Common law notice vs statutory minimums (2026): what this site does not calculate

This site calculates one thing: the minimum your employment standards statute guarantees. That is a hard number, taken from a section, and it is the floor. Common law reasonable notice is a separate entitlement that a court can award on top of it to an employee who is not covered by an enforceable termination clause and is not under a collective agreement. It has no schedule, no table and no formula, so this site does not estimate it, does not publish a range and does not tell you what your case is worth. What it can tell you is exactly where the floor sits, so you can see whether an offer clears it. This page is part of the severance pay hub.

Updated September 6, 2026 · Figures verified against the statutes of each jurisdiction · see all figures and their sources

The floor at eight years, in all fourteen jurisdictions

The table below is the whole of what the statutes guarantee an employee with exactly eight completed years of service. Every figure in it comes from a section. Nothing in it is an estimate, an average or a prediction, and anything above it is outside what this site covers.

Statutory severance is only owed where the statute's own conditions are met. Ontario: You are owed severance pay if the employer severed the employment relationship, you had been employed there five years or more, and either the employer's payroll is $2.5 million or more, or the severance was caused by a permanent discontinuance of all or part of the business at an establishment and you are one of 50 or more employees whose employment was severed within six months as a result. Federally regulated workplaces: You are owed severance pay if your employer ends your employment and you have completed twelve consecutive months of continuous employment. The only exception in the section is a dismissal for just cause. A lay-off counts as a termination for this purpose unless the regulation says otherwise.

Read it as a floor and not as an answer. An employer that pays exactly this has complied with the Act. Whether it has paid everything it owes you is a different question, and the rest of this page is about who gets to ask it.

What reasonable notice means

Outside Quebec, an employment contract with no fixed end date carries an implied promise: the employer will give reasonable notice before ending it, or pay in place of that notice. What counts as reasonable is decided case by case, on the circumstances of the individual employee. The factors courts weigh are well known and none of them is a number:

• Your length of service.
• The character of the position, its level of responsibility and its seniority.
• Your age.
• The availability of similar work, given your experience, training and qualifications.

Quebec reaches the same idea through the Civil Code rather than the common law. Either party to an employment contract of indeterminate term may end it by giving notice in reasonable time, taking into account the nature of the employment, the special circumstances and how long the work has lasted (CCQ art. 2091). The Code adds a protection with real teeth: an employee cannot give up the right to an indemnity for insufficient notice or for an abusive dismissal.

Two things follow from all of this, and they are the reason there is no calculator for it here. Reasonable notice is not a schedule, so it cannot be looked up. And it is assessed on facts about you personally, which no data file holds.

Who cannot claim it

Reasonable notice is not automatic. Three groups are outside it, in whole or in part.

Employees with an enforceable termination clause. If your written contract says what happens when the job ends, and that clause is enforceable, it replaces the implied promise. That is precisely why employers write them. Whether a particular clause is enforceable is a legal question about its wording, decided by a court, and this site does not read contracts or express a view on one.

Unionized employees. Where a collective agreement governs your employment, the agreement and its grievance procedure normally take the place of a court action about dismissal. Several statutes go further and remove the statutory entitlement itself. Nova Scotia's regulations exempt employees under a collective agreement from the termination sections and the general-holiday sections altogether (NS LSC Regs s. 2). New Brunswick's notice sections apply only where employees are not covered by a collective agreement (ESA s. 2). Yukon's termination sections do not apply to employees represented by a union (Yukon ESA s. 49). Manitoba shuts unionized employees out of the employment standards complaint route entirely (ESC s. 96), and Prince Edward Island's individual notice section steps aside where a collective agreement under the Labour Act governs (PEI ESA s. 3). If you are in a union, your first call is your union, not this site.

Employees the statute never covered. Each Act carves out occupations, and the carve-outs are wider than people expect. Quebec removes senior managerial personnel from the notice standard (LSA s. 2). Newfoundland and Labrador excludes people qualified in or training for a list of professions (NL LSA s. 2). Saskatchewan takes out farming, ranching and market gardening (SEA s. 2-3). Being outside the Act is not the same as being outside the common law, but it changes where the argument happens.

A contract cannot take you below the floor

This is the one direction the statutes are absolutely clear about. These Acts set minimums, and a term that gives you less than the minimum does not lower it.

Newfoundland and Labrador says any term of a contract that gives you less than the Act is void, while a term that gives you more stands (NL LSA s. 2). The Northwest Territories says every benefit, obligation or duty equal to or better than the Act, including a common law right or a contract term, still stands and must be honoured (NWT ESA s. 3). Yukon's Act overrides any other law, custom, contract or arrangement while leaving alone anything more favourable to the employee (Yukon ESA s. 2). Nunavut and Prince Edward Island keep more favourable rights alive in the same way (Nunavut LSA s. 14.03, PEI ESA s. 62), and Quebec makes a settlement in which an employee accepts less than the amount claimed absolutely null (LSA s. 76).

So a severance offer that comes in under your statutory minimum is not a hard negotiation. It is a shortfall you can raise with a free complaint to your employment standards body, and the deadlines are in final pay deadlines by province.

Routes that can beat the minimum without a lawsuit

There are four across the fourteen jurisdictions, and all four are worth knowing before anyone talks about going to court.

Quebec, section 124. An employee credited with two years of uninterrupted service in the same enterprise, who believes the dismissal was not for good and sufficient cause, has 45 days to complain in writing to the CNESST or to the Administrative Labour Tribunal (LSA s. 124). The tribunal can order reinstatement, an indemnity up to the wages the employee would have earned, or any other decision it thinks fair. Reinstatement is a remedy the provincial and territorial employment standards Acts do not offer; the Quebec recourse above and the federal one below are the two exceptions.

Federally regulated workplaces, unjust dismissal. An employee with twelve consecutive months of continuous employment who is not a manager and is not covered by a collective agreement may complain of unjust dismissal within 90 days, and the Board can order reinstatement (CLC s. 240). Being paid the statutory notice and severance does not close that door.

Nova Scotia, ten years of service. Once the period of employment is ten years or more, the employer cannot discharge or suspend the employee at all without just cause, enforced by complaint to the Director and then the Labour Board (LSC s. 71). That is a right not to be dismissed rather than a right to be paid.

New Brunswick, written reasons. A dismissal for cause has to be given in writing with the reasons set out, and without that statement the dismissal without notice is not valid even where the cause was real (ESA s. 31). Details are in fired for cause: what you are still owed.

One decision to make before you file

In Ontario, filing an employment standards claim for termination pay or severance pay bars a wrongful dismissal action about the same termination, unless you withdraw the claim within two weeks of filing it (ESA s. 96). That is a fork in the road, not a formality. If a lawyer has told you the statutory floor is not the whole story in your case, know which route you are choosing before you click the button. Federally, a wage complaint and an unjust dismissal complaint on substantially the same facts cannot run at once, although a complaint purely about money you are owed is allowed and is simply put on hold (CLC s. 251.01).

A worked example of the floor

Sam has twelve years with an Ontario employer whose payroll is over the threshold in section 64. He is paid $1,400 a week and is let go without cause.

• Notice: 8 weeks, the top band, so $11,200.00 (ESA s. 57).
• Statutory severance: 1 week for each year of employment, capped at 26 weeks, so twelve weeks: $16,800.00 (ESA s. 65). It sits on top of notice, not instead of it.
• The statutory floor, before his accrued vacation pay and unpaid wages: $28,000.00.

That number is the end of what this site will tell you. Whether a court would find that Sam was owed more, and how much more, depends on his position, his age, the market for his skills and the wording of his contract. This page does not estimate it, and no honest page can estimate it from length of service alone.

When a package is worth a second opinion

There is no promise attached to any of these, and none of them means you have a claim. They are the situations where the gap between the floor and what a court could award tends to be widest, so the cost of a first conversation is easiest to justify.

• You are being asked to sign a release. A release usually gives up everything above the floor, permanently, in exchange for what is on the table. Read it before you sign it, and get someone qualified to read it with you.
• Long service, a senior position, or both.
• A short statutory ceiling. New Brunswick tops out at 4 weeks, the lowest ceiling in the country (ESA s. 30), so the distance between the minimum and a court's view of reasonable notice is structurally wider there.
• A termination clause in your contract that limits you to the statutory minimum, or that you do not understand.
• An allegation of cause you disagree with, especially in Ontario or federally, where it can also remove statutory severance.
• A deadline that is short. Quebec's section 124 runs 45 days from the dismissal and the federal unjust dismissal complaint runs 90 days, both far shorter than the ordinary complaint windows.

How to get a first opinion without spending much

Every province and territory has a law society, and most of them run a referral service that will put you in touch with a lawyer in the right area for a short first conversation, free or at a set low cost. Many employment lawyers also offer a free first consultation. Legal aid and community legal clinics exist in many places as well, each with its own eligibility rules.

What to bring, whichever route you take: your employment contract and any amendments, your offer letter, the termination letter, your pay records for the past few months, the severance offer and the release, and the dates. Bring the figure from the calculator too, because knowing exactly where the floor sits is the fastest way to make a first conversation useful.

Owed at Work is written by an editor, not a lawyer, and none of this is legal advice. What the site does is publish the statutory floor with the section beside it, which is the part that can be checked. Everything above the floor needs someone who can look at your documents.