Alberta severance and termination pay (2026): what you're owed when your job ends

When your job ends in Alberta, the Employment Standards Code gives you four things and puts a deadline on all of them. Once you're past 90 days with the same employer, you're owed written notice of termination, from 1 week to 8 weeks depending on your length of service, or termination pay instead. Alberta has no separate statutory severance pay, so severance here means that termination pay. On top of that you're owed the vacation pay you earned but were never paid, at 4% of your wages and 6% once your service is long enough, plus pay for any general holiday that falls before the job ends. All of it is due within 31 days of your last day.

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

The calculator above is set to Alberta's Code. The same tool with a jurisdiction selector is on the severance pay hub.

Who the Code covers, and who is federally regulated instead

The Code covers employers and employees in Alberta, the provincial Crown included (ESC s. 2). Municipal and agency police officers sit outside it except for the leave provisions, and farm and ranch employees have partial exemptions under the Employment Standards Regulation (Alberta Employment Standards Regulation). One test comes before all of that: if your employer is in an industry Parliament regulates rather than the province, the Canada Labour Code applies instead, wherever you live. Banks, air transport, railways and interprovincial trucking, telecom, pipelines that cross a border and most Crown corporations belong on the federally regulated page, which has a longer notice ladder and a statutory severance pay that Alberta doesn't have.

One trade is outside almost all of this. Section 5(1) of the Employment Standards Regulation says "no termination notice, termination pay or combination of termination notice and termination pay is required to be given or paid by an employer" where the employee works at the site of construction, repair or demolition of a building, road, pipeline, sewage or power system, or on land clearing, and it lifts the employee's own notice duty too (Alberta ES Regulation s. 5). Sections 45 to 48 replace their holiday and vacation rules with flat rates: "at least 3.6% of the employee's wages" for general holidays and "at least 6%" for vacation (Alberta Employment Standards Regulation). Teachers are outside holidays and vacations altogether, and some commission salespeople lose one or both. If that is you, the schedules below are not yours.

Notice of termination, and the pay that replaces it

Section 55 sets the choice your employer has and section 56 sets the amount (ESC s. 56). Below 90 days of employment nothing is owed, and Alberta counts days rather than months, so the threshold arrives a little sooner than in most provinces. Two separate stretches of work for the same employer get added together if fewer than 90 days passed between them (ESC s. 54), so a seasonal gap usually doesn't reset your clock. Notice steps up in flat bands: crossing a line gives you the whole band, and part of a band adds nothing.

Source: Employment Standards Code, s. 56 — Employer's termination notice. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. Notice is owed once you have 90 days of continuous service.

Working notice or termination pay

Your employer picks. It can hand you written notice and keep you working through it, end the job on the spot and pay the same money instead, or mix the two so long as they cover the whole period. Termination pay equals the wages you'd have earned working your regular hours through it. If your pay moved around, the Code averages it: "If the wages of an employee vary from one pay period to another, the employee's termination pay must be determined by calculating the average of the employee's wages during the previous 13 weeks in which the employee worked preceding the date of termination of employment" (ESC s. 57). Weeks you actually worked, so unpaid weeks don't drag the average down.

While you're working out notice, nothing about the job is allowed to get worse. Your wages, wage rate and every other term stay as they were until the employment ends, whether or not you're given anything to do (ESC s. 61). Your employer can't make you use up banked overtime then, or push you onto your annual vacation to run the clock down, unless you'd been told to take it before the notice.

When no notice is owed

Section 55 lists ten exceptions (ESC s. 55): just cause, service below the qualifying period, a definite term or task of a year or less now finished, turning down reasonable alternative work, a strike or lockout, a contract made impossible to perform, the end of a season, and the layoff and recall rules. Just cause is the one employers reach for most, and putting it in a letter doesn't make it so: the burden of proof sits with the employer, and if the employer can't meet it, the money is owed in full. See what you are still owed when you are fired for cause.

Temporary layoff, and the day the clock runs out

Alberta lets a layoff run for a while before it counts as the end of the job. It has to be in writing, and then a clock starts: "The employment of an employee who is laid off for one or more periods exceeding, in total, 90 days within a 120-day period terminates, and termination pay is payable" (ESC s. 63). The clock stops while your employer keeps paying wages or benefit contributions by agreement, or while recall rights under a collective agreement are alive; when those end, the job is over and the money falls due. The other jurisdictions are on temporary layoff rules.

A worked example

Take Priya, seven full years at a Calgary equipment dealer, let go on a Thursday with no written notice. Her regular pay is $1,150 a week before overtime. Seven years puts her in the band worth 5 weeks, so her termination pay is $5,750.00. Had the dealer kept her on the payroll through a written notice period instead, it would owe nothing extra here. Had it given her two weeks' notice and then ended the job, it owes the rest of the band in money.

There is no separate severance pay in Alberta

Only two Canadian jurisdictions have a statutory severance pay sitting on top of notice, Ontario and the federal jurisdiction. What Albertans call severance is the termination pay under section 57, worked out from length of service, and that is what the calculator produces. The two ideas are pulled apart on termination pay versus severance pay.

That is a floor, not a forecast. A contract can promise more, a collective agreement can promise more, and outside Quebec the courts award reasonable notice at common law that is often well above what the Code requires. This site doesn't calculate common law notice and gives no ranges, because the answer turns on your age, your job, your service and how hard a comparable job is to find. If a release is attached to the offer in front of you, that's when an employment lawyer earns their fee. What you get here is the floor underneath that conversation.

Group terminations: a notice to the Minister, not to you

Alberta's group rule changed in 2020 and most of what's written about it online is out of date. There is no sliding scale anymore. Section 137 now says that "an employer who intends to terminate the employment of 50 or more employees at a single location within a 4-week period must give the Minister written notice at least 4 weeks before the date on which the first termination is to take effect" (ESC s. 137).

Source: Employment Standards Code, s. 137 — Group termination. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. When an employer plans to end 50 or more jobs at one location inside a four-week span, it must give the Minister written notice at least four weeks before the first termination takes effect, saying how many jobs will go and on what dates. If that is impossible, the notice must go out as soon as is reasonable. This notice goes to the government, not to you: it does not add a single week to your own individual notice, which is still set by section 56. Seasonal employees and people hired for a definite term or task are left out of the count.

Look at who that notice goes to, because that's the part that matters to you. It goes to the government, and it adds nothing to your own notice, which is still the section 56 figure above. Alberta is unusual there: in Manitoba, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick the group notice is served on the employees and becomes their own. Seasonal employees and definite-term hires are left out of the 50 employees count. The comparison is on mass termination and group layoffs.

The notice you owe when you quit

The duty runs both ways in Alberta, and section 58 is short (ESC s. 58).

Source: Employment Standards Code, s. 58 — Termination of employment by an employee. Reviewed on September 6, 2026.

You owe nothing in your first 90 days, nothing if staying would endanger your health or safety, nothing if the contract became impossible to perform or you are on temporary layoff, and nothing if you are quitting because your employer cut your wage rate, overtime rate, vacation pay, general holiday pay or termination pay. Quitting doesn't touch your vacation pay, which is owed no matter how the job ends. How much notice you owe when you quit compares all fourteen jurisdictions.

Vacation pay on your final pay

Vacation pay is the line people forget, and for someone with years in, it's often the bigger amount. It builds up every pay period as a percentage of what you earn, and when the job ends, for any reason, your employer has to pay out everything that has built up and gone unpaid (ESC s. 42).

Source: Employment Standards Code, s. 34 — Basic vacation entitlement. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. Vacation pay you have earned and not been paid is owed when the job ends, however it ends. If you leave before your first annual vacation ever came due, you get 4% of everything you earned. If you had already earned a vacation entitlement, you get the vacation pay for that year plus at least 4% (or 6% once you are on three weeks) of your wages from your last vacation anniversary to your last day.

The Code splits it in two. Leave before your first annual vacation ever came due and you get 4% of everything you earned there. If you'd already earned an entitlement, you get that year's vacation pay plus at least the applicable percentage of your wages since your last vacation anniversary. Wages here means salary, pay, commission and other pay for work, and it leaves out overtime pay, general holiday pay and termination pay (ESC s. 1). An employee paid by the month has a different calculation again (ESC s. 34.2).

Back to Priya. Since her last vacation payout she had earned $34,500 in wages. Seven years puts her rate at 6% and her entitlement at 3 weeks a year, so the vacation pay on her final cheque is $2,070.00, on top of her termination pay. Being let go, being fired for cause and resigning all leave it untouched: it's money she has already earned. The same rule across the country is on vacation pay when your job ends.

General holidays in your last weeks

Alberta's word is general holiday, and the Code names 9 of them (ESC s. 25). One that falls inside a notice period is a paid day like any other, because you're still employed. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation is not among them: Alberta has never added it to section 25, though Manitoba and the federal jurisdiction have.

Source: Employment Standards Code, s. 25 — General holidays in Alberta. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. The statute names 9 holidays.

The pay formula is what older pages get wrong. Alberta stopped using a percentage of the previous four weeks in 2020. General holiday pay is now your average daily wage: "the average daily wage of an employee, in relation to a general holiday, is calculated by averaging the employee's total wages in whichever of the following periods the employer chooses over the number of days worked by the employee in the period" (ESC s. 24.1). The employer picks the four weeks right before the holiday or the four weeks ending on the last day of the pay period before it (ESC s. 28). Work the holiday on a normal work day and you also get at least one and a half times your wage rate for every hour, or your ordinary rate plus a paid day off later.

The division is what people get stuck on. Say you earned $4,600 in the four-week period your employer picked and worked twenty days in it: your average daily wage is $230.00, and that's what a general holiday in that stretch pays. It divides by the days you actually worked, not by every day on the calendar, so part-time hours don't shrink the figure.

Eligibility has two parts (ESC s. 26). You need thirty work days or more with the same employer in the twelve months before the holiday. And you lose that holiday if you were scheduled to work it and didn't show up, or if you were away without consent on your last regular work day before it or your first one after it. All fourteen holiday lists and formulas are on statutory holiday pay by province.

When your final pay has to arrive

Another place where old pages are wrong. Sections 9 and 10 of the Code, which used to set shorter deadlines and a special rule for employees who quit without notice, were repealed in 2020. Section 8(2) is now the whole rule, and it gives the employer a choice: "When an employee's employment terminates, the employer must pay the employee's earnings within whichever of the following periods the employer chooses: (a) 10 consecutive days after the end of the pay period in which the termination of employment occurs; (b) 31 consecutive days after the last day" (ESC s. 8).

So 31 days from your last day is the outside limit, the same whether you were let go or you quit: there is no penalty deadline for quitting without notice anymore. What goes in is defined broadly, as "wages, overtime pay, vacation pay, general holiday pay and termination pay" (ESC s. 1), so unpaid vacation pay and banked general holiday pay ride along. The fourteen deadlines are compared on final pay deadlines by province.

Severance and EI

The permanent rule is that money paid when a job ends delays Employment Insurance. Under section 36 of the EI Regulations, money paid because the job ended, whatever the letter calls it, counts as earnings and is allocated to the weeks after your last day at the rate of a normal working week, so benefits don't start until it runs out. That isn't what's happening right now: a temporary measure switches the allocation off, and the waiting period with it, for benefit periods that begin on or before October 10, 2026, so an Albertan paid several weeks of termination pay can still draw EI from the first week of the claim. Read the end date rather than the promise.

Apply either way, and apply early. Waiting for a settlement, for your record of employment or for a cheque to clear is not a reason to hold off. Alberta's EI regions and a worked example are on the Alberta EI page, and the detail is on severance pay and EI.

What the statutory minimum does not include

Three things sit outside everything above, and all three can be worth more than the Code. Common law notice: outside Quebec a court can award reasonable notice far beyond the statutory minimum, and this site doesn't estimate it. Your contract: it can promise more notice, more vacation or a set severance formula, and the better term wins, though it can't promise less. A collective agreement: if you're unionized it governs most of this, and your route is a grievance rather than a complaint to an officer.

The Code can't tell you whether your dismissal was lawful, whether the just cause your employer alleges would hold up, or whether a release is a good deal. Take the figure from this page to an employment lawyer. Sergio, the editor of Owed at Work, is not a lawyer, which is why this site publishes its method and its sections instead of an opinion.

How to file a complaint

You have 6 months, and the window runs from the date your employment ended: a complaint "may be made at any time while the employee is employed by the employer and, if the employee's employment is terminated, at any time up to 6 months after the date on which the employment is terminated" (ESC s. 82). While you are still employed there is no deadline at all.

The complaint goes to an employment standards officer at Alberta Employment Standards and costs nothing. An officer can mediate, then investigate, decide and order your employer to pay, and can turn down a complaint that is frivolous, already before a court or arbitrator, or covered by a collective agreement. The form and instructions are at alberta.ca.