September 6, 2026 · Canada · 5 min read
This is not a settlement, a lawsuit, or a claim anybody has to approve. It is money the government already decided you were owed, sent you, and never saw cashed.
Almost none of this is people ignoring free money. It is addresses.
The CRA mails a cheque to the address on your last return. People move, and a benefit payment follows a year later to a place they left. Others are cheques for amounts too small to chase at the time, arriving during a move, a separation, a death in the family, or a semester abroad. Some are payments people never expected at all: a credit reassessed in their favour after the fact, for a year they had stopped thinking about.
The result is a pile that grows every year and never shrinks on its own, because nothing about it expires and nobody gets a reminder.
More than tax refunds. The CRA's list includes the GST/HST credit, the Canada Child Benefit, the Canada Workers Benefit, and a long tail of provincial and territorial benefits it administers on a province's behalf.
Two things are not searchable online, and this catches people out: COVID-19 benefit payments and business payments. Neither appears in the online list. They are not excluded from being reissued. They just cannot be found the easy way, and need a phone call.
Sign in to CRA My Account and open the Uncashed cheques section. It lists personal cheques that are at least six months old.
That six-month floor is the one detail worth remembering. A cheque you were sent last month will not appear, and its absence means nothing. Neither will a business cheque. For either of those, the CRA's phone lines are the route.
Official CRA page: uncashed cheques →
Finding it and being paid are two steps, and the second one is deliberately not a single click. It is the government making sure the person claiming a replacement is the person the cheque was for.
Replacement arrives by direct deposit if you have one set up, which is the fast path, or by mail in up to ten business days.
There is an industry of "unclaimed money finders" that will locate government money for a percentage of it. For this particular pile, that percentage buys you nothing at all: the search is a free page inside an account you already have, and the reissue form is free and pre-filled.
The tell is the same one that separates a real settlement claim page from a lead-generation page: we wrote about that here. A genuine route to government money is free, run by the government, and asks you for identity, not for a cut and a credit card.
Uncashed CRA cheques are the largest single one in Canada, but money gets stranded in several places, each with its own registry and none of which talk to each other:
| Where | What ends up there | Who runs it |
|---|---|---|
| CRA | Uncashed refund and benefit cheques | Canada Revenue Agency |
| Bank of Canada | Bank accounts dormant for 10 years at federally regulated banks | Bank of Canada |
| Provincial registries | Deposits, wages, credit balances: BC, Alberta, New Brunswick and Quebec each run their own | Province or a provincial society |
A person who moved provinces, changed banks, and filed taxes throughout could have something in all three, and would have to check all three separately. There is no single Canadian search.
The figures and the process come from the Canada Revenue Agency's own uncashed cheques page, which is also where the claim starts. The count and value are the CRA's July 2026 figures and will drift as cheques are cashed; the two facts that do not drift are that the cheques never expire and that claiming costs nothing.
See every class action settlement currently open in Canada and the US →
PayUpBro is not a law firm and never files a claim for you. This page is a plain-language summary of a public government process, not legal or tax advice. Whether a cheque is owed to you is determined by the Canada Revenue Agency.