The Canada Council budget form, line by line

People lose more time on the Canada Council budget step than on any writing on the form, and almost always for the same reason: they open it expecting a box to type a number into, and find a two-sided ledger with 23 named lines.

Here is the whole thing, so you can have your numbers ready before you open it. Structure captured from the live Micro-grants budget on August 3, 2026.

The shape of it

It is a balanced budget, not a request. Two tables:

• Revenue, in 4 groups, 6 lines
• Expenses, in 5 groups, 17 lines

Every line has an amount and a Notes field capped at 500 characters.

The thing that trips people first: the money you are asking Canada Council for is a revenue line inside this budget. It is not a separate "amount requested" field somewhere else on the form. It sits at the top of Public Sector Revenue, and your expenses have to account for it alongside everything else funding the project.

Revenue

Public Sector Revenue

• Canada Council for the Arts, the request for this application
• Other public sector revenue

Earned Revenue

• Other earned revenues

Private Sector Revenue

• Other private sector revenue

In-kind and other

• Applicant contribution
• Other revenue

Four of those six lines are named "other", which is not an accident. Outside your Canada Council ask, the form does not care about the taxonomy of your money. It cares that the total is real and that the Notes explain it. Your provincial arts council, a broadcaster licence, a distributor advance: those go on a line called "other" with the detail in the note.

Expenses

Artistic and project expenses

• Artist and professional fees, cultural participant fees, compensation, personal costs
• Honoraria for Elders and Knowledge Keepers
• Other artistic and project expenses

Production, technical and programming expenses

• Registration fees for professional development
• Materials and supplies
• Equipment rental
• Venue, studio, facility rental

Travel expenses

• Personnel travel
• Per diem and accommodations
• Other travel expenses

Other expenses

• Safety-related costs
• Childcare and dependent care costs

Accessibility expenses

• Public accessibility costs
• Applicant accessibility costs
• Other accessibility expenses, three separate lines

Four things worth noticing

Accessibility gets five lines of its own. More than travel, more than the entire "other expenses" group. That is a funder telling you what it will pay for. Access costs are separated out from the rest of the budget on purpose, and applicants routinely leave them at zero out of habit.

Childcare is a line. So is dependent care. If the reason you cannot take the residency is care, that is a budget line, not a personal problem you absorb.

Equipment is rental. There is a line for renting gear and no line for buying it.

Honoraria for Elders and Knowledge Keepers is its own line, separate from artist fees, and it sits in the top group.

About the wording above

The line names here are our plain-language version. The portal's own labels say the same things with more furniture on them: title casing throughout, a letter suffix on lines where only one exists, and "(Add details in Notes)" repeated on every "other" row. One of them is misspelled.

The structure is the part that matters and the part we match exactly: same groups, same lines, same order, same 500 character notes cap. When you copy your numbers across, match the lines by meaning and ignore the decoration.

One more absence worth naming. Micro-grants funds up to $10,000, and the budget step enforces no maximum, on any line or on the total. The form will accept a $40,000 request. It just will not fund one.