Disclaimer

Last updated: September 6, 2026.

This page says, without fine print, what Owed at Work is and what it is not. It is the full version of the site's disclaimer; the rest of the conditions are in the terms of use.

1. What you can expect from this site

Owed at Work reports what an employment standards statute guarantees you when your job ends, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and what the Employment Insurance Act and its regulations set out. Every figure on the site is checked against the statute or the regulation itself, is published with that source and the date it was reviewed, and is not published at all if it has not been verified. How that works is described in Methodology, and every figure with its source and status is listed in Official figures.

Even so, statutes change, regulators publish new positions, and every situation has particulars that no general page can capture. So everything you read here should be understood with the limits that follow.

2. This is not legal advice

This is the most important section on this page. Read all of it.

The content of owedatwork.com is general information. It is not legal, employment, tax or financial advice, and it cannot replace advice about your own situation.

The person who writes and maintains this site is not a lawyer. He is not called to the bar in any province or territory of Canada, is not a member of any law society, and holds no Canadian legal qualification. There is no firm, no legal department and no licensed professional behind this site reviewing its content. That is stated here, in About and in Contact, and it is the reason the site publishes its verification method and the official source of every figure instead of invoking an authority it does not have.

2.1. There is no professional relationship

Reading this site, using its calculators and exchanging email with the contact address create no solicitor-client relationship, no retainer, no professional engagement and no duty of confidentiality between you and the operator. Nothing published here, and nothing said in reply to an email, is a professional opinion about a particular case.

2.2. Statutory minimums only

This site calculates the statutory minimum: the floor that the employment standards statute of your jurisdiction sets, and nothing above it. That floor is not the whole of what you may be owed.

• The common law may give you more. Outside Quebec, an employee dismissed without cause is generally entitled to reasonable notice at common law, which courts have often set well above the statutory minimum. This site never calculates a common law amount, never estimates a range and never tells you what a court would award. A lawyer may recover more for you than the figure shown here.
• Your contract may give you more. A written employment contract, an offer letter or a company policy can promise more than the statute, and a termination clause that fails to meet the statutory minimum may be unenforceable altogether.
• A collective agreement may give you more, and if you are unionized your first stop is your union, because the grievance procedure usually replaces an individual claim.
• The statute may not cover you at all. Every employment standards statute excludes categories of worker, and the federal Canada Labour Code applies instead of a provincial statute to federally regulated workplaces such as banks, airlines, rail, telecommunications and interprovincial trucking. Each jurisdiction page says who is covered where.

2.3. The calculators are estimates

The results of the calculators are estimates produced from the figures you type, and they are only as accurate as those figures. They have no official standing of any kind and they bind nobody: not an employer, not a labour standards body, not an adjudicator, not a court, not Service Canada and not anyone else. A calculator cannot see your contract, your collective agreement, your exact record of service, the reason your employment ended or the documents in your file, and all of those change the answer.

2.4. What the site answers for, and what it does not

The site undertakes that the figures and the rules it cites are the correct ones and are current, and it applies the procedure described in Methodology to that end: every figure is verified against its primary source, carries its statute and its review date, and is not published if it is not verified.

That undertaking does not extend to the outcome of your case. What you actually receive depends on your real dates of service, your wage, your contract, your collective agreement, the reason the employment ended, the documents you can produce, the deadlines you meet and the view taken by whoever decides. No figure on this site is a decision, a prediction of what you will be paid, or a recognition of an entitlement.

The operator is not liable for the decisions you take on the basis of this site or for their consequences: filing or not filing a claim, signing or refusing to sign a release, letting a deadline pass, accepting a final payment, or any other act or omission. Deciding is yours; advising is a lawyer's. Nor is the operator liable for loss arising from an error or omission in the content, from the site being unavailable, or from a figure being out of date between the day the rule changed and the day the site was corrected. All of this applies only to the extent the applicable law allows, and nothing in it excludes a liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, or any right you have as a consumer under the law of your province or territory.

2.5. Who actually decides

Nothing on this site decides anything. The bodies that do are these:

• The employment standards body of your jurisdiction decides a complaint about notice, termination pay, severance pay, vacation pay, holiday pay or final pay. Each jurisdiction page names it, gives the deadline to file and links to the official page for filing.
• Service Canada decides Employment Insurance claims: whether you qualify, how much you receive, how many weeks you receive, and how severance, pay in lieu and vacation pay are allocated against your claim. An estimate on this site is not a decision on your claim, and it does not shorten or lengthen a single week of it.
• The courts decide a claim for common law notice or for breach of an employment contract, which is a different route from an employment standards complaint. In most jurisdictions you cannot pursue both for the same loss at the same time, and choosing one can close the other. That choice is exactly the kind of decision to take with a lawyer, not with a calculator.

If an official figure or decision you have received from one of those bodies does not match what this site says, the official one governs. I would also be grateful if you told me, through Contact, because there is probably something here to correct.

2.6. When to see a lawyer

For anything that affects your money, your rights or a deadline, and in particular before you sign a release or accept a settlement offer, speak to an employment lawyer in your province or territory. Many employment lawyers in Canada offer a free first consultation, so finding out what your case is worth often costs nothing. Legal aid exists in every province and territory for those who qualify, and the law society of each province and territory runs a lawyer referral service.

3. Quebec

Quebec is covered on this site like any other jurisdiction, in English. Employment standards there come from the Act respecting labour standards, and the body that administers it and receives complaints is the Commission des normes, de l'équité, de la santé et de la sécurité du travail (CNESST). The notice and the indemnity that Act sets are minimums in the same way as elsewhere: your contract or the general law may give you more, and this site does not calculate that.

4. If you find an error

Write to hello@owedatwork.com. You do not need to be sure, you do not need to work in the field, and you do not need to know what the right figure is. Saying that something does not look right is enough.

What happens next is described in Contact: the figure is checked against the statute or regulation itself, and if it is wrong it is corrected in the data file, which is the only place that figure lives, so every page, table and calculator that uses it is corrected at once. The change is recorded with its date and its source and shown in Official figures. Corrections are not made silently, and you get an answer either way.

The information on this site is general and is not legal, employment, tax or financial advice. For your own case, speak to an employment lawyer in your province or territory. Sergio, editor of Owed at Work.