Prince Edward Island Paid Holiday Pay Calculator

The method changed on 30 June 2026

Two substantive changes matter for your pay:

• The formula. The old s. 10(2) paid your regular rate for your normal hours — a regular day’s pay. The new s. 28(1)(a) pays 5% of four weeks’ wages excluding overtime.
• The qualifying test. The old Act required 30 days of service and pay for 15 of the previous 30 days. Both were removed.

The holiday base is not PEI’s definition of wages

This is the trap in the new Act. Section 1(w) defines “wages” to exclude holiday pay, vacation pay, leave pay, tips and benefits. But s. 28(2) then builds a different, wider base for holiday pay specifically.

Section 28(2) provides that wages earned in the four weeks before the paid holiday include:

• pay for any paid vacation you took during those four weeks
• pay for any other paid holiday that occurred during those four weeks

So the holiday base adds back two things the general definition strips out. Coding this from s. 1(w) alone produces the wrong number, and the two things it adds back are precisely what the vacation calculation excludes.

There is a genuine drafting tension worth flagging: s. 27(3)(a)(ii) describes the holiday component as “the employee’s regular rate of pay”, while s. 28 sets it at 5% of four weeks. The two do not obviously reconcile, and resolving it needs regulations or departmental guidance not yet published.

You lose it only by missing both days

Section 27(1) grants the paid holiday unless the employee, without direction, permission or reasonable cause, fails to work on both their last work day before the holiday and their first work day after it.

The word “both” is doing real work. Missing one of the two surrounding days does not disqualify you in PEI. In New Brunswick and Newfoundland, missing either one does.

Combined with the removal of the service and 15-of-30 tests, PEI now has the most generous qualifying rules of the four Atlantic provinces by a clear margin.

Eight holidays, including Truth and Reconciliation

New Year’s Day, Islander Day, Good Friday, 1 July, Labour Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Remembrance Day and Christmas Day.

PEI is the only Atlantic province that pays 30 September, and one of only three provinces in Canada alongside British Columbia and Manitoba. Remembrance Day sits inside the employment standards statute here, as it does in New Brunswick — unlike Nova Scotia, which uses a separate Act.

Not paid: Victoria Day, Thanksgiving, Boxing Day and Easter Monday.

Working the holiday pays either 1.5× for the time worked plus the holiday pay, or straight time plus a day off before your next annual vacation. The employer picks.

Paid holidays now reach collective agreements

Section 3(2) provides that the Act does not generally apply to employment under a collective agreement — except for an enumerated list, and that list expressly includes “sections 27 and 28, respecting paid holidays”.

That is the exact reverse of Nova Scotia, whose regulations exempt collective-agreement employees from the holiday provisions entirely. Unionised Islanders keep the statutory floor; unionised Nova Scotians do not.

A complaint must be delivered within two years of the alleged contravention under s. 64(2) — the longest window in Atlantic Canada and four times Nova Scotia’s.

One caveat worth stating plainly: the new General Regulations setting out exemptions were not publicly retrievable at the time of writing, so which classes of employee are exempt under the new Act is not yet confirmed from a primary source.