Brief / The cheque
Regulation 134/98 · Regulation 222/98
What the regulations pay
Each cheque has two lines. Basic needs is a flat amount for food, clothing, transit and everything that is not rent. Shelter is the lesser of actual housing cost or a statutory cap. If rent exceeds the cap, the difference is taken from basic needs. Maytree’s 2025 welfare-income total for a single adult on OW in Toronto is $10,242 a year — 33% of Canada’s Official Poverty Line. The federal “lift out of poverty” for people with disabilities is $204.20. That is not a safety net. It is a floor below subsistence, published after years of promises.
Ontario Works — July 2026
Eighth consecutive year with no inflation adjustment. Same dollar amounts as 2018. ISAC: prices have risen about 23–25% since the freeze.
| Household | Basic needs | Max shelter | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single adult | $343 | $390 | $733 |
| Couple, no children | $494 | $642 | $1,136 |
| Single parent + 1 child* | $360 | $642 | $1,002 |
| Couple + 1 child* | $494 | $697 | $1,191 |
| Couple + 2 children* | $494 | $756 | $1,250 |
*Ontario Child Benefit is paid separately and is not part of the OW cheque.
ODSP — July 2026
Indexed +1.9% on 1 July 2026. A single adult’s shelter line rose $12, to $611. Combined maximum: $1,436.
| Household | Basic needs | Max shelter | Maximum |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single adult | $825 | $611 | $1,436 |
| Couple, one person disabled | $1,189 | $959 | $2,148 |
| Couple, both spouses disabled | $1,457 | $959 | $2,416 |
| Single parent + 1 child* | $968 | $959 | $1,927 |
| Single parent + 2 children* | $968 | $1,038 | $2,006 |
Shelter is paid only up to actual cost. A room at $450 yields $450, not $611.
Two lines, one month
The cap is not a rent
The shelter maximum is a ceiling, not a market observation. It does not move with CMHC’s survey. OW’s $390 single cap has been $390 since 2018.
Overage comes from food
When rent is $900 and the ODSP cap is $611, $289 is subtracted from the $825 basic-needs line. The person is still housed — on $536 for everything else.
A room is not a 1-bedroom
Boarding and lodging, shared rooms, and basement units are how a $390 or $611 cap is made to “work.” That arrangement is not recorded as homelessness. It is recorded as a paid shelter line.
Adequacy against the official line
Maytree’s annual welfare-income series adds the GST/HST credit, Ontario Trillium Benefit and related transfers to the social-assistance cheque, then compares the yearly total with the Market Basket Measure. In 2025 every Ontario example household was below the Toronto MBM. All four were also below the deep-income-poverty threshold (75% of MBM).
The unattached single considered employable — Ontario Works — had the least adequate income of any provincial example household Maytree published for Ontario: 33% of the poverty line.
2025 total welfare income
| Example household | Annual | Monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Unattached single, Ontario Works | $10,242 | $854 |
| Unattached single, ODSP | $18,230 | $1,519 |
| Single parent + 1 child | $24,163 | $2,014 |
| Couple + 2 children | $35,353 | $2,946 |
Source: Maytree, Welfare in Canada 2025, Ontario chapter.
Eight years of the same $733
2018 — rate set
Single adult OW maximum $733. That dollar is still the 2026 cheque.
2020–22 — emergency money, then back
Pandemic top-ups and time-limited federal transfers moved. The OW maximum did not become a new permanent floor.
2024–25 — caseload up
Maytree / provincial counts: about 282,000 OW cases and 373,000 ODSP cases; nearly 973,000 beneficiaries in 2024–25. OW cases up about 15% in one year.
July 2026 — still $733
Eighth freeze. ODSP indexed 1.9%. Prices since 2018 up about 23–25%. Real OW has been cut by a quarter without a vote that said “cut.”
The federal top-up that does not lift
The Canada Disability Benefit was introduced as the answer to disability poverty. Maximum, July 2026–June 2027: $204.20 a month. Gate: an approved Disability Tax Credit. Ontario’s only courtesy is that it does not claw the amount back from OW or ODSP.
Arithmetic, not rhetoric: ODSP $1,436 + CDB $204.20 + CGEB $57 + a typical Trillium amount ≈ $1,767. Daily Bread’s 2025 Toronto poverty line for a single adult is $2,444. Deep poverty is $1,833. The stacked maximum does not clear deep poverty. People with disabilities are disproportionately on these cheques, on the RGI list, and in the shelter count. A $204 attachment does not change the statute that set the destitution.