Statutory Holiday Pay Calculator

Four formulas, not one with different constants

This is the part almost every online calculator gets wrong. Holiday pay is not a single method with a provincial number plugged in — the provinces use structurally different arithmetic.

The look-back windows differ too: 30 calendar days in British Columbia, four weeks in most provinces, three weeks in Newfoundland, and in Nova Scotia the Code sets no window at all.

Overtime is stripped out everywhere — except one province

Nine provinces exclude overtime from the holiday pay base, either in the formula itself or through the definition of wages. Newfoundland does not.

Two provinces run the opposite asymmetry inside a single Act. British Columbia and Saskatchewan both count overtime toward your vacation pay and expressly exclude it from your holiday pay. Same statute, same word, opposite treatment — which is why the two calculations can never share one wage base.

Manitoba is not a flat 5%

Section 23(1) of Manitoba’s Employment Standards Code pays a regular day’s pay. The 5%-of-four-weeks figure in s. 23(2) is a fallback that applies only where your hours or wages vary.

A great deal of published guidance states the 5% as though it were the general rule. For a salaried Manitoban working steady hours it is the wrong rule, and it usually pays less.

Whether you qualify is a bigger question than the formula

The tests differ more than the arithmetic does, and two provinces are at opposite extremes.

• Saskatchewan asks nothing. No service threshold, no attendance rule. A first-day employee is owed 5% of whatever they earned.
• British Columbia is the strictest. You must have been employed 30 calendar days and worked or earned wages on 15 of the 30 days before the holiday.
• New Brunswick wants 90 days of employment in the previous 12 months.
• Newfoundland wants 30 days, Nova Scotia wants pay for 15 of the last 30 days, and PEI asks for no service at all.

British Columbia has no shift-attendance rule at all — its 15-of-30 test replaces it. The province’s own guidance corrects the myth directly: working the day before and the day after is not the test in BC.

What you get for working the holiday

Most provinces pay 1.5× on top of the holiday pay. Two do something else entirely.

• British Columbia is the only province with a double-time tier: 1.5× for the first 12 hours, then 2× beyond 12, plus an average day’s pay.
• Newfoundland pays double — and uniquely, you choose between the money, a day off within 30 days, or an extra vacation day. Everywhere else the employer chooses.
• Quebec has no premium rate at all. You get your wages for the hours worked plus either the indemnity or a compensatory day off. There is no time-and-a-half in Quebec.

Which days are actually paid holidays

The count ranges from six to eleven, and the disagreements are not where people expect.

The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is a paid provincial holiday in only three provinces — British Columbia, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island. Alberta treats it as optional. It is a paid holiday for federally regulated employees everywhere, which is the source of most of the confusion.

Remembrance Day is absent from four provinces’ employment standards Acts, and for different reasons. Ontario and Quebec simply do not have it. Manitoba and Nova Scotia move it into a separate statute — and in Nova Scotia that means a day off in lieu for people who work it, with no premium and nothing at all for people who were already off.

Boxing Day is a paid holiday only in Ontario, where the statute calls it “December 26”. Easter Monday is paid nowhere, except in Quebec where an employer may elect it instead of Good Friday.