Yield finder methodology

How the table is ranked

• Options are ranked by the dollars you would earn over your chosen period: after tax in a non-registered account, and before tax in a registered one.
• You can sort by promo rate instead. That puts options with a promo you qualify for first, highest promo rate first, followed by the rest in order of their regular rate. It's meant for people who move their money from promo to promo.
• Ties are listed alphabetically. Nothing else affects the order: there is no featured or sponsored placement.
• Some banks pay us a commission when you open an account through our link. Those links are labelled next to the link itself, and they never change the order. Every ETF in the table pays us nothing.
• Sign-up bonuses offered through referral links are shown in the row but left out of the calculated return, because including them would favour the options that pay us.

How returns are calculated

• Interest accrues daily and compounds monthly. ETF distributions are assumed to be reinvested.
• ETF yields are shown after the fund's fees. When a provider publishes a yield before fees, we subtract the MER.
• A promo rate is used only if you could sign up for it today and your answers match its conditions (new money, new clients). It applies to the balance up to any cap, for the promo period or your time period, whichever is shorter. After that, and on any balance above the cap, the regular rate applies.
• When an option has more than one promo you qualify for, the one that pays you most is used.
• Returns are annualised so that different time periods can be compared.

Tax

• Interest from savings accounts and most cash ETFs is fully taxable at your combined federal and provincial marginal rate.
• Corporate-class funds such as HSAV pay no distributions. Their growth is a capital gain, and 50% of a capital gain is taxable. We assume you sell at the end of your time period; holding longer defers the tax.
• Growth inside a TFSA, RRSP, FHSA or RESP isn't taxed each year, so the after-tax column shows the full return. Withdrawals from an RRSP, an RESP, or an FHSA used for anything other than a first home are taxed later.
• The marginal rate uses the same tax brackets as our RRSP vs TFSA calculator.

Where the rates come from

• ETF yields for funds whose provider we track are collected automatically each business day from the provider's website.
• Bank rates, promos and the yields of other ETFs are checked by hand against the provider's own website about once a week.
• Every row shows the date its rate was last confirmed.

Out-of-date data

Options removed from the ranking are still listed under the table with their last known rate.

Deposit insurance

Bank savings accounts are covered by CDIC, up to $100,000 per depositor, per insured category, at each bank.

ETFs have no CDIC coverage for your units. A HISA ETF does keep its cash in bank deposits, but the depositor is the fund, so CDIC's limit applies once to the whole fund rather than to each unitholder. Money market and T-bill ETFs hold short-term debt rather than deposits, so CDIC doesn't apply to them at all.

ETFs are protected in other ways:

• The fund's assets are held by an independent custodian, apart from the fund company's own money. If the fund company failed, the deposits and T-bills would still belong to unitholders.
• If your brokerage is a CIPF member and becomes insolvent, CIPF covers missing assets up to $1 million per account category. It does not cover a fall in the investment's value.
• These funds hold bank deposits, government T-bills and other short-term, high-quality debt, so the main risk is a bank or issuer failing rather than market swings. Ultra-short bond ETFs can move slightly more in price.

None of this is a guarantee in the way CDIC insurance is.