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The amount of tax you normally pay is a combination of both federal and provincial tax. Each side of the tax return has its own tax credits and deductions that help you reduce the tax you have to pay on each respective side. When you are first start working for a company, you fill in a form to let your employer know what kind of tax credits you may be claiming. This gives your employer a way of gauging how much tax to deduct from your regular pay. As a result of all of this, the % of tax withheld from your regular pay can be much different than what the actual tax brackets are because everything is averaged out.
When you are paid anything outside of your regular pay, it is taxed differently because the tax rate for your regular pay has already been averaged out. Using the same rate for this extra payment would make it "incorrect". As a result, payments outside of your regular pay (such as bonuses and overtime) are taxed at your marginal tax rate (federal + provincial rate added together).
based on the % you provided (you said you were dinged 30%), your regular income would be in the range of $43k to $75k, correct? in this range of income, your federal tax rate is 22% and provincial tax rate is 7.7%. as a result, your marginal tax rate is 29.7%, which is what all your irregular payments would be taxed at.
or if you just were rounding down to 30%, then you could be in the 75k to 86k range, which would put your marginal tax rate at 32.5%
having said that. when you file your tax return for the year the payment belongs to, if too much tax was taken off, you will get it back as part of your refund (or a reduction in what taxes you would have owed). In the short term, it sucks not to get the money now, but in the grand scheme of things, it works out to be exactly the same thing.
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