Severance pay after 10 years (2026): where the notice ladder stops

Ten completed years is where most Canadian notice schedules stop climbing. Eleven of the fourteen statutes have reached their ceiling of 8 weeks by then, and staying another decade adds nothing to the notice line. What still grows at ten years is Ontario's statutory severance pay, which counts every completed year at 1 week of regular wages up to 26 weeks, and federal severance pay, which counts 2 days a year with no ceiling at all. Nova Scotia does something different again: at ten years it stops your employer from dismissing you without just cause. 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

What ten completed years gives you across Canada

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.

The ceiling, and the three statutes that are still moving

Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and federally regulated jobs all top out at 8 weeks of notice. Some got there earlier than others, but by ten years they are all on the same top rung and it does not rise again. That is the single most important thing a long-service employee should understand about employment standards: the statutory notice for someone with a decade in and someone with three decades in is identical.

Three statutes are not at a ceiling of 8 weeks at ten years.

• New Brunswick is capped at 4 weeks, the shortest notice ceiling in Canada, and it reached that ceiling well before your tenth year. Ten years in, twenty years in, it does not move (ESA s. 30).
• Newfoundland and Labrador gives 4 weeks at ten years and keeps climbing to 6 weeks for very long service (NL LSA s. 55).
• Prince Edward Island gives 6 weeks at ten and reaches 8 weeks later (PEI ESA s. 59). PEI rewrote its Act from scratch in 2024, so most of what is written online about PEI notice is out of date.

The full ladder for your own jurisdiction, band by band, is on its page under severance and termination pay.

Nova Scotia: what ten years actually buys you

Nova Scotia has no separate statutory severance pay, and its notice at ten years is the same 8 weeks as most of the country. It has something else instead, and there is nothing like it in any other Canadian employment standards statute.

"Where the period of employment of an employee with an employer is ten years or more, the employer shall not discharge or suspend that employee without just cause" (LSC s. 71).

That is not a longer notice period. It is a bar on dismissing you at all unless the employer can show just cause, enforceable by a complaint to the Director and then to the Labour Board, and it can be worth far more than any number of weeks. Two limits matter: the section does not reach the categories the Code excludes from the notice rules, and employees covered by a collective agreement are taken out of it by the regulations, because they have grievance rights instead. If you are a long-service Nova Scotia employee who has just been let go with no reason given, that section is the first thing to read on the Nova Scotia page.

Ontario severance at ten years

Ontario is where the ten-year mark is worth real money, because severance pay keeps counting after notice has stopped. Once you pass 5 years and your employer meets the payroll or shutdown test in ESA s. 64, ESA s. 65 pays 1 week of regular wages for every completed year plus the leftover months as twelfths, capped at 26 weeks.

At ten completed years that is ten times your regular weekly wage, on top of the 8 weeks of notice or the pay in lieu. In other words, once you get through the door, severance pay is the larger half of the Ontario calculation, and it is the part most people never hear about until they read their own statement.

Federally regulated jobs at ten years

Under the Canada Labour Code the notice ceiling is also 8 weeks, but severance pay has no ceiling: it is the greater of 2 days of wages for each completed year and 5 days of wages, and the per-year branch simply keeps adding (CLC s. 235). Ten completed years works out to 20 days of wages, and a thirty-year employee gets three times that, with nothing in the section to stop it.

Ten years is also the only rung in Canada where a fourth week of vacation appears in a statute: federally the minimum steps up to 4 weeks at 8% of wages (CLC s. 184). Saskatchewan reaches 4 weeks at 7.69% at the same point (SEA s. 2-24), having started everyone higher than the rest of the country in the first place. Everywhere else the vacation minimum has already settled at 3 weeks at 6%, except Newfoundland and Labrador, which at ten years still owes 2 weeks at 4%, and Yukon, which never moves off 2 weeks at 4%.

A worked example: ten years, three jurisdictions

Priya earns $1,300 for a regular work week, which is $260 a day. Her employer ends her job on the day she completes her tenth year, with no working notice. Since her last vacation pay was paid out she has earned $67,600 in gross wages and has taken no vacation.

• Ontario, employer over the payroll threshold. Pay in lieu of 8 weeks: $10,400.00. Statutory severance at 1 week a year: $13,000.00. Vacation pay at 6%: $4,056.00. Floor: $27,456.00.
• The same job, federally regulated. Pay in lieu of 8 weeks: $10,400.00. Severance at 2 days a year on a $260 day: $5,200.00. Vacation pay at 8%: $5,408.00. Floor: $21,008.00.
• The same job in New Brunswick. No statutory severance and the lowest ceiling in the country: $9,256.00 for the whole floor.

Ten identical years, and the statutory floor is roughly three times larger in Ontario than in New Brunswick. The wage and the dates are invented; every week, day and percentage comes from the section cited in the tables. Your own numbers go into the tool on your jurisdiction's page.

What long service does not buy you

The gap between the statutory floor and what a long-service employee may actually be owed is widest at exactly this length of service. Outside Quebec, courts award reasonable notice at common law on facts a schedule cannot see, and it is frequently well above the ceiling in these tables. This site does not estimate it and never will. A contract or a collective agreement may also promise more. Signing a release in exchange for the statutory minimum usually gives all of that up, which is why a decade of service is a good reason to have an employment lawyer read the offer first. The boundary is drawn in common law notice versus statutory minimums.