Infrastructure funding programs

STA 0+120Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund (CHIF)

CHIF provides $6 billion in federal funding over 10 years specifically for drinking water, wastewater, stormwater and solid waste infrastructure that enables housing¹. It runs through two streams: a Direct Delivery stream worth $1 billion over eight years, with intake now closed to all applicants, funding projects between $1 million and $100 million that must be substantially complete by September 2031¹; and a Provincial and Territorial Agreement stream worth $5 billion over 10 years, with projects due to be substantially complete by September 2033¹.

STA 0+240Build Communities Strong Fund

Announced in Budget 2025, the Build Communities Strong Fund is the largest of the current programs: $51 billion over 10 years starting in 2026-27, plus $3 billion a year ongoing after that². It splits into three streams:

The fund launched on April 7, 2026 with a first tranche of 13 projects and $300 million in federal funding³.

STA 0+360The Community stream: local roads, water and sewer

The Community stream is the direct successor to the federal Gas Tax Fund, later the Canada Community-Building Fund, and it is the stream most relevant to everyday municipal civil work, funding local roads, bridges and water systems at over $2.5 billion a year⁴. It delivers that over $2.5 billion every year to more than 3,700 communities⁴, covering 19 eligible project categories under 10-year administrative agreements running from April 1, 2024 to March 31, 2034, worth $26.7 billion over that period and indexed at 2% annually⁴. Because it flows on a per-community formula rather than a competitive application, it tends to fund the steady base of local infrastructure renewal rather than single large signature projects.

STA 0+480Canada Public Transit Fund

The Canada Public Transit Fund's current official page states approximately $25 billion over 10 years for public transit and active transportation, delivered through the Strong Transit Fund, Baseline Funding and Targeted Funding streams⁵. The program was originally reported at launch in 2024 as a $30 billion fund; the current page's lower figure was not explained on the page itself, so the $25 billion current figure should be treated as the one to plan against until the change is reconciled in an official update.

STA 0+600Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (legacy)

The Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program (ICIP), the program that preceded the current suite, has delivered over $33 billion through bilateral agreements with provinces and territories⁶, split across a $20.1 billion Public Transit stream, $9.2 billion Green Infrastructure stream, $1.3 billion Community, Culture and Recreation stream, and $2 billion Rural and Northern stream plus a $400 million Arctic Energy Fund⁷. All provincial ICIP funding was allocated by March 31, 2023 (territories had until March 31, 2025), and the construction deadline has been extended to October 2033⁷. A project already running under an ICIP agreement stays on that program's terms; new applications go through the current suite of funds above instead.

STA 0+720How the old Community-Building Fund split by province

The most recent published province-by-province breakdown of the predecessor Canada Community-Building Fund covers fiscal 2023-24, ahead of the Community stream rebrand, and gives a sense of relative scale even though it is not current-year data:

Current-year Community stream allocations should be confirmed directly against the program's own page rather than scaled from this older table.

STA 0+840What this means for a project

None of these programs pay a contractor directly; they flow to the province, territory or municipality that then designs, tenders and delivers the actual project, usually through the public tendering process covered elsewhere on this site. For a civil contractor, the practical use of this list is knowing which program a municipality's capital plan is likely drawing on for a given project type — Community stream money for a routine local road or watermain renewal, CHIF or the housing-enabling parts of the Build Communities Strong Fund for a project explicitly tied to new housing-enabling servicing, and the Public Transit Fund for transit-adjacent civil work. See the site servicing process for how a subdivision's own off-site levies interact with this municipal-side funding.

STA 0+960How the money actually flows to a project

Most of these programs move through the same basic chain: the federal government signs a bilateral agreement with a province or territory, that government allocates funding to eligible categories or specific projects (sometimes by formula, sometimes competitively), and the receiving municipality or agency then designs and delivers the project itself, typically funding the balance of cost from its own capital budget, debt, or development levies. A federal program rarely covers the full 100% of a project's cost on its own; cost-sharing formulas vary by program and sometimes by project type, so confirming what share a specific program actually covers, and what the province or municipality is expected to contribute alongside it, is a necessary step before assuming a federal contribution closes a project's funding gap on its own.

Timing matters as much as eligibility. Programs with a fixed intake window, like CHIF's now-closed Direct Delivery stream¹, stop accepting new applications once that window closes, while formula-based programs like the Community stream flow on a set schedule tied to the administrative agreement rather than a competitive call. Knowing which type a given program is changes how far in advance a municipality needs to plan its application, and it is worth asking a municipal capital-planning contact directly which program a specific project is already counted against before assuming additional federal money is still available for it.