Five years for FINTRAC’s own categories — but the CRA’s six-year clock runs separately, and the two don’t start on the same day.
Short answer
Real estate brokers, sales representatives and developers must keep every FINTRAC-required record category — client identification, receipt-of-funds, large cash transaction, and copies of reports filed — for five years, though the start date varies by record type. That’s a distinct clock from the Income Tax Act’s six-year retention period, and the two shouldn’t be assumed to run together.
FINTRAC’s own record-keeping guidance for real estate brokers and sales representatives sets five-year retention on every category, but the clock starts differently for each: a receipt-of-funds record is kept “at least five years from the date the receipt of funds record was created,” an information record runs “five years from the day the last business transaction was conducted,” a large cash transaction record runs “at least five years from the date” it was created, and a copy of a report you actually filed with FINTRAC is kept “at least five years after the day it was submitted.” Four categories, four different start dates, same five-year length.
Separately, the Income Tax Act s.230(4)(b) requires your brokerage’s general books, accounts and vouchers to be kept “until the expiration of six years from the end of the last taxation year to which the records and books of account relate.” That’s broader than FINTRAC’s transaction-triggered categories, and it counts from the end of a taxation year rather than from a transaction date, so the two clocks genuinely don’t line up. Note also that RECO’s own brokerage administration guidance publishes no separate deal-file retention period of its own — don’t infer one from RECO; the FINTRAC and ITA clocks are what govern.
Keep everything on the longer of the two clocks. In practice that’s effectively six years, which comfortably covers FINTRAC’s five-year minimum from any reasonable transaction date. Whatever system holds those files needs to survive a platform change without losing that history — see can we store deal files in the cloud for what that actually requires.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you whether your record system can answer a FINTRAC or CRA request on demand.
