Crowcery

Does your grocery receipt add up? How to check it in three steps

A printed grocery receipt reconciles to the cent, because the till's arithmetic is done by a computer. The mistakes that cost you money are in the lines it adds up: a price higher than the shelf tag, a multi-buy that did not fire, an item you did not buy, an item taxed that should not be. Three checks find them, each one a different kind. You need the receipt, a memory of what the shelf said, your province's tax rate, and a phone calculator.

What are the three checks?

1. The lines against your cart. Each priced line is an item you bought, at the shelf or flyer price, in the quantity you took, with the deal applied if you qualified. This is where almost every real error lives.
2. The tax. The taxable base times your province's rate equals the tax line, and only the taxable items are in the base. This catches an item taxed that should not be, or the reverse.
3. The totals. Lines minus discounts equal the subtotal; subtotal plus tax equals the total. On a printed receipt this is the store's arithmetic and it is essentially never wrong, so a failure here means a misprint or a cash-rounding line, not a pricing error.

Do them in that order. Check 1 needs you; checks 2 and 3 are arithmetic.

Check 1: does each line match what you bought?

Go down the receipt one line at a time with the cart in mind. For each priced line ask four things: is this something I bought, is the price the one on the shelf tag or in the flyer, is the quantity right, and if it was on a multi-buy or member deal, did the deal line print. A line that fails any of the four is your finding; the rest of this page tells you what it means. Then add the lines up: every line with a price in the right-hand column, minus every line in brackets or with a minus sign. Rows that only describe another row and carry no amount in the price column, such as a "$4.99 ea or 2/$8.00" deal row or a "0.535 kg @ $4.39/kg" weight row, are not counted; a row that does carry an amount in the price column counts, even when it is the second row of a two-row item. The sum is the subtotal.

Here is a Nova Scotia Superstore receipt from March 2026, shortened, with the digits altered:

Seven priced lines: 11.49 + 0.10 + 3.75 + 9.00 + 4.50 + 20.00 + 5.49 = 54.33. One discount line, the strudel's clearance markdown: 54.33 − 3.29 = 51.04. That is the printed subtotal, so the arithmetic closes. Whether each of those seven prices was the shelf price is the part only you can answer.

Four things trip people up on this step:

• Multi-quantity rows. The apples print on two rows: the item row with no price, then "2 @ $10.00" with the extended price 20.00 in the price column. Count the 20.00 once, and check the 2 against what you took.
• Weighed items. The kg and $/kg print on their own row; on Loblaws-family receipts that row also carries the amount, so it is the row you count. Check the weight against what the scale showed. See weighed items.
• "YOU SAVED" and points rows are not money. On Sobeys, Safeway and Loblaws-family receipts a savings summary and a loyalty points block print after the total. They report, they do not reduce. See the Sobeys page for the difference between YOU SAVED and YOUR DISCOUNT.
• Deposits and eco fees count. They are charges with prices, printed before the subtotal, so they go into the sum. See deposits and eco fees by province.

Check 2: is the tax right?

Sales tax is your province's rate times the taxable base, and the base is the taxable items only, after store discounts. Loblaws-family receipts print the base right on the tax line; whether other chains do varies. On the receipt above it reads "2.20 @ 14.000%": the base is $2.20, and 2.20 × 0.14 = 0.308, which rounds to the printed 0.31.

Where did 2.20 come from? Only one line on that receipt is taxable, the strudel, marked HMRJ (the H is the HST flag on Loblaws-family receipts; the Superstore tax-code page explains the rest). It was $5.49 with a $3.29 markdown, and 5.49 − 3.29 = 2.20. The tax was charged on what was paid, not on the shelf price. That is the normal rule for store discounts; the discounts page shows it on a Costco receipt too.

So the check is: find the taxable lines by their code letter, add them up after any discount on those lines, and multiply by the rate. If the chain prints the base, compare your sum to it first, because that tells you whether the disagreement is about which items are taxed or about the arithmetic.

In the GST-plus-PST provinces the two taxes print as two lines, because an item can be GST-taxable but PST-exempt. Whether the base prints next to each amount varies by chain (the Safeway receipts in our sample print only the two amounts), so you may have to build each base from the code letters yourself. Which groceries carry GST or HST is a federal rule with a long list of exceptions, and the PST provinces set their own list for the provincial part, which is not the same list; the which groceries are taxed page covers the ones that surprise people. Bottle deposits on the Nova Scotia receipts behind these guides were never in the base; eco fees were. The deposits page has the detail.

Check 3: do the totals close?

Lines minus discounts gave 51.04 above, the printed subtotal. Then 51.04 + 0.31 = 51.35, the printed total. On a printed receipt this check is trivial, and that is the point: if it fails, the problem is in the gap between two printed lines, which is a short list. The one legitimate cause we see on Canadian receipts is cash rounding: a total paid in cash is rounded to the nearest five cents, and it prints as its own line (ROUNDED, or Cash Rounding, on the Loblaws-family and Safeway receipts in our sample). Under the federal penny-rounding guidance only cash is rounded; card payments settle to the cent. A receipt that rounds a card payment, or rounds by more than two cents, has a problem.

What does a mismatch mean?

When one of the checks fails, the size and place of the difference usually tells you the cause.

• A line is higher than the shelf tag. Likely cause: a scanning error, the till price is not the shelf price. In participating stores the Scanning Code of Practice applies: the item is free up to $10, or $10 off. See how to use it.
• A multi-buy price did not apply. Likely cause: you did not reach the qualifying count, or mixed sizes that do not qualify. Read the deal row: "2/$8.00" needs two. The discounts page shows how each chain prints these.
• A line you did not buy. Likely cause: a double scan, or a previous customer's item left on the belt. The customer service desk handles these with the receipt in hand. Double scans print as two identical lines, or one line with quantity 2.
• The tax base is wrong. Likely cause: an item carries a taxable code that should be exempt, or the reverse. Find the line by its code letter. Basic groceries are zero-rated federally; the letter glossary tells you what each chain's code means.
• The base is right but the tax is off by a cent. Likely cause: rounding of a computed amount. Normal. A base times a percentage lands on a fraction of a cent and the store rounds once. Anything larger than a cent is not rounding.
• The total is off by up to two cents and you paid cash. Likely cause: cash rounding to the nearest nickel. Normal. Look for the ROUNDED line.
• The totals do not close and you paid by card. Likely cause: a misprint, or a fee added after the subtotal. Rare in our sample. Keep the receipt and ask the store about it.

How much difference is normal?

Two kinds, both small and both printed. Each tax line is rounded once, so it can sit a fraction of a cent from base times rate, which shows as one cent at most. A cash total is rounded to the nearest five cents, and the rounding prints as its own line. Beyond those, none. Across the receipts behind these guides, a receipt that was photographed clearly and read correctly closes to the cent. Our own checker tolerates a cent or two, and only because a photo can turn a 3 into an 8: we would rather flag the line than fail the whole receipt. It is not an allowance for the store's arithmetic. If your hand check is out by more than that, there is a line to find.

How confident are we here? The procedure is arithmetic and does not depend on our sample. The rates are the published provincial rates as of September 2026. The claims about how lines print (where deposits sit, how rounding prints, which chains show the tax base) come from a collection of several hundred receipts that is heavily weighted to Nova Scotia, with Walmart the only chain sampled across most provinces. We have no Quebec receipts and this page does not cover Quebec. A chain may print differently in a province we have not seen.

More receipt guides

Grocery receipt discounts and promo math, with a full worked example
The Scanning Code of Practice: wrong price at the till
Which groceries are taxed in Canada, and why
Receipt tax code letters explained: GP, MRJ, HMRJ, J, H, C
Bottle deposits and eco fees by province
Weighed items on grocery receipts
What a grocery receipt reveals about you
How to read a Superstore or Loblaws receipt
How to read a Walmart Canada receipt
How to read a Costco receipt
All receipt guides