Methodology: how every figure here is verified and kept current

Every number on this site comes out of a single data file, where that figure exists once, with the section of the statute or regulation that sets it, the dates it applies between, its verification status and the day it was last checked. No page holds a number typed by hand. And the site can't be compiled at all if a page about to be published asks for a figure that hasn't been verified against the primary source. That's a control in the program, not a promise.

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

This page is written so you can audit the site instead of trusting it. If anything described here doesn't match what you see on a page, I want to know. The last section says how to tell me.

Why a method, and not a resolution to check now and then

Legal figures don't go wrong dramatically. They go wrong quietly. A page is written while the amounts are right, it earns its spot in the search results, and then an Act is amended, a regulation lifts a threshold, or a schedule is replaced. Nobody who wrote the page opens the Act again. The page keeps ranking. The reader has no way to tell that the figure has aged.

Employment standards in Canada make that worse in two specific ways. There are fourteen sets of rules instead of one, so a habit that works for the jurisdiction you know doesn't carry to the thirteen you don't. And the words collide. "Severance" means a separate statutory entitlement in Ontario and in federally regulated workplaces, and means termination pay in everyday speech everywhere else, so a page that mixes the two is wrong even when its math is right.

A method that depends on remembering to look ends up exactly where you'd expect. So verification here isn't a habit. It's a piece of the program that compiles the site.

Rule one: a figure lives in one place

Every legal figure the site uses sits in one data file: the notice schedules of the fourteen jurisdictions, the severance conditions, the vacation percentages, the holiday lists, the final pay deadlines, the complaint deadlines and the EI parameters of the year. Pages don't write those numbers. They ask for them by name, and the build swaps the request for the formatted figure. Where a page shows a table of figures, the table is generated from the same file, with its own caption and its own source line.

The practical result is the one that matters. When a threshold changes, it's fixed in one place, and every page, table, page title, calculator and comparison on the site is fixed in the same moment. An older page can't keep last year's amount, because that page never held the amount in the first place.

The same rule covers the math in worked examples. Where a page shows a calculation, the inputs are invented and visible, and the result is computed at build time from the figures in the file, so an example can't drift away from the schedule it's meant to show.

Rule two: every figure carries its section, its validity, its status and its date

A bare number can't be audited. In the data file, each one is a record with:

Value and unit

The number and what it is: weeks of notice, days, a percentage of wages, an amount in Canadian dollars, a count of employees.

Source

The statute or regulation and the exact section, as an entry in a dictionary of sources that holds the full title of the Act, the body that publishes the official version and the link to it. One figure, one section. A figure that would need two sections to be true is split into two figures.

Validity

The date the figure took effect and, if it has been replaced, the date it stopped applying. Amounts that depend on the year are kept by year instead of overwritten, because a period of employment can run through a lot of them.

Status

The verification traffic light in the next section.

Review date

The day the figure was last read from its source. It's the date at the foot of every generated table and beside every figure in official figures.

Facts that are text rather than numbers get stored the same way: who the Act covers, when notice isn't owed, what has to keep running during the notice period. Each is written from scratch in a sentence or two, with its section, its status and its review date attached.

Rule three: the traffic light, three states and no others

Rule four: the site won't publish if a figure is unverified

This is what turns an intention into a guarantee. Each page declares which blocks of data it uses. When the site is compiled for production, the program walks that declaration, and if it finds a single unverified figure on a page about to be published, it stops and generates nothing, naming the file and the figure that caused it.

What's blocked is precise, and it isn't everything. An unverified figure can't be presented as a firm fact inside an article. Unverified figures are published, and should be, in official figures and in the data file, labelled unverified. Hiding what hasn't been checked would be the opposite of the point of this page.

Three more checks belong to the same family. A page that asks for a figure that isn't in the data file stops the build. A page that asks for a table that isn't in the registry stops the build. A page whose HTML grows past the size ceiling stops the build too. The site never shows an empty gap or a leftover placeholder where a number should be.

Rule five: math I do myself says so

Some figures exist in law but nobody publishes the result. The Act sets a percentage and the amount it applies to sits in another instrument, and the product of the two, the number you actually want, appears nowhere official.

The honest way to handle that isn't to stay quiet about the figure, and it isn't to present it as though a government published it. It's to publish it as our own math, with the operation showing. When the site displays a figure like that, it marks it visibly, shows the arithmetic and adds a note at the foot of the page saying it was worked out here from official figures and isn't published as a result anywhere. A derived figure without that marking can't be published: same kind of control as the one above.

The same standard applies to readings of the law. Where a section can fairly be read more than one way and nothing settles it, the page says which reading it uses and why, instead of presenting it as the only possible one.

What counts as a primary source

In order, and you only move down the list when the one above genuinely doesn't have it:

1. The official consolidated text of the Act or regulation, from the body that publishes it for that jurisdiction: e-Laws for Ontario, BC Laws, the King's Printer or the legislature for the other provinces and the territories, LégisQuébec for Quebec, and the Justice Laws Website for the Canada Labour Code, the Employment Insurance Act and their regulations. Consolidated, not the version as first passed, because an Act from 2000 may have been amended a dozen times since.
2. The regulation under the Act, when the Act delegates the detail. Termination and severance exemptions, hours thresholds and holiday rules often live there rather than in the Act.
3. The official table published by the department that maintains it, for figures that are set administratively rather than in a section. The EI regional table is the main one, and it's re-read on its own cycle.
4. CanLII as a place to read a statute or find an amendment, when a government site is down or unreadable. The link stored beside a figure is still the official one wherever an official one exists.

Government explanatory guides, law firm bulletins, HR blogs and news stories are used for one thing only: noticing that something may have changed. A bulletin sends you to the Act. It's never the source of a figure here, and its wording never lands on a page.

The copyright rule

Nothing on this site is copied from a government website. Federal and provincial guide pages are protected, and reproducing them commercially needs permission that hasn't been asked for and isn't wanted. Every fact here is written from scratch in the site's own words, with the section cited so you can go read the original.

Statutes and regulations themselves are quoted only when the exact wording matters, in short passages, in quotation marks, with the section given. Everything else is a restatement. If you ever find a sentence here that reads like it came off a government page, that's a bug, and the last section of this page is where to report it.

The EI cycle, every four weeks

Employment Insurance has a moving part the employment standards figures don't have. The regional rate of unemployment for each economic region is set on a four-week cycle, and it decides three things at once: the insurable hours you need to qualify, the number of weeks of benefits you can draw, and how many of your best weeks of earnings go into the calculation. A page that quotes last quarter's rate is telling you the wrong number of weeks.

So the regional table isn't retyped here. It's fetched from the official source each cycle by a script that refuses to write anything if the table has changed shape: if a column heading is different, if the number of regions falls outside the range it expects, if a cell won't parse as a number, or if the period the table covers ended more than five weeks ago. Nothing stale gets published quietly. Every fetch is compared against the previous one, a change report lists the regions whose rate, hours or weeks moved, and the old file is archived.

The regional table published here covers August 9 to September 5, 2026. That period is printed on every EI page and in the caption of every regional table, so you never have to guess how current the page is.

The January review, and the reviews that don't wait

The January review

The full pass. A command lists every figure whose validity has ended or whose last review is more than twelve months old. Each one is opened at its source, confirmed or corrected, its validity and review date updated, and the change written into the data file's change log. That log is what feeds the "what changed" section of official figures. January is the right month because most annual amounts, including the EI parameters of the year, change on January 1.

Every four weeks

The EI regional table, as above.

Out of cycle

When an amending Act or regulation touches a figure the site publishes, it doesn't wait for January. Provincial budgets and the months when employment standards amendments usually come into force are marked in the project calendar so the check happens on time rather than by luck.

Link checks

Official sites reorganize. A separate run confirms that every source link still answers, and a broken internal link stops the build outright.

What "statutory minimum" means here, and what's deliberately left out

Everything this site calculates is the floor: what the employment standards statute of your jurisdiction guarantees, no more. That's a deliberate scope, and it's worth being blunt about what it leaves out.

• Common law reasonable notice. Outside Quebec, if your employment contract doesn't validly limit you to the statutory minimum, a court can award notice far above it, based on your age, your job, your years of service and how hard a comparable job is to find. This site doesn't estimate it and doesn't give ranges for it. It's the main reason to have a lawyer read an offer before you sign.
• Your employment contract. A contract can promise more than the statute, and often does. It can't promise less.
• Your collective agreement. If you're unionized, your agreement and your union's grievance procedure govern most of this, and the numbers here are the backstop underneath them.
• Human rights and reprisal claims. If you were let go because of a protected ground, or for asserting a right under the Act, that's a different claim in a different forum with its own remedies, and it isn't a calculation.
• Whether the dismissal was lawful at all. The calculator assumes the ending you tell it about. It doesn't judge a just cause allegation, and it can't tell you whether a constructive dismissal happened.

What you get instead is a number you can stand on: the minimum the statute requires, with the section beside it, which is the same number an employment standards officer would start from.

How the calculators work, in words

Both tools run entirely in your browser. Neither one sends anything anywhere, stores anything or puts anything in the address bar, and neither fetches figures while you use it: the figures each page needs are embedded in the page when the site is built, from the same data file as the text, so the tool can't disagree with the page around it.

The termination pay calculator works in the order the statute does. It turns your first and last day of work into completed service, reads the notice your service earns off that jurisdiction's schedule, subtracts the working notice you actually got, and multiplies the rest by your regular weekly wages, which means your normal work week, not overtime. Where the statute has a separate severance pay, it applies that test on its own terms and adds it, and where the statute has none it shows zero with the reason. It works out vacation pay as the percentage your service earns, applied to the wages you tell it about, less what's already been paid out. Then it dates the final pay from the deadline in that statute. Every step is on screen with its arithmetic, because a total you can't check is no use to you.

The EI estimator follows the Act the same way. It compares your insurable hours against the requirement for your economic region, works the weekly benefit out as the benefit rate applied to your average weekly insurable earnings, caps it at the year's maximum, reads the number of weeks off the schedule using your hours and your regional rate, and shows how severance, termination pay and vacation pay paid on separation get allocated and delay the start of your claim. It's an estimate that follows the Act and its regulations; Service Canada decides your claim.

The data is published, and you can reuse it

The whole data file is rendered page by page in official figures, with every figure, its section, its validity, its verification status and its review date, including figures no page uses yet. If something here is wrong, it's wrong in the open.

The raw files are published too, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: the legal figures at /data/legal-data-2026.json and the EI regional table at /data/ei-regions.json. You can use them in your own work, including commercially, as long as you credit Owed at Work and link back. Two things to know if you do. The figures are the statutory minimums described on this page, with the scope limits listed above, so they aren't a substitute for reading the Act yourself. And the regional table changes every four weeks, so check the period stamped inside the file before you rely on it.

Every version of the site is kept in a repository with its history, which answers the only question that really matters if a figure is ever disputed: what exactly was on this page the day I read it.

What this method can't give you

It's worth saying as plainly as the rest. This method makes sure the figures and the sections cited are the right ones and are current. It doesn't make sure the conclusion you draw for your own situation is right, because that depends on your contract, your collective agreement, how your job actually ended, what you can document and what the officer or the court decides.

And the person doing the verifying isn't a lawyer. That's set out without hedging in about. It's exactly why the method and the sources are published: so you don't have to rely on a credential that isn't there, and can check the figure yourself or take it to someone who has one.

If you see a figure that's wrong

This is the most useful part of the page. If you find a wrong figure, a misquoted section or something that's gone out of date, write to hello@owedatwork.com with three things:

1. The address of the page where you saw it.
2. The exact sentence or figure you think is wrong. Paste the text.
3. The source that contradicts it, if you have one. A link to the Act or the regulation is plenty. A letter or decision you've received from an employment standards office also works.

What happens next is set out step by step in contact: it gets checked against the primary source, and if the error is real the data file is corrected, which fixes every page and tool that uses that figure at once, the change is dated, and the site is republished. You get a reply either way. Corrections here are never made in silence.