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

When your job ends in Nunavut, the Labour Standards Act sets the floor. Once you have 90 days of employment your employer owes you 2 weeks of written notice, climbing a week at a time to 8 weeks, or termination pay instead, measured in wages and benefits. There is no separate statutory severance pay here: what people call severance in Nunavut is that termination pay. The vacation pay you've built up is owed on top, at 4% of your wages and 6% once your service is long enough, and all the wages you earned have to reach you within 10 days of the termination. One thing here is found nowhere else in Canada: the Act sets no deadline for reporting unpaid wages at all.

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

The severance pay hub covers all fourteen Canadian jurisdictions; the calculator above is set to Nunavut's Act. Give it your first and last day, your regular pay and how the job ended, and it runs the schedules below against your own dates.

Who the Act covers here, and who is federally regulated instead

The Act covers employment connected with the operation of an industrial establishment, which it defines broadly as any work, undertaking or business of a local or private nature in Nunavut, along with the employees and employers involved. It leaves out trappers, people engaged in commercial fisheries, members and students of professions designated by regulation, and employment in the public service, and the hours-of-work Part doesn't apply to employees working mainly in a managerial capacity (Nunavut LSA s. 2). Where the two sides disagree about whether the Act applies at all, the Labour Standards Officer decides, so that's a question to put in writing rather than to argue out with your employer.

Section 3 keeps alive any more favourable right you have under another law, a custom, a contract or an arrangement. And one test comes before everything else: if your employer is in an industry Parliament regulates rather than the territory, the Canada Labour Code applies instead, which takes in banks, air transport, telecom, and most Crown corporations. Those jobs belong on the federally regulated page.

The Act is only half the picture here. The Notice of Termination Exemption Regulations lift four groups out of the notice rule before the Act's own exceptions apply: anyone employed in the construction industry, anyone working seasonally or intermittently for less than 180 days in a year, anyone hired for a definite term or task of up to 365 days that simply runs out, and anyone employed for less than 25 hours a week (Nunavut Notice of Termination Exemption Regulations s. 1). If you're in one of those four, no notice and no termination pay are owed under the Act at all, however long you worked there, and the schedule below is not your floor. It's the same instrument the Northwest Territories carries as section 4.1 of its own regulations, which is why the two territories read alike.

Notice of termination, and the pay that replaces it

Section 14.03 sets the threshold: "No employer shall terminate the employment of an employee who has been employed by that employer for a period of 90 days or more, unless the employer (a) gives the employee notice of termination; or (b) pays the employee termination pay" (Nunavut LSA s. 14.03). Below 90 days, nothing is owed. Separate stretches with the same employer count as one period when the gap between them was short, so a recall after a break doesn't always start you over.

Source: Labour Standards Act, s. 14.03 — Termination of employment and notice. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. Notice is owed once you have 90 days of continuous service.

The statute builds that table out of one sentence. An employer must "give the employee written notice of termination of not less than (i) two weeks, if the employee has been employed by the employer for less than three years, and (ii) an additional week for each additional year of employment, to a maximum of eight weeks" (Nunavut LSA s. 14.03). The notice has to state the day it's given and the day the job ends, so a vague warning that layoffs are coming is not notice.

Termination pay here includes benefits

Termination pay is the wages and benefits you'd have been entitled to had you worked your usual hours for every week of the notice period, and section 14.10 deems it to be wages for every purpose of the Act, so it's protected and enforced exactly like your regular pay (Nunavut LSA s. 14.03). If you had a health plan, a housing allowance or another benefit with a value attached, that value belongs in the calculation. Price it before you agree to a number that covers wages alone.

Once notice is given, your employer can't cut your wages or wage rate or change any term or condition of the job, and it has to keep paying wages and benefits at least equal to what you'd have had working your usual hours, whether or not any work is required or performed (Nunavut LSA s. 14.08). The notice period can't overlap your annual vacation, and if you keep working past the date in the notice, the notice is void.

When no notice is owed, and constructive termination

Notice isn't owed to an employee who is on temporary layoff, who works in an activity exempted by regulation, whose employment is terminated for just cause, who refused an offer of reasonable alternative work, or who is on temporary layoff and doesn't come back within seven days of a written request (Nunavut LSA s. 14.04). Just cause is what your employer has to establish, not what it gets to declare.

The Act runs the argument the other way as well. The Labour Standards Officer can declare that a termination happened where the employer substantially altered a condition of employment to discourage the employee from staying (Nunavut LSA s. 14.08). If your pay, hours or duties were cut until leaving was the only option, that's the section to raise.

Temporary layoff, and the day it counts from

A temporary layoff is an interruption "not exceeding 45 days of layoff in a period of 60 consecutive days", or a longer one if the employer recalls you within a time the Labour Standards Officer fixes (Nunavut LSA s. 14.01). Your employer has to give written notice of the layoff saying when you're expected back, and without that notice it is deemed to have terminated you (Nunavut LSA s. 14.05). If the layoff runs past the limit, your employment is deemed to have ended on the last day of it and termination pay is owed (Nunavut LSA s. 14.06). Temporary layoff rules compares the fourteen.

A worked example

Elisapee has seven full years at an Iqaluit supplier and is let go with no notice. Her regular pay is $1,300 a week. Seven years puts her in the band worth 7 weeks, so her termination pay starts at $9,100.00 in wages, before the value of the benefits she'd have kept through those weeks is added on top.

There is no separate severance pay in Nunavut

The word severance does not appear in Nunavut's Act. Only Ontario and the federal jurisdiction have a statutory severance pay sitting on top of notice. Here, severance is the termination pay under section 14.03(4), the wages and benefits for the notice period you should have had, and that is what the calculator produces.

Section 3 keeps any more favourable right alive, so a written contract can promise more. Outside Quebec the courts also award reasonable notice at common law, often well above the statutory minimum. This site doesn't calculate that and gives no ranges: it turns on your age, your job, your service and how hard a comparable job is to find where you live. If a release has been put in front of you, that's where an employment lawyer earns their fee. See common law notice versus the statutory minimum.

Group terminations

Section 14.07 catches an employer that "wishes to terminate the employment of 25 or more employees at one time or within any period not exceeding four weeks", and it then has to give the Labour Standards Officer written notice on top of the notice each employee is owed (Nunavut LSA s. 14.07).

Source: Labour Standards Act, s. 14.07 — Notice to Labour Standards Officer (group termination). Reviewed on September 6, 2026. An employer ending 25 or more jobs at once, or inside four weeks, must give the Labour Standards Officer four, eight, twelve or sixteen weeks of written notice depending on how many people are affected, on top of each employee's own notice. None of those terminations can take effect until that period has expired. Unlike some jurisdictions, the Act does not require a copy to the union.

None of those terminations can take effect until that period has expired. Unlike the Northwest Territories, whose Act this one closely resembles, Nunavut doesn't require a copy of the notice to go to the union: the officer alone is told. If your workplace is unionized, that means nobody outside the employer has to tell your representatives, so tell them yourself. Mass termination and group layoffs has the other thirteen.

If you quit, you owe no notice

The Act asks nothing of an employee who quits. Part II.1 puts every duty on the employer, and nothing in it lets an employer hold back pay because you left without warning (Nunavut LSA s. 14.03). A written contract may still ask you for notice, which is a contract question rather than an employment standards one. Either way your vacation pay is owed. How much notice you owe when you quit shows which jurisdictions do impose one.

Vacation pay on your final pay

Vacation pay is a percentage of the wages you earned during the year of employment the vacation belongs to, and the rate follows your entitlement to time off.

Source: Labour Standards Act, s. 16 — Annual vacation with pay. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. If you stop working for any reason before finishing a year of employment, the employer must pay you without delay the vacation pay owing for every completed year, plus four or six per cent, whichever rate applies to you, of the wages you earned in the completed part of the current year.

Years with the same employer count toward the higher band even when they weren't continuous, as long as they fall inside a ten-year window (Nunavut LSA s. 16). Vacation pay is deemed to be wages for every purpose of the Act, so it carries the same protection as your regular pay. When the employment ends for any reason before you finish a year of employment, your employer has to pay "without delay" the vacation pay owing for every completed year plus the applicable percentage on the wages you earned in the completed part of the current year (Nunavut LSA s. 19). "Without delay" is a stricter standard than the deadline for your other wages.

Back to Elisapee. Since her last vacation payout she had earned $45,000 in wages. At her length of service the rate is 6%, so $2,700.00 is owing, on top of the termination pay. Being let go doesn't reduce it, and neither does quitting. The rule across the country is on vacation pay when your job ends.

General holidays in your last weeks

Nunavut calls them general holidays and names 11. Nunavut Day is the territory's own and no other jurisdiction has it. The Act doesn't include National Indigenous Peoples Day, and it names Victoria Day the long way around, as the day fixed by the Governor General for the reigning sovereign's birthday (Nunavut LSA s. 1). A holiday that falls inside your notice period is a paid day like any other, because you're still employed until the notice runs out.

Source: Labour Standards Act, s. 1 — Definitions, including "general holiday". Reviewed on September 6, 2026. The statute names 11 holidays.

If your wages are worked out on a time basis, holiday pay is what you'd have earned at your regular rate for your normal hours. If they're worked out any other way, the section says the employee is to "be paid at least the equivalent of his or her daily wages, based on the average of his or her daily wages for the four weeks that the employee worked immediately preceding the week in which the general holiday occurs" (Nunavut LSA s. 24). Work the holiday and you get at least time and a half for the hours worked on top of the holiday pay, or a substituted paid day off no later than your next vacation or the end of the job. That premium is where Nunavut parts company with the Northwest Territories, which pays overtime rates instead.

You aren't paid for a holiday you didn't work if you haven't worked at least thirty days for that employer in the previous twelve months, if you were called in that day and didn't report, if without your employer's consent you didn't work your last regular working day before or after it, or if you're on pregnancy or parental leave (Nunavut LSA s. 28). A holiday that falls on a day you don't work is owed to you either in pay or as a paid day off before your next vacation or the end of the job. Statutory holiday pay by province has the rest.

When your final pay has to arrive

Section 50(3) is plain: "Where the employment of an employee is terminated, the employer shall, within 10 days after the termination of the employment, pay to the employee all wages earned by the employee" (Nunavut LSA s. 50). The same 10 days applies whether you were let go or you quit, because the section covers any termination of employment. Vacation pay, holiday pay and termination pay are each deemed by the Act to be wages, so they're owed and enforced the same way, and unpaid wages become a lien and a secured debt against the employer's property in favour of the Labour Standards Board. Final pay deadlines by province puts the fourteen side by side.

Severance and EI

The permanent rule is that money paid when a job ends delays Employment Insurance. Under EI Regulations section 36, money paid because the job ended, whether it's called severance, termination pay, a closure bonus or unused vacation pay, counts as earnings and is allocated to the weeks after your last day at the rate of a normal working week, so benefits begin only when it runs out (EI Regulations s. 36). It delays your benefits; it doesn't take weeks away from you.

That isn't what happens 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 someone paid several weeks of termination pay can still draw EI from the start of the claim. Read the end date rather than the promise: an extension is a decision someone has to make, and nothing here assumes one.

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. Nunavut's EI regions, the hours they ask for and a worked example are on the Nunavut Employment Insurance page; the interaction in detail is on severance pay and EI.

What the statutory minimum does not include

• Common law notice. Outside Quebec a court can award reasonable notice far above the statutory minimum. This site doesn't estimate it and gives no ranges.
• Your contract. A written contract can promise more notice, more vacation or better benefits during notice, and section 3 keeps the better term alive. It can't promise less.
• A collective agreement. If you're unionized, your agreement governs most of this and your remedy is a grievance rather than a report to the officer.

The Act also can't tell you whether your dismissal was lawful, whether the just cause your employer alleges holds up, or whether a release is a good deal. Take the figure from this page to an employment lawyer and ask there. 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 report unpaid wages: there is no deadline

This is the part of Nunavut's Act with no equal in Canada. Every other province and territory sets a limitation period for a labour standards complaint. Nunavut sets none. Section 53(1) says the Labour Standards Officer "may, at any time" make a certificate setting out the wages owing (Nunavut LSA s. 53). There is no window you can miss, and an old shortfall is not automatically out of reach.

Two qualifications belong with that. The only limitation period in the Act is on prosecutions, which must be started within two years (Nunavut LSA s. 70), and no statute can conjure up records your employer no longer has. The practical advice is the same as everywhere else: report early, while pay stubs, schedules and the people who remember your hours are still around.

The process itself is a certificate rather than a hearing. The officer issues one for what's owed and mails it to the employer, which then has thirty days to answer. The Labour Standards Board investigates, holds any hearing it thinks advisable, and either confirms the certificate or cancels it and issues another. A confirmed certificate can be filed with the Nunavut Court of Justice and enforced as a judgment, and a point of law can be appealed to a judge. Inspectors can also settle an underpayment of minimum wage, overtime, vacation pay or holiday pay by written agreement. The Labour Standards Compliance Office runs the process, and its forms are at nu-lsco.ca.