EI economic regions (2026): the rate, the hours and the weeks, region by region

This is the whole Employment Insurance regional table for August 9 to September 5, 2026: every economic region in the country, its unemployment rate, the insurable hours you need to qualify for regular benefits, the shortest and longest run of weeks that region produces, and how many of your best-paid weeks your benefit is averaged over. The hours run from 420 hours to 700 hours and the weeks from 14 weeks to 45 weeks, depending entirely on where you ordinarily live. The rest of the rules are on the EI hub, which also has the estimator.

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

What this table is, and how often it changes

Canada is split into economic regions for EI purposes, and each one has an unemployment rate that Service Canada publishes from Statistics Canada's labour force survey. The table is replaced every four weeks, on a fixed calendar, and the new rates apply to claims that begin in that period. A claim already running is not re-rated when the table turns over.

This site fetches the official table each cycle, compares it against the copy it already has, archives the old one, and prints the period in the caption of every regional table here. That is why you can tell at a glance whether what you are reading is current: the period stamp on this page is August 9 to September 5, 2026. The file itself is published under a Creative Commons licence at /data/ei-regions.json.

How to read each column

• Region. The name Service Canada gives that economic region. It is not a city boundary and it is not a riding. Several of them are named after a city but reach well beyond it.
• Rate. The regional rate of unemployment in force for this period. Everything else in the row follows from it.
• Hours. The insurable hours you need in your qualifying period to draw regular benefits at all.
• Min weeks. The number of weeks someone in that region draws with exactly the hours it requires. It is the shortest claim the region produces, from 14 weeks upward.
• Max weeks. The number of weeks someone draws with a full year or more of insurable hours, to a ceiling of 45 weeks.
• Best weeks. The divisor: how many of your best-paid weeks are averaged to set your weekly benefit, from 14 to 22.

Your own hours will usually fall between the two week columns, and the exact figure comes from Schedule I of the Act. The estimator on the EI hub reads it for you.

Source: EI Program Characteristics (economic regions, rates, hours and weeks). Table for the period August 9 to September 5, 2026; it is replaced every four weeks.

Where these columns come from in the Act

Nothing in the table is left to administrative discretion. Three provisions produce every number in it, and this site checks each row against them rather than taking the published figures on trust.

• Hours come from the table in EI Act s. 7, applied to the region's rate.
• Minimum and maximum weeks are two cells of EI Act, Schedule I read in the column for that region's rate: the minimum beside the hours the region requires, the maximum in the top row of hours.
• Best weeks come from the divisor table in EI Act s. 14.

Every region in the current file was recomputed from its rate and compared with the published row, and all of them matched. The regional columns are a convenience, not a separate set of rules.

Three footnotes that change how you read a row

• The territories are measured differently. Their rate is the higher of a three-month and a twelve-month moving average, because a small labour force makes a three-month figure jump around. That keeps a territorial region from swinging between hours bands month after month.
• Four jurisdictions are split in two. Prince Edward Island, Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut have each been divided into a capital region and a rest-of-jurisdiction region since 2014. That is Charlottetown and the rest of the Island, Whitehorse and the rest of Yukon, Yellowknife and the rest of the Northwest Territories, Iqaluit and the rest of Nunavut. The two halves of one of those jurisdictions can sit in very different hours bands.
• Newfoundland and Labrador has a hole in it. The region called Newfoundland/Labrador is the province minus the St. John's region, which is listed separately. If you live in the capital, your row is St. John's, not the provincial one.

Find your own province or territory

Each of these pages carries its own regions, a worked example and the estimator preset to that province, so you do not have to read the whole national table to answer one question.

• Ontario
• Quebec
• British Columbia
• Alberta
• Manitoba
• Saskatchewan
• Nova Scotia
• New Brunswick
• Newfoundland and Labrador
• Prince Edward Island
• Yukon
• Northwest Territories
• Nunavut

What the table does not tell you today

The rows above set the hours, the weeks and the divisor. They say nothing about the temporary measures that are in force across the whole country while you read this, and those measures change the start date of a claim rather than its size.

Until they lapse, severance and vacation pay do not delay your benefits and there is no unpaid week at the start of a claim. From October 11, 2026, unless the sections are extended again, separation money is allocated to the weeks after your last day (EI Regulations s. 36) and the waiting period of 1 week returns (EI Act s. 13). Neither of them touches the columns in this table.