Your CEBA loan is due in full on 31 December. Nobody is going to move the date this time

If you still owe money on your CEBA loan, the whole balance is due on Thursday 31 December 2026. That is 79 days from today. There is no forgiveness left, no refinancing window, and the program's own FAQ says the deadline is final and cannot be changed. On a $60,000 loan you have been paying about $250 a month in interest since January 2024 and the $60,000 itself is still there, waiting. This page does three things. It tells you exactly what you owe and why, it puts the three ways out on real numbers so you can pick one by the middle of November, and it explains what actually happens, step by step, if you cannot pay, because that part is written down and most owners have never read it.

What you owe, and why the forgiveness is gone

CEBA was a $40,000 or $60,000 loan from the federal government, paid out through your bank in 2020 and 2021. It was interest free, and up to a third of it was forgivable: $10,000 on a $40,000 loan, $20,000 on a $60,000 loan. The catch was a date. To get the forgiveness you had to repay the rest by 18 January 2024, or by 28 March 2024 if you had applied to your bank to refinance before 18 January. About 898,000 businesses took the loan and the Department of Finance says roughly 80% repaid by that deadline.

If you did not, three things happened on 19 January 2024, automatically:

• the forgivable portion disappeared, so you owe the full amount you borrowed
• interest started at 5% a year on the outstanding balance, with the payment frequency set by your bank (most bill it monthly)
• the loan became a three-year term loan with no scheduled principal payments and the full balance due on 31 December 2026

That last point is the one that catches people. "Non-amortizing" means nothing you have paid since January 2024 has touched the principal unless you chose to pay some down. The $250 a month on a $60,000 loan was interest only. Come 31 December you owe the same $60,000 you owed in 2024, and the program says it has no authority to grant exceptions, "including your financial institution".

The program has already moved the date once, from 31 December 2025 to 31 December 2026, in September 2023. Every signal since then points the other way. The FAQ was updated in January 2026 to say deadlines are final. The CRA's own debt page was updated on 17 September 2026 to say it "is now collecting defaulted" CEBA loans. If your plan is a fourth extension, you are betting against both of them.

Who is in the same position

The last numbers Finance Canada published are from a briefing binder for the Deputy Minister, dated 19 November 2024. Of the $49 billion lent, $40.9 billion had been repaid or forgiven and $8.1 billion was still outstanding across about 175,000 loans. That works out at about $46,000 each. Of those, about 41,000 had been partly repaid. About 134,000 had made no repayment at all.

By the same date about 70,000 loans, worth around $3.4 billion, had already been assigned to the CRA for collection. Those are not loans that missed 31 December 2026. They are loans where the owner stopped paying the monthly interest, or was never eligible in the first place, and the bank handed them back. So the collection machine is already running and the deadline simply adds everyone else to the queue on the same day.

No newer official figures exist, so this page does not guess at them.

Put it on your own loan

Take a $60,000 loan with nothing paid off the principal. Swap in your own balance from your bank statement.

• Interest paid since 19 January 2024: 5% of $60,000 is $3,000 a year, $250 a month. By 31 December 2026 that is about $8,850, if your bank has been billing it as it accrues.
• Due on 31 December: $60,000.
• What paying today would save: 79 days of interest on $60,000 is about $649. Worth having, not worth a panic. The rate was never the problem with this loan.

On a $40,000 loan the same arithmetic is $2,000 a year, about $5,900 in total interest, and $40,000 due.

A loan at 5% is cheap money in 2026. The Bank of Canada's published chartered bank prime rate was 4.45% on 7 October 2026, and small business lending normally sits above prime. That is why the honest advice is not "refinance it this week". It is "decide which of the three roads you are on by mid-November, and then do that road properly".

Road one: pay it from cash

If the money exists, this is the cheapest road. The only trap is timing. Ask your bank, in writing, what date the money has to land in the loan account to count as paid by 31 December. If your loan has already been assigned to the CEBA Program, the FAQ says bill payments "may take several business days to process" and that the program "is not responsible for payments received late due to processing time". Paying on 30 December is not the same as paying by 31 December.

Then make it a separate pot. Open an account, name it, and move a fixed sum into it every week from now until mid-December. Eleven weeks at $5,500 a week clears a $60,000 loan. If that number is not possible, you have learned something important before the bank tells you, and you are on road two or three.

For cafes, salons and gyms the deadline lands on the last day of the Christmas trade and the day before January, which is usually the slowest month of the year. Look at last January's bank balance before you decide to drain December's.

Road two: refinance it

A bank term loan replaces the lump sum with monthly payments that include principal. The rate goes up a bit. The monthly cash out goes up a lot, because you are finally repaying the loan instead of renting it.

Here is the shape, on an assumed rate of 6.45% (prime of 4.45% plus two points, an assumption, not a quote, your bank may offer better or worse):

• $60,000 over five years: about $1,173 a month, and about $10,350 of interest over the five years.
• $60,000 over three years: about $1,838 a month, about $6,150 of interest.
• For comparison, what you pay now: $250 a month, interest only, with $60,000 still due at the end.

So the monthly outflow goes from $250 to between four and seven times that. If your business clears that comfortably, refinancing is a sensible way to turn a cliff into a slope. If it does not, a refinance only moves the default from December to the spring, with a bank that will be less patient than the CEBA Program is.

Two practical notes. Ask for the quote now, not in December, because approvals take weeks and lenders will see a queue of the same request. And compare quotes on monthly cash, not on the headline rate. A longer term at a slightly higher rate is often the one you can actually survive.

Road three: you cannot pay

This is the part owners do not read, so here it is in the order it happens, from the program's own pages.

1. Your bank contacts you and asks for a lump sum repayment of the outstanding debt. 2. If you do not pay in full, the bank "will likely be required to assign your loan" to the government's CEBA Program. You get a Loan Assignment Notice with a 12-digit CEBA Identification Number, and from then on you pay Export Development Canada directly, not the bank. 3. The CRA takes over collection. Its number for CEBA is 1-800-361-2808. The program says the CRA "may review your circumstances on a case-by-case basis" and set up a payment arrangement "tailored to your ability to repay". The CRA's own page says the same: if you cannot pay in full or on time, call for payment arrangement options. 4. Interest keeps running at 5% a year, accrued daily on the principal, "until your CEBA Loan is repaid in full". Payments are applied to fees first, then interest outstanding, then principal, then accrued interest. The program does not publish what the fees are, so do not assume there are none. 5. Your refunds can be taken. The program states that "unpaid balances may be deducted from your tax refunds and federal benefits". For a company that means a corporate tax or GST/HST refund can be swept into the loan. 6. A payment arrangement does not freeze the balance. The FAQ warns that an arrangement covers the balance on the day it is set but "does not include the interest that accrues over the lifetime of the loan", so a residual balance remains at the end. The CRA may allow a balloon payment at the end to keep the monthly amount down.

Three more things the FAQ says plainly. You have to repay even if you close the business. You cannot dispute the repayment terms. And the CRA can authorise your accountant or a family member as a third party to deal with the loan, which is worth doing if you are the kind of owner who stops opening envelopes.

If you are on this road, the worst version is to wait for the demand letter. The CRA arrangement exists, it is cheaper than most alternatives at 5%, and the sooner the loan is in a plan the less of the daily interest piles up unpaid.

What it does to the price of your business

A buyer prices a business on its profit and then takes off the debt that comes with it. A $60,000 CEBA balance on the balance sheet is $60,000 less in your pocket on the day you sell, at any multiple. That is the simple part.

The less simple part is what the loan says. By 2027 a CEBA balance that is still unpaid will no longer be a pandemic loan. It will be a loan in default, assigned to the CRA, and it will turn up in due diligence as a government creditor with the power to take your refunds. Buyers and their lenders read that as a cash problem, not a history lesson, and it costs you more than $60,000 in negotiating position.

Clearing it before you ever talk to a buyer is cheap by comparison. If you are thinking about selling in the next two years, treat 31 December as the day the business gets its liability list clean.