Best RESP Accounts and Providers in Canada in 2026

A father in Airdrie, Alberta wanted to move $3,000 out of a Registered Education Savings Plan he’d bought through the Canadian Scholarship Trust. He was told it would cost him roughly $2,000 in fees to do it. Not $2,000 in penalties for withdrawing early. $2,000 just to leave. In a separate case now working through the Quebec courts, a father who’d put money into two group RESPs for his kids ended up paying $11,720 in enrolment fees on his contributions, which worked out to about 60 percent of everything he’d put in. That class action lawsuit alleges those fees broke a provincial cap that was supposed to protect families like his.

I’m telling you this before I tell you what an RESP (Registered Education Savings Plan) is, because the provider you pick for this account matters in a way that most banking decisions don’t. Choose the wrong chequing account and you switch banks. Choose the wrong RESP structure and you can lock years of your kid’s education money into a plan that punishes you for leaving it.

So here’s a proper look at where Canadian families actually put RESP money in 2026, what each option really costs, and which ones I’d steer well clear of. If you’re still deciding whether an RESP is the right account for your situation in the first place, that’s worth settling before you shop providers.

This comparison is built from current provider documentation, fee schedules, and government sources rather than personal use of every platform listed here, since nobody realistically holds accounts at seven competing brokerages at once. Where I have used a specific product myself, I’ve said so.

What You’re Actually Trying to Capture Here

An RESP is a tax-sheltered account for a child’s post-secondary education. Money grows inside it tax-free, and withdrawals used for education get taxed in the student’s hands rather than yours, which usually means little or no tax owed given how little most students earn. That part is true everywhere the account is opened.

The reason provider choice matters so much is that an RESP is also the doorway to free government money, and how a provider handles that money varies enormously.

The big one is the Canada Education Savings Grant, or CESG. The federal government matches 20 percent of what you contribute each year, up to $500 annually, with a lifetime cap of $7,200 per child. Contribute $2,500 in a year and Ottawa adds $500 on top. Lower and middle income families can qualify for a bit more through the Additional CESG, an extra 10 or 20 percent on the first $500 contributed each year. For 2026, families with adjusted net income at or below $58,523 get the higher 20 percent additional rate, and those between $58,523 and $117,045 get 10 percent. Above that, only the standard CESG applies, according to the 2026 income bracket update from Employment and Social Development Canada.

Then there’s the Canada Learning Bond, or CLB, aimed at lower income families and requiring no contribution at all. An eligible child gets $500 in the first year they qualify, plus an extra $25 to help cover the cost of opening the RESP, then $100 for every additional eligible year up to age 15, to a lifetime maximum of $2,000. Starting in April 2028, the government plans to automatically open an RESP and deposit the CLB for eligible children born in 2024 or later who aren’t already named as a beneficiary by age four, which will change how a lot of low-income families end up with these accounts in the first place. Until then, someone still has to open the account and apply, and this is worth knowing regardless of which government RESP grants you’re actually eligible for.

British Columbia and Quebec each layer on their own incentive. BC pays a one-time $1,200 grant to resident children born in 2006 or later, claimable any time between their sixth and ninth birthday. Quebec runs the Quebec Education Savings Incentive, worth 10 percent of annual contributions up to $250 a year and $3,600 over a lifetime. Saskatchewan and Alberta both ran similar provincial top-ups years ago, but both have since closed to new grants, so if you’re in either province, the federal programs are what you’re working with.

All of that sits inside a $50,000 lifetime contribution limit per child, which covers what you personally put in, not the grants or the growth on top. Go over that limit and the Canada Revenue Agency charges a 1 percent monthly tax on the excess until it’s withdrawn. None of these numbers change based on which provider you use. What changes is how much of that money actually survives contact with fees, and how easily you can get at it if your plans change.

The Big Banks: Convenient, Rarely Cheapest

If your RESP is with the same bank that holds your chequing account, you’re almost certainly using one of the big banks’ self-directed brokerage arms, RBC Direct Investing, TD Direct Investing, BMO InvestorLine, CIBC Investor’s Edge, Scotia iTRADE, or National Bank Direct Brokerage.

These platforms let you build your own portfolio of stocks, ETFs, mutual funds, and GICs inside the RESP, with no annual account fee on registered accounts. The catch shows up per trade. RBC Direct Investing charges $9.95 per stock or ETF trade, dropping to $6.95 if you place more than 150 trades in a quarter, a threshold almost no parent buying twice a year will ever hit. TD’s standard commission runs similarly, though its Easy Trade mobile app throws in 50 free trades a year. National Bank Direct Brokerage and Desjardins Online Brokerage have both gone the other direction and now offer commission-free trading on stocks and ETFs, which quietly makes them the two cheapest bank-owned options for a buy-and-hold RESP.

None of this makes the big banks a bad choice. If you’re already comfortable in your bank’s app, want everything under one login, and plan to buy an ETF portfolio once or twice a year rather than trade actively, the commission difference between a big bank and a discount brokerage might cost you $20 or $30 annually. That’s not nothing over eighteen years, but it’s also not worth the hassle of switching institutions if you’re otherwise happy where you are, and it doesn’t change which RESP investment options are actually available to you inside the account.

Questrade: The Discount Brokerage Default

Questrade has become the default recommendation for cost-conscious, hands-on parents, and the reasoning holds up. Since March 2025, Questrade charges nothing to buy or sell stocks and ETFs in any account type, RESP included. Options trades still carry a small per-contract fee, and there’s no inactivity charge, no annual platform fee, and no custody fee sitting quietly in the background.

The one real friction point is the $1,000 minimum deposit required to start trading in a self-directed account, which is a genuine barrier if you’re opening an RESP the week your kid is born with a smaller first contribution in mind. Once you clear that threshold, Questrade also offers Questwealth, its own robo-advisor, for parents who want a built portfolio managed for them at a 0.20 to 0.25 percent annual fee rather than picking ETFs themselves. Questwealth’s minimum is lower, at $250.

Questrade applies for the CESG on your behalf once you set up contributions, which is standard across nearly every provider on this list and not something worth paying extra for anywhere.

Wealthsimple and the Robo-Advisor Route

Wealthsimple takes a different approach entirely. There’s no self-directed RESP option here, no minimum deposit, and no per-trade commission, because you’re not picking individual stocks. You choose a risk level, Growth, Balanced, or Conservative, and Wealthsimple builds and rebalances a portfolio of low-cost ETFs around that choice, collects the CESG paperwork, and largely stays out of your way. The fee is 0.5 percent annually on balances under $100,000, dropping to 0.4 percent above that, on top of the underlying ETF costs.

For a parent who wants education savings handled without spending an afternoon researching index funds, this is close to the easiest legitimate option in the country. The tradeoff is that 0.4 to 0.5 percent compounds over an eighteen-year investment horizon in a way that’s genuinely bigger than the $9.95 you’d occasionally pay at a big bank brokerage, even if it feels smaller day to day. Justwealth runs a similar managed model but leans on target-date portfolios that automatically shift toward safer holdings as your child approaches university age, which suits a parent who wants that de-risking built in rather than something they have to remember to do manually around age 15.

Group and Scholarship Plans: Read the Fine Print Before You Sign Anything

This is the category the Airdrie family and the Quebec lawsuit both involve, and it deserves its own honest warning rather than a neutral mention alongside everything else.

Group RESPs, sold by providers like CST, through its CST Advantage plan, and Kaleido, pool your contributions with those of other families and pay out based on a fixed schedule tied to enrolment in a qualifying program. The structural problem is the enrolment fee, sometimes called a sales charge, which is deducted from your earliest contributions before any of that money starts growing for you. Cancel early and you don’t just lose the fee, you also forfeit the investment income your money would have earned during that period, which gets redistributed to families who stay in.

A 2021 class action authorized in Quebec, targeting CST, Kaleido, Knowledge First Financial, Heritage, Children’s Education Funds, and Global RESP Corporation, alleges these enrolment fees exceeded a provincial cap of $200 per plan that was supposed to apply. The lead plaintiff’s case shows just how steep this gets in practice, with $11,720 paid in enrolment fees against roughly $19,500 contributed across two children’s RESPs. That’s not a rounding error, that’s most of two years of saving disappearing into fees before a single dollar of grant money even landed.

CST has responded to this pressure with CST Spark, a newer, fee-transparent RESP that behaves more like a conventional managed plan, with an all-in cost reported around 1.3 to 1.5 percent and none of the front-loaded enrolment structure. If a family member is pushing you toward a traditional group plan sold door-to-door or through a workplace presentation, ask specifically whether it’s the older enrolment-fee style plan or something closer to CST Spark, because those two products behave completely differently if your circumstances change.

My honest take, and this is a personal judgment rather than a researched fact, is that there’s rarely a good reason for a Canadian parent in 2026 to choose a traditional enrolment-fee group RESP over a self-directed account or a low-cost robo-advisor. The tax sheltering and CESG matching are identical either way. What differs is what happens to your money if life doesn’t go according to the plan’s fixed schedule, and group plans handle that scenario worse than almost anything else on this list.

How the Main Options Stack Up

Provider	Structure	Annual cost	Minimum to start	Best suited to
Questrade	Self-directed brokerage	$0 commission on stocks/ETFs (since March 2025)	$1,000	Hands-on parents comfortable picking their own ETFs
Wealthsimple	Managed (Growth/Balanced/Conservative)	0.5% under $100k, 0.4% above	$0	Parents who want it handled with no ongoing decisions
RBC / TD / Scotia / BMO / CIBC Direct Investing	Self-directed brokerage	Around $9.95 per trade, varies slightly by bank	Varies, usually $0	Existing bank customers who trade infrequently
National Bank Direct Brokerage / Desjardins Online Brokerage	Self-directed brokerage	$0 commission on stocks/ETFs	$0	Cost-conscious DIY investors already banking there
Questwealth / Justwealth	Robo-advisor, some with target-date options	0.20% to 0.25% plus ETF costs	$250 (Questwealth)	Parents who want a managed portfolio that de-risks automatically
CST Spark	Managed education portfolio	Roughly 1.3% to 1.5% all-in	Varies	Families who want a dedicated education-savings brand without enrolment fees
CST Advantage / Kaleido, traditional group plans	Pooled group plan	Front-loaded enrolment fee, varies by unit	Varies by plan	Approach with real caution, read the prospectus in full first

Mistakes That Cost Families Real Money

The most common one I see is treating “my bank offers RESPs” as the same thing as “my bank offers the best RESP.” It usually isn’t, and the gap between a $9.95 commission and a $0 commission adds up more than people expect over eighteen years of periodic contributions.

The second is misunderstanding CESG catch-up. If you don’t contribute enough in a given year to get the full $500 grant, you can catch up later, but the annual grant payout is capped at $1,000 even when you’re making up for multiple missed years. Parents sometimes assume they can dump a huge lump sum in one year and collect years of missed CESG all at once. You can’t, and it’s worth reading up on how RESP contribution catch-up actually works before you plan around it.

The third, and the most expensive by far, is signing a group plan without reading exactly how the enrolment fee is structured and what happens if the plan gets cancelled early. The Airdrie and Quebec cases above aren’t outliers dredged up from an obscure corner of the internet, they’re the direct, foreseeable result of how that specific product category is built.

Which One Actually Fits You

Existing bank customers who only plan to make an ETF purchase once or twice a year can generally stay put without losing much, though it’s worth checking whether your bank’s brokerage now offers commission-free ETFs before assuming the old fee schedule still applies everywhere.

The lowest ongoing cost, for anyone comfortable picking two or three ETFs themselves, comes from Questrade, provided you can clear the $1,000 minimum without straining your budget in the account’s first month.

Parents who’d rather never think about rebalancing, and don’t mind paying a modest management fee for that peace of mind, tend to end up at Wealthsimple. Justwealth is worth a look specifically for anyone drawn to a portfolio that automatically shifts toward lower-risk holdings as a child nears university age, without a parent having to remember to do it manually.

A group RESP prospectus handed over at a baby shower or a workplace benefits fair deserves to go home unsigned first. Read the enrolment fee section closely, then compare it against what CST Spark or a simple self-directed account would cost for the same contribution schedule.

One more decision worth making early, regardless of provider, is whether you want an individual plan or a family plan if you have more than one child, since that choice affects how flexibly grant money and contributions can move between siblings later.

Now What

Pick the account type that matches how involved you want to be, then open the RESP before your child turns 15 if you want any shot at the CESG for beneficiaries aged 16 or 17, since those ages carry extra contribution requirements that are much harder to meet if you start late. Once it’s open, set up automatic contributions if your provider allows it, since most CESG-related mistakes come from inconsistent, one-off deposits rather than deliberate decisions. Then confirm your provider has actually applied for the CESG, and the CLB or BCTESG if you qualify, rather than assuming it happens automatically the moment the account exists. And if you’re weighing an RESP against other registered accounts before deciding how much goes where, it’s worth a look at how an RESP stacks up against a TFSA for education-specific saving, or planning ahead for how you’ll eventually withdraw the money once your child actually enrolls.