Published 21 Sept 2026
B.C. Pauses the October 1 PST Expansion to Professional Services
The accounting, engineering, architectural, security and non-residential real estate PST is on hold — but not every October 1 change went with it.
If you had already penciled a 7% increase into your accounting or engineering costs for this fall, you can erase it. On September 18, 2026, the B.C. government announced it is pausing the planned expansion of provincial sales tax to professional services that was set to begin October 1, 2026. The province pointed to ongoing international trade disruption and the economic uncertainty it is creating as the reason for holding off, and said it will not proceed while that uncertainty persists.
What is on hold
The pause covers the five categories announced in Budget 2026:
Accounting services, including bookkeeping and assurance work
Architectural services
Engineering and geoscience services
Security services, including private investigation
Non-residential real estate services, including trading, rental property management and strata management
Government estimates the delay leaves roughly $260 million in 2026–27 with people, businesses and local governments rather than the provincial treasury.
What the pause does not cover
This is the part worth reading twice. The announcement addressed professional services only. Other PST changes dated October 1, 2026 were not part of it, including the end of the exemptions for residential landline phone service, toll-free telephone service and basic cable TV, and the new tax on clothing patterns, yarn and fabric used for making clothing, and repair services for clothing and footwear. Unless the province says otherwise, treat those as still arriving. Check the B.C. sales tax updates page before you change any line in your budget.
What it means for your numbers
Remove the professional-services bump. If you added 7% to a bookkeeping retainer, strata fee or engineering estimate starting in October, that increase is not happening on that date.
Do not delete the assumption — reschedule it. A pause is not a cancellation. Keeping it in your projection with a later, uncertain start date is more honest than pretending it was never announced.
Strata and rental owners: management fees are the line most likely to be affected, since strata and rental property management fall inside the paused categories.
Self-employed readers: if you registered to collect PST ahead of October 1, watch for provincial guidance on what to do with that registration rather than assuming it lapses on its own.
Modelling it in AffordaFlow
Reversals like this are exactly why it helps to keep tax-driven cost increases as separate, dated expense lines rather than folding them into a single household-costs figure. In AffordaFlow you can adjust the affected expense entries on their own, keep a lower-confidence version of the increase further out in the projection, and compare the two paths side by side — so a policy change means editing one line instead of rebuilding your whole plan.
Source: B.C. Updates to sales taxes (September 18, 2026) and Notice 2026-001: Notice to providers of professional services.
This article is informational and not financial advice.