What It Costs to Incorporate a Professional Corporation in Ontario

The cheapest quote you will find for an Ontario professional corporation includes a $13.80 name search. The number is real — it is the federal government’s price for a federal NUANS report, and Ontario will not accept that report. The province’s own filing instructions say it twice: a “Canada (federal) biased Nuans name search will not be accepted,” and the report Ontario does accept “must be obtained from a private name search company.” There is no government-set price for that report at all. Each search house sets its own fee, and the $13.80 keeps getting copied from one price list to the next because it is the only NUANS number a government publishes.

That is the professional corporation cost problem in miniature. Every figure is published somewhere — but they sit across one ministry and four regulators, and the lists that collect them tend to collect the wrong ones. Here is each fee from the body that actually charges it, verified in October 2026.

The cost to incorporate, line by line

Why you cannot skip the name search

An ordinary Ontario company dodges the NUANS fee by incorporating as a numbered company. A professional corporation cannot. Section 3.2(2) of the Business Corporations Act is blunt about it: “The corporation shall not have a number name.” The same subsection requires the words “Professional Corporation” (or “société professionnelle”) in the name, and for the health professions Ontario Regulation 39/02 adds that the name must include the surname of one or more shareholders as it appears on the College’s register, and must indicate the profession.

So the name is almost entirely written for you — surname, profession, the mandatory tailpiece — and you still have to buy a NUANS report to prove nobody else has it. Order the report only after you have checked your College’s naming criteria, because the registry and the College are checking different things: NUANS screens against existing names, the College screens against its own rules. RCDSO will pre-approve a proposed name before you file; for a $750 non-refundable application, that is worth doing. And the report expires — file more than 90 days after its date and you are buying another one.

What the Colleges charge, and what they charge again

The certificate of authorization is not a one-time purchase. Every regulator renews it annually, on its own calendar, through its own portal — and separately from your own licence renewal. CPSO says this plainly to physicians: renewing the corporation’s certificate is a different process from renewing your certificate of registration, with its own $175 fee and its own deadline. The two are easy to conflate in June and expensive to conflate in September.

RCDSO’s calendar has a sharper edge. Every dentistry certificate expires on August 31 regardless of when it was issued — a corporation authorized in July renews within weeks. The renewal is $175 if paid by July 31 and $200 after. CPA Ontario’s professional corporation fees run through its firm-registration regime; the Law Society’s renewal is $100 plus HST, paid through the LSO portal. None of these is large. All of them are recurring, which matters when the corporation nears the end of its useful life — what happens to a professional corporation when you retire is largely a question of whether to keep paying them.

The deadline that is not a late fee

Here is the trap in the RCDSO numbers, and it is not the $25 step-up. Pay the renewal after July 31 and it costs $200. Miss August 31 and there is nothing left to pay, because the certificate is revoked effective September 1 — and RCDSO states that a revoked certificate cannot be renewed. The only route back is a fresh $750 application, reviewed in the order received, with no expedited option, while your corporation sits unauthorized to practise dentistry. The $25 is not the penalty. The queue is the penalty.

CPSO’s version is gentler but runs the same direction: miss the renewal and the College issues a notice that the certificate will be revoked within 60 days. The reminder lands in the member portal about six weeks before the deadline, addressed to a corporation’s contact — which is worth knowing if nobody in your office reads the portal.

How long does it take to incorporate a professional corporation?

The incorporation itself is the fast part. Ontario’s published processing time for an online filing is “immediate” — articles filed in the morning are a corporation by the afternoon. Mail takes 15 business days.

The certificate of authorization is the long pole, and it is the step nobody prices in. CPSO’s certificate takes effect when all of the regulatory requirements are met, not when the form goes in. RCDSO reviews applications in the order received and says they cannot be expedited, so your certificate may land weeks after your corporation does. Until the certificate exists, the corporation is just a company with a promising name — it cannot practise the profession, which means the billing, the payroll and the tax planning all start later than the incorporation date suggests. Sequence your file accordingly: naming criteria first, then the NUANS, then the articles, then the College application, with the 90-day NUANS clock running through the middle of it — a window that is probably tighter than it sounds if the share structure takes a few rounds to settle.

What the legal work actually covers

The lawyer’s fee on this file is not for filling in the articles. It is for the conditions an ordinary incorporation never has to carry: a business restricted to the practice of one profession, share provisions that track section 3.2(2) and your College’s own rules about who can own the shares — rules that differ by profession, and that bar family members entirely for four of the five main regulators. Get the share structure wrong and the fix is articles of amendment, a corrected College filing, and time. If a holding company is anywhere in the plan, read what the Colleges say about holding companies before the articles are drafted, not after: the Law Society permits a fenced version, the medical and dental Colleges prohibit it outright.

Most firms, mine included, quote this work as a fixed fee with the government and College charges billed at cost — the professional corporation is a well-worn path, and the price of walking it should be known before you start.

The $300 is the only number on this page that is the same for every profession. Everything after it depends on which College signs the certificate — and the expensive versions of this file are rarely about the fees. They are articles drafted for an ordinary company, inside a corporation that is not allowed to be one.