Tools · AgriMarketing eligibility
Will AgriMarketing pay for my own staff time?
Salaries are a cost category, capped at around a quarter of the project.
Salaries and benefits are eligible, and would normally not exceed twenty-five per cent of total project costs.
That cap decides the shape of a fundable project rather than merely trimming it. A project delivered mostly by people you already employ puts most of its value in the one category that cannot carry it. Projects that fit are weighted toward contracted services and travel: buying expertise and going places, rather than reallocating staff.
There is a second reason this matters. Your thirty per cent has to be cash. Internal time is not cash, so a company planning to contribute its share in effort has not planned a contribution at all.
What has to be true
- Salaries and benefits stay within about a quarter of total project costs
- Your own thirty per cent share is contributed in cash, not in staff time
Read next
- What export funding will not pay for, and the dates that decide it
Most funding money is lost to two rules nobody reads: a cost incurred on the wrong date is ineligible however well it fits the program, and a cost that is not tied to a specific named market is ineligible however genuinely it advances the export plan.
- Which export funding programme you are eligible for, decided by what you make
CanExport and AgriMarketing are not two doors into one building. Which one is open to you is decided by your core business activity, and the programme documents themselves say where each kind of company should go. Getting it wrong costs an intake cycle.
The other activities
Market research
DependsA trade show booth
DependsTranslation, and label artwork for a market
EligibleLegal advice and trademark protection
DependsCertification obtained to enter a market
Not eligibleDeveloping or reformulating a product
Not eligibleA new website or brand refresh
Not eligibleEquipment, software or plant
Not eligibleWork on a market your sector already sells to
This does not answer CanExport
CanExport SMEs is the other federal program exporters ask about, and it is not covered here. Its rules live on a Government of Canada host that refuses requests from our infrastructure.
Every answer we gave would come from memory rather than from a page we opened and dated.
That is a worse outcome than an absence.
A funding answer is acted on by somebody about to commit money, and the two programs differ on cost share, on who is eligible and on what counts as a fundable activity.
We would rather tell you the gap exists.
Read from
- AgriMarketing Program, Market Diversification for SMEs: 1. What this program offers. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, read 25 September 2026
- AgriMarketing Program, Market Diversification for SMEs: 2. Eligibility. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, read 25 September 2026