You don't need a lab: ~96% of SR&ED claims are accepted — the real risk is not filing

The most expensive misconception about SR&ED is that it's a long shot — that you submit a claim, brace yourself, and hope the CRA doesn't come after you. The numbers say the opposite.

The program isn't adversarial. The math is on your side.

In the CRA's most recent annual statistics (April 2025 to March 2026), the SR&ED program allowed about $4.6 billion in investment tax credits, across roughly 24,200 claims filed. Of those claims, about 96% were accepted — and 90% were accepted exactly as filed¹ (CRA Annual program statistics).

Read that again: nine out of ten claims go through as written. This is not a program designed to say no. It's a program designed to reward Canadian businesses for doing development work — and most of the money goes out the door without a fight.

So the real risk isn't filing. The real risk is not filing — quietly leaving money on the table year after year because you assumed you wouldn't qualify.

"But we don't have a lab."

You don't need one. This is the second misconception, and it's the one that costs whole industries.

Software development takes the single biggest share of SR&ED credits — roughly 43% of all investment tax credits allowed go to it² (CRA Annual program statistics). That visibility creates a halo: people assume SR&ED is a tech-company thing. It isn't. Food processing, agriculture, and construction are consistently under-claimed relative to how much genuine development work happens in them.

I've seen it again and again. A food processor reformulating a product so it holds texture through a freeze-thaw cycle. A builder figuring out how to assemble panels a way no supplier's spec sheet covers. A shop on the plant floor modifying a process because the off-the-shelf approach didn't work. That's development. There's no white coat involved, and it still qualifies.

What actually counts: doing something new

Here's the test, in plain language. SR&ED is about technological uncertainty — you set out to do something, and at the start it was genuinely unclear whether it would work or how you'd get there. You experimented. You iterated. Maybe you got there; maybe you didn't.

The CRA wants to see that as a systematic investigation: you defined the problem, formed a hypothesis, tested it, and drew conclusions from what happened. That second requirement is the one claims most often fail on — not the ambition of the work, but the record of how it was approached.

And that last part matters more than people expect: failed experiments qualify too.³ The credit rewards the attempt to resolve an uncertainty through systematic work — not whether the product shipped or the process landed. Some of the most defensible claims I've written are built on the things that didn't work, because that's where the genuine uncertainty shows up most clearly.

If your team has ever said "we weren't sure this was possible" and then rolled up their sleeves to find out — you're likely doing SR&ED, whether or not anyone has ever called it that.

The under-claimers I'd most like to reach

If any of these is you, you're probably leaving money on the table:

You've never claimed because you assumed SR&ED was for tech companies or universities.
You're in food, agriculture, or construction — sectors that, in my experience, under-claim relative to the real development happening in them.⁴
Your projects sometimes don't pan out, and you assumed that disqualifies the work. (It doesn't.)

Sources

In the CRA's FY2025–26 statistics the SR&ED program allowed ≈$4.6B in investment tax credits across ≈24,200 claims filed, with ≈96% of processed claims accepted (90% exactly as filed) — CRA — SR&ED annual program statistics (FY2025–26: 24,160 claims filed, 23,677 processed; ITCs allowed $4.6B; 90% accepted as filed + 6% after modifications = 96%)
Software development takes the single largest share of SR&ED credits — roughly 43% — CRA — SR&ED annual program statistics (FY2025–26: software development 42.6% of investment tax credits allowed by field of science)
Failed experiments qualify — the credit rewards systematic work to resolve technological uncertainty, not whether the product shipped — CRA — What work is eligible for SR&ED ("You do not have to achieve your goal in order to gain new knowledge")

Note: the observation that food processing, agriculture, and construction are "consistently under-claimed" is the author's professional characterization based on practice. CRA statistics report the field-of-science mix of investment tax credits allowed — a share of dollars, not of claims — which shows these sectors as a small share (FY2025–26: agricultural sciences 2.2%, food processing 1.3%, civil engineering 0.6%). The CRA does not publish an "under-claiming" rate; this entry is a judgment, not a published figure.

Not sure if your work counts? That's exactly the conversation I have on a 30-minute call — no prep, no obligation, and you'll talk to an engineer, not a salesperson. If you've claimed before, ask about a free review of your last claim.