Legal Cost Canada publishes the assumptions behind its calculators. The family-law legal-cost calculator is a broad budgeting model, not a court-fee schedule or a Canadian fee survey.
Primary official sources
- BC Provincial Court Family Rules — procedure and filing requirements for Provincial Court family matters.
- BC Family Law Act — British Columbia’s family-law statute.
- BC Family Law Act Regulation — Part 4 — adopts the Federal Child Support Guidelines as BC’s child support guidelines, with specified adaptations.
- Federal Child Support Guidelines — section 7 — special or extraordinary expenses.
- Federal Child Support Guidelines — section 9 — shared parenting time.
- Justice Canada — Federal Child Support Tables. Current table version used for present-period examples on this site: 2025 Federal Child Support Tables, effective October 1, 2025.
How province-specific content is handled
Province-specific pages are only added when the court route, procedure, forms, fees, terminology and source material for that province have been researched. BC Provincial Court, BC Supreme Court and courts in other provinces use different rules and forms, so those systems are not treated as interchangeable.
How the city / province tax estimate works
The city/community search is a jurisdiction selector, not a local lawyer-price database. When a listed community is selected, the calculator sets its province or territory. The user-entered hourly rate stays unchanged.
For ordinary taxable private legal services, the model applies the selected jurisdiction’s tax rate to modelled lawyer fees only. It does not automatically tax the disbursement allowance because tax treatment can depend on the type of disbursement and how it is billed.
- Alberta, Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Yukon: 5% GST.
- British Columbia: 5% GST + 7% PST on taxable legal fees.
- Manitoba: 5% GST + 7% RST on taxable legal services.
- New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island: 15% HST.
- Nova Scotia: 14% HST.
- Ontario: 13% HST.
- Québec: 5% GST + 9.975% QST.
- Saskatchewan: 5% GST + 6% PST on taxable legal services.
These are planning assumptions for ordinary taxable services. Legal aid, exemptions, the lawyer/client location, place-of-supply rules and the nature of a disbursement can change the tax actually charged.
What the tools do not do
These tools do not decide entitlement, interpret legislation for an individual user's facts, predict a judge, or replace province-specific legal advice. Where a calculation depends heavily on difficult tax/legal assumptions, the site should either expose those assumptions or not claim to calculate the result.
What “Last reviewed” means
A review date means the page was checked against the primary official sources listed on it. It does not mean a lawyer reviewed the page unless we explicitly say so. We do not change review dates automatically just to make content appear fresh.
See our Corrections & updates policy for how we handle rule, form and calculation changes.
BC small-claims calculator
The small-claims and CRT calculator uses the published Court Schedule A and CRT fee schedule checked October 11, 2026. It models ordinary money claims without contractual-interest valuation, with a usual route by amount and an explicit confirmation for a smaller original Court Notice of Claim.
Official fees are added in cents, using the selected role, filing method and stage. Alternative CRT later steps are not charged together. A CRT final-decision fee includes a validated order copy; filing that order in Court is separate. The Court Services Online charge is per transmitted package. Standard fees are shown without applying waivers or refunds.
Service, document and legal-help amounts are user-entered budgets, including any relevant tax. The optional settlement comparison assumes the whole claim is awarded and collected, no costs are recovered, no budget has yet been spent and accepting the offer has no extra cost. It does not predict entitlement, collection or the chance of winning.