CRA contact-centre wait in international context
- Passport processing — service performance against the 30-day passport standard.
- Immigration processing times — how long IRCC takes against its own service standards.
- Veterans benefit backlog — wait times for veterans' disability-benefit decisions.
- Healthcare wait times — waits for medical treatment in international context.
- Public service size — how much the federal public service grew over the past decade, and how fast.
Three views on the same underlying problem: average wait, the share of calls within each agency's own standard, and the strength of the standard itself.
Most recent full fiscal year reported. Wait is queue time from when the caller selects "speak to an agent" to agent pickup; IVR navigation excluded for all agencies.
CRA's 31-minute average wait is roughly 1.7× HMRC, 3.4× ATO, and ~7× the IRS's Filing Season figure. Caveats on the IRS number are large — see methodology.
All figures are for the general/individual taxpayer telephone line where separately reported. Fiscal years differ: CRA and HMRC end 31 March; ATO and IRD end 30 June; IRS ends 30 September. The IRS Filing Season window (Jan–Apr) is staffed materially better than the rest of the year.
| Agency | Country | Reporting period | Average wait | % within standard | Service standard (target) | Denominator caveats |
|---|
The CRA sits at or near the bottom of the four agencies that publish comparable data, whether ranked by average wait, by the share of calls answered within the stated standard, or by absolute service-level target. The OAG found that for June 2025 only 5% of CRA calls were answered within 15 minutes, against a 65% target.
CRA's service standard was 80% of calls answered within 2 minutes until 2019-20, when it was lowered to 65% within 15 minutes. The IRS and HMRC have held their headline targets at 85%; the ATO's average-wait commitment (under 15 minutes) is similar to CRA's percentile target but has been met in every quarter of FY 2024-25.
The IRS Enterprise LOS excludes 39 of 99 phone lines and only counts calls that ultimately reach an assistor. The NTA calls this "materially misleading." The ATO openly blocks inbound calls when capacity is exceeded; blocked calls fall out of the denominator. CRA reports two different ratios from the same underlying data (35%→70% "unique calls answered" in the 100-Day Plan vs 18% within-standard in the OAG audit). Any cross-country chart needs a denominator footnote per cell.
CRA's December 2025 100-Day Service Improvement Plan press release reports "unique calls answered" rising from 35% to 70%+ with peaks of 92%. That is a different denominator (unique callers rather than calls within the 15-minute standard), and it has not yet been reflected in an audited full-year figure. The within-standard share that the OAG measured remains 18% for FY 2024-25.
Callers who reached a CRA agent in FY 2024-25 waited an average of 31 minutes, and just 18% of calls met the agency's own 15-minute standard against a 65% target.
- Compared with
- The tax agencies of the United States (IRS), United Kingdom (HMRC), Australia (ATO), and New Zealand (IRD), set out as a directional comparison the page says is not a league table.
- Where Canada sits
- CRA's 31-minute average wait is roughly 1.7× HMRC and 3.4× ATO on the page's directional comparison. Only 10 million of over 32 million calls reached an agent.
- Which way it is moving
- Up. The average wait almost doubled from FY 2023-24, and the Auditor General found just 5% of calls answered within 15 minutes in June 2025. The wait is getting worse.
- What the verdict follows
- Canada's own service standard and the peer agencies, taken together. The page says its chart is not a league table, but CRA's average wait is the longest of the four agencies that publish one, and 18% of calls were answered within 15 minutes against a 65% target. Every reading points the same way, so Weak.
- Data basis
- 2025 Report of the Auditor General of Canada on CRA contact centres, CRA Service Standards 2025-26, and published IRS, HMRC, ATO, and NZ IRD figures. Data current to FY2024–25. Page last reviewed December 2025.
How each agency defines "wait"
- CRA: 15-minute clock starts when caller selects "speak to an agent" in the IVR. Time in the IVR menu is excluded. Standard is 65% within 15 minutes for general lines.
- IRS: Reports both "Level of Service" (calls routed to an assistor that ultimately receive assistance, on 60 staffed lines) and an "average wait" calculated separately. Eight of the agency's headline wait figures exist; only three are publicly reported per TIGTA.
- HMRC: Headline metric is "adviser attempts handled" — the share of customer attempts to reach an adviser that succeed. "Average speed of answer" is a secondary metric reported as full-year and peak (Self Assessment) averages.
- ATO: Industry-standard "average speed of answer" — mean of queue-entry to agent-pickup across all answered calls. Calls "blocked" when inbound volume exceeds capacity are excluded from the denominator.
- NZ IRD: Does not publish a wait-time figure on its current-performance page. Processing-time targets are published but are not comparable to call wait times.
Why the chart is directional, not a league table
The IRS's 4-minute Filing Season figure is for the Accounts Management line during the Jan–Apr 2023 filing window only. The TIGTA report titled Telephone Level of Service and Average Wait Times Do Not Fully Reflect the Taxpayer Experience shows wait times on the eight headline lines range widely, with the publicly reported three being the best of the set. A full-year all-line IRS figure would be materially higher than 4 minutes.
HMRC's 18m 38s is a full-year mean across all helplines for FY 2024-25; the Self Assessment helpline averaged 23m 40s in FY 2024-25 (37m 15s in FY 2023-24), per HMRC's answer to a parliamentary written question. ATO's 9m 01s is a full-year mean for FY 2024-25 (ending 30 June 2025); calls blocked at the network edge do not enter the calculation.
For CRA, the OAG reported a 31-minute average wait for FY 2024-25, almost twice the prior year, and 18% within the 15-minute standard. CRA's December 2025 100-Day Service Improvement Plan press release reports "unique calls answered" rising from 35% to 70%+ with peaks of 92%; this is a different metric on a different denominator and is not yet reflected in an audited full-year figure.
Primary sources
- 2025 Report of the Auditor General of Canada — Canada Revenue Agency Contact Centres
- CRA 100-Day Service Improvement Plan news release (11 Dec 2025)
- CRA Service Standards 2025-26
- TIGTA: IRS Telephone Level of Service and Average Wait Times Do Not Fully Reflect the Taxpayer Experience (2025)
- US Treasury: Filing Season 2023 Report Card
- National Taxpayer Advocate Annual Report to Congress 2025
- NAO: HMRC Customer Service (May 2024)
- ICAEW: HMRC meets its performance target on calls (Feb 2025)
- HMRC Monthly Performance Report (Apr 2024)
- ATO Current Year Performance
- ATO Service Commitments 2024-25
- Inland Revenue NZ — Current Processing Times
- OECD Tax Administration 2024
