deadline, you are determined ineligible and coverage ends. You may have to reimburse the Government of Canada for services the plan paid for while you were ineligible. And there is a sting in the tail: you cannot reapply until you have sent documents for review, repaid the full amount owed, and meet all the eligibility requirements at the time you apply.

The 2025 assessment error, and why people still ask about it

One specific episode comes up often enough that it deserves a mention. In October 2025, Health Canada issued a public statement about an error in which roughly 70,000 Canadians with active CDCP coverage were identified as ineligible or assessed at an incorrect co-payment level. According to the Ontario Dental Association, those affected were not required to repay the difference in co-payment or amounts covered for dental care received before October 24, 2025.

If you think you might have been caught by that, the route is Service Canada, not your dental office, and the ODA’s advice is a good habit regardless: bring any communication you receive from Health Canada about changes to your eligibility or coverage to your next dental appointment.

The CDCP alongside other government programs

A common and costly assumption is that provincial coverage rules you out. It does not.

If you have dental coverage through a provincial, territorial or federal government social program, you could still qualify for the CDCP, and where you qualify for both, the plans coordinate so that nothing is paid twice. The Ontario Dental Association confirms this specifically for Healthy Smiles Ontario and the Ontario Disability Support Program, and encourages people with those benefits to apply.

The ODA also publishes a figure that explains why. Provincial dental programs reimburse a dental office roughly $32 for every $100 of treatment. The CDCP reimburses close to $86 for every $100. That difference is the reason the ODA describes the CDCP as better funded than many provincial programs and encourages people who hold provincial coverage to apply anyway.

Private dental insurance works in the opposite direction. CDCP coverage and private dental coverage cannot be coordinated at all. If you have private insurance, claims go to your insurer as usual, and you are not eligible for the plan.

Where applications go wrong

The failures cluster in a handful of places, and almost none of them are about income.

There is no fee, and that is how you spot the scams

There is no fee to apply for or renew CDCP coverage. None. Any message by mail, phone, text or email asking for a payment, or for banking or credit card details, so that you can apply, renew, or check your status, is not the Government of Canada. The same goes for advertisements and pop-ups that are not on official Government of Canada websites.

If you are unsure whether something is genuine, the number to call is 1-833-537-4342, and you can reach the same line on TTY at 1-833-677-6262. From outside Canada it is 1-613-221-3227. General questions do not require identification, though questions about your own file do.

It also helps to know what the wait is likely to be. Health Canada publishes its own average call wait times, and they move with the season. The monthly average was 32 minutes in May 2026 and 23 minutes in June, during the renewal rush, then 22 minutes in July and 13 minutes in August. If your question can wait for a quiet week, it will cost you less of your afternoon. There is also an eServiceCanada request form for a callback within two business days, though it is not available for help with applying.

Using CDCP coverage at a dental office in Vaughan

Participation in the CDCP is voluntary for dental offices, and the Ontario Dental Association does not keep a list of participating providers. Sun Life does, through its CDCP Provider Search, and the ODA’s own advice is to start by asking your dentist directly whether they participate.

Marketplace Dentistry is a participating CDCP provider and accepts patients covered under the plan at our Vaughan office at 9360 Bathurst Street, serving Vaughan, Thornhill, Maple and Richmond Hill. Claims for covered services are submitted to Sun Life directly instead of being paid by you and claimed back, which is how the plan is designed to work everywhere.

If your dentist does not participate, they can still treat you. The costs simply will not be covered by the plan.

Bring your determination letter to your appointment if you have had a change of coverage or co-payment level. It saves a conversation, and it is the ODA’s own recommendation.

A last piece of advice that has nothing to do with paperwork. Do not delay dental care while you wait to find out whether you qualify. The ODA puts it about as directly as a professional association ever does: keep going for regular checkups now, because problems caught early are less painful and less expensive than problems caught late. If you are between coverage and worried about cost in the meantime, speak openly with the dental office instead of staying away.

If you would like to talk it through

Nobody at a dental office can tell you whether you qualify for the CDCP, and we will not pretend otherwise. Eligibility is decided by Health Canada and Service Canada, using your tax return and your tax slips, and the honest answer to “do I qualify” is usually “check box 45, then apply and find out”.

What we can do is look at your mouth, tell you what treatment you need, explain what the plan is likely to cover and what it is not, and give you a written estimate before anything starts. If you are in Vaughan, Thornhill, Maple or Richmond Hill and you would like that conversation, you can book a consultation with our Vaughan dental team. An appointment does not commit you to treatment, and any estimate can change once a dentist has examined you and taken whatever imaging is needed.

If you are still working out what a particular treatment involves before you worry about paying for it, our guides to what can and cannot be reversed in gum disease, wisdom teeth removal, preparing for a dental visit using the CDCP and what to know before your first CDCP appointment are all a reasonable place to start.

Frequently asked questions about CDCP eligibility and applying

How do I know if I am eligible for the CDCP?

You are eligible if you meet all four requirements at once: no access to private dental insurance or coverage, you and your partner have filed tax returns in Canada, your adjusted family net income is under $90,000, and you are both Canadian residents for tax purposes. The quickest self-check is box 45 on your T4 or box 015 on your T4A. A code of 1 means no access. Anything from 2 to 5 means coverage was offered.

Do I have to reapply for the CDCP every year?

Yes. You must confirm every year that you still meet the eligibility requirements. In normal years that confirmation is a renewal. Right now the renewal window is closed, so anyone without current coverage submits a new application instead.

What is the income limit for the Canadian Dental Care Plan?

Your adjusted family net income must be less than $90,000. At $90,000 or above you are not eligible. Adjusted family net income is calculated from line 23600, minus universal child care benefit and registered disability savings plan income at lines 11700 and 12500, plus any of those amounts repaid at lines 21300 and 23200.

Can I still get the CDCP if I have benefits through work?

No. Having access to dental coverage through work disqualifies you, even if you never enrolled, never used it, pay a premium for it, or it only covers part of your costs. The same applies to coverage through a spouse’s or family member’s plan.

Who is not eligible for the Canadian Dental Care Plan?

Anyone with access to private dental insurance or coverage of any kind, anyone whose adjusted family net income is $90,000 or more, anyone who has not filed a tax return in Canada for the previous year, and anyone who is not a Canadian resident for tax purposes. The same applies where the disqualifying factor belongs to a spouse or common-law partner instead of the applicant.

How do I renew my CDCP coverage?

Right now, you cannot. The renewal period closed on June 1, 2026, and renewals for the 2027-2028 benefit period open in spring 2027. If your coverage has lapsed, submit a new application for the current 2026-2027 benefit period instead.

What happens if I missed the CDCP renewal deadline?

You submit a new application. You are not barred from the plan. But there will be a gap between the end of your old coverage and the start of the new coverage, and any dental care you receive during that gap is not covered and is not reimbursed retroactively.

How long does it take to be approved for the CDCP?

There is no published processing time, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. Your coverage start date depends on when your application is received and when you are enrolled, and it varies for each person. You will receive a welcome package from Sun Life with the start date on it.

How do I check my CDCP application status?

Use the CDCP Status Checker online, which does not require you to sign in to My Service Canada Account, or call Service Canada. You will need an application code or client number, also called a member ID, plus a Social Insurance Number for each person you are checking. For a child without a SIN you provide their full name and date of birth, and you cannot use the automated phone service in that case.

Can I apply for the CDCP online?

Yes. The main route is My Service Canada Account. There is a separate Canada.ca route for people who cannot use MSCA, and a phone route on 1-833-537-4342 for people who cannot apply online at all. Note that it is My Service Canada Account, not CRA My Account.

Does my spouse need to apply separately?

Yes. You provide information about your spouse or common-law partner so the plan can confirm your marital status, calculate your adjusted family net income, and check whether you have access to coverage through them. That does not enrol them. They submit their own application.

Does the CDCP cover children?

Children can be included as dependants on an application where the family meets the requirements, and there were 543,878 members under 18 across Canada in the 2026-2027 benefit period as of August 31, 2026. A child without a Social Insurance Number can still be included using their full name and date of birth.

Will I have to pay anything if my income is under $70,000?

Possibly, yes. Your co-payment is 0% of the CDCP established fees, but a dental office may charge its own usual fee, and the difference between that and the established fee is yours. You would also pay for anything the plan does not cover, or for treatment you choose to have after a preauthorization request is refused.

Can I pay for treatment myself and claim it back from the CDCP?

No. Only oral health providers are reimbursed under the plan. If you pay the full cost yourself, the CDCP will not reimburse you.

Does having ODSP or Healthy Smiles Ontario stop me qualifying?

No. Coverage through a provincial, territorial or federal government social program does not disqualify you, and the plans coordinate benefits so nothing is paid twice. The Ontario Dental Association actively encourages people with those benefits to apply.

What is a CDCP member eligibility review?

It is a check the plan runs after enrolment to confirm that only eligible people are covered. If your attestation does not match your T4 or T4A slips, you may be selected. You will receive a letter by mail asking for documents from the employer or pension plan that reported the coverage, and you have 45 days from the date on the letter to send them.

What happens if I am found ineligible for the CDCP?

Your coverage ends and you receive a decision letter. You may be required to reimburse the Government of Canada for services the plan paid for while you were ineligible. You cannot reapply until you have sent documents for review, repaid the full amount owed, and meet all the eligibility requirements at the time you reapply. You should also let your dental office know you are no longer a member.

Is there a fee to apply for the CDCP?

No. There is no fee to apply or to renew. Any request for payment or for banking or credit card details in connection with applying, renewing or checking your status is a scam.

Does the CDCP cover braces, implants or teeth whitening?

No. Orthodontic services are currently not available under the plan. Cosmetic treatment including teeth whitening, veneers and dental implants sits outside the plan as well. These sit outside the plan entirely, which is a different situation from a preauthorization request being refused.

Should I cancel my work dental plan so I can qualify?

The Ontario Dental Association advises against it, because the CDCP will not replace those benefits and care under the CDCP can work out more expensive than care under a private plan. Compare what your current plan actually covers against the CDCP before making that decision, and remember that opting out of pension dental coverage after December 11, 2023 does not make you eligible anyway.

Editor’s note on images

Three original images were generated for this article with Higgsfield nano_banana_pro and optimized to WebP before upload.

1. cdcp-eligibility-application-online-canada.webp, 1200×675, WebP, 56,448 bytes. Media title “Applying online for Canadian Dental Care Plan coverage at home”. ALT: “Person at a kitchen table using a laptop to complete a Canadian Dental Care Plan application”. Caption: “CDCP applications for the 2026-2027 benefit period are open and can be completed online through My Service Canada Account.” Placement: featured image. Prompt: photorealistic 16:9 editorial photograph of a calm middle-aged woman at a bright kitchen table working through paperwork on an open laptop, soft natural window light, muted neutral palette, no text or logos anywhere in frame.
2. cdcp-coverage-check-dental-reception.webp, 1000×563, WebP, 30,886 bytes. Media title “Confirming CDCP coverage at a dental office reception desk”. ALT: “Dental office administrator helping an older patient confirm CDCP coverage at a reception desk”. Caption: “Coverage should be confirmed as active before every appointment, because co-payment levels can change at renewal.” Placement: within the renewals section. Prompt: photorealistic landscape editorial photograph of a dental office administrator in soft blue scrubs helping a seated older man at a clean modern reception desk, tablet flat on the counter, warm diffused daylight, no text or signage.
3. cdcp-dentist-patient-coverage-discussion.webp, 1000×563, WebP, 35,782 bytes. Media title “Dentist and patient discussing CDCP coverage before treatment”. ALT: “Dentist seated in conversation with an adult patient in a treatment room discussing dental coverage”. Caption: “Asking what the plan will not cover, before treatment starts, is the single most useful question a CDCP patient can ask.” Placement: within the eligibility review section. Prompt: photorealistic landscape editorial photograph of a dentist in a white clinical coat with mask down at the neck talking with a seated adult patient in a modern operatory, no treatment taking place, no instruments near the mouth, no text or charts.

Graphics a qualified designer and dental reviewer could usefully build from this article, which are not appropriate for generated imagery: a decision flowchart for the four eligibility requirements; an annotated diagram of where box 45 sits on a T4 and box 015 on a T4A; a benefit period timeline showing the renewal window, the coverage gap and the reapplication route; a co-payment ladder chart; and a one-page checklist of what to gather before starting an application.