CARM Is Here: What US Importers and Carriers Must Know About Canada's Customs System in 2026

If your business ships goods into Canada, the rules have fundamentally changed — and many US companies are only finding out when their freight gets held at the border.

The Canada Border Services Agency has fully implemented CARM, the CBSA Assessment and Revenue Management system. The transition period is over as of 2026, and the era of "let the broker handle everything" has ended. Here's what US importers and carriers need to understand, in plain English.

What CARM actually is

CARM is the CBSA's digital platform for assessing and collecting duties and taxes on commercial goods imported into Canada. It replaces older, largely manual systems with a single online portal — the CARM Client Portal (CCP) — through which importers manage their accounts, review statements, and pay what they owe.

The headline change isn't technical. It's about liability. Under CARM, responsibility for registration, financial security, and duties sits directly with the importer of record — not the customs broker. That's a major shift from how cross-border importing worked for decades.

Why this hits US businesses directly

Here's the part many US companies miss: if you're a US business acting as the importer of record into Canada — a Non-Resident Importer, or NRI — you are now responsible for CARM compliance, even if you use a customs broker.

That means a US company shipping into Canada must:

• Register in the CARM Client Portal and obtain a Canadian Business Number (BN9)
• Enroll in the Release Prior to Payment (RPP) program if you want goods released before duties are paid
• Post your own financial security — a surety bond or cash deposit — rather than relying on a broker's bond
• Digitally delegate authority to your broker inside the portal, because a paper power of attorney is no longer sufficient

If you're not registered and haven't posted security, your cargo can be held at the port of entry, you may have to pay all duties and taxes immediately before release, and you can face administrative penalties and demurrage charges.

The deadlines that already passed

This isn't a future change to plan for — the key dates are behind us. Financial security became mandatory in May 2025. The transitional measures that let brokers use their own business number on an importer's behalf ended at the close of 2025. And the legislative amendments clarifying importer-of-record liability came into force on January 1, 2026.

In short: the grace period is gone. Compliance is now the baseline for moving freight into Canada.

Where documentation fits in

CARM raises the cost of document errors. When liability sits with the importer and the system is fully digital, the accuracy of your commercial invoices, customs invoices, and supporting documents matters more than ever. Mismatched data, missing fields, or values that don't line up across documents can trigger delays and penalties in a system that's far less forgiving than the one it replaced.

It's also worth knowing that CARM doesn't replace the eManifest requirements — carriers still file through ACI in Canada, and that filing has to match the underlying documents. More systems that all need to agree means more places where a manual data-entry error can cause a problem.

How to stay clean under CARM

The compliance steps — registration, security, delegation — are one-time setup items your broker or a customs consultant can guide you through. But staying compliant day to day comes down to accurate, consistent documentation on every shipment.

The most reliable way to keep that data clean is to stop entering it by hand. When commercial invoices, customs documents, and shipping paperwork are read and extracted automatically, the data that flows into your records and filings is accurate and consistent — which is exactly what a zero-tolerance digital customs system rewards.