Class 10, not Class 10.1
A food truck is a motor vehicle, not a passenger vehicle, so the luxury-car cost ceiling that haunts Class 10.1 never applies: the full purchase price goes into Class 10 and depreciates at 30% on a declining balance. A towed food trailer lands in Class 10 as well. For additions that become available for use before 2028, the half-year rule stays suspended under the accelerated investment rules, so a truck put to work this season earns the full 30% in year one instead of 15%.
Available for use is the phrase to respect. A truck sitting in a fabricator's shop in December has not earned a claim; one wrapped, plated and serving by late fall has. When a purchase is close to year-end, we plan the delivery and in-service date deliberately, because the difference is a season's worth of deduction.
What goes where in the build-out
A fitted truck is really a bundle of assets, and each piece has its own CCA home. The classing decisions happen once, at purchase, and echo through every return after:
| Asset | Class and rate | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Truck or trailer, including the built-in kitchen fit-out | Class 10 — 30% | No passenger-vehicle cap; the fit-out installed as part of the vehicle travels with it. |
| Standalone equipment: smoker, generator, tents, tables | Class 8 — 20% | Gear that lives outside the truck body is equipment, not vehicle. |
| POS tablet and laptop | Class 50 — 55% | Computer hardware depreciates fastest of all. |
| Kitchen utensils under $500 apiece | Class 12 — 100% | Pans, inserts and small wares are fully claimable in the year. |
| Vinyl wrap on a truck you already own | Usually a current expense | A re-skin is advertising; a wrap bought as part of the original build is capitalized with the truck. |
The wrap line deserves its footnote: the position depends on facts, and we document it either way so the file defends itself.
Buy, finance or lease
Financing a truck gives you CCA plus deductible interest; leasing gives you deductible payments and no asset. The lease often looks friendlier to first-season cash flow, but at Class 10's 30% rate the ownership deductions run ahead of most lease schedules in the early years, exactly when a new truck needs them. The real decision is cash-flow shape against deduction shape, and it deserves numbers, not folklore.
Walla Assaf spent years in banking and corporate finance before founding the practice, which is why lender conversations are part of the plan here, not an afterthought. Structuring the loan through Business Financing Advisory with seasonal payments, heavier May through October, lighter in winter, keeps the truck from eating the reserve that has to carry you to spring.
Claim CCA when it counts
CCA is discretionary every single year, and that is a planning lever most owners never pull. In a break-even first season, claiming the full 30% can create a loss that does little for you now, while skipping the claim preserves undepreciated capital cost for the profitable years ahead. In an incorporated truck earning inside Ontario's roughly 12.2% small-business rate, the timing question changes again, and the right answer comes out of Tax Planning & Advisory, not out of software defaults.
The same discipline applies at the exit. Sell or trade up when the truck's price exceeds its undepreciated balance and the difference comes back into income as recapture on the corporate return. Recapture is not a penalty, it is a timing bill, and choosing the year it lands, alongside a low-income winter or against the new truck's first-year claim, is the difference between planning and reacting.
The plan around the truck
Once the asset strategy is set, the rest of the year plugs into it: how much profit to leave in the corporation, how owner pay splits between salary and dividends, and how instalments track a seasonal earning curve, which we cover in depth in our CFO work for trucks. The order matters. Get the truck decisions right first, because they are the ones you cannot quietly amend next spring.
