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

When your job ends in Yukon, the Employment Standards Act sets the floor. After 6 months of consecutive employment your employer owes you written notice of termination on the longest ladder in the North, from 1 week up to 8 weeks, gaining a week for every year of service between three and eight, or the same money as termination pay instead. There is no separate statutory severance pay here: what people call severance in Yukon is that termination pay. The vacation pay you've built up is owed on top, at 4% of your wages no matter how long you stayed, and every wage you're owed except the termination pay has to reach you within 7 days of your last day.

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 Yukon'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 reaches every employee working in Yukon and their employer, with one flat exception: the Government of Yukon and its own employees are outside it (Yukon ESA s. 2). It overrides any other law, custom, contract or arrangement, while leaving alone anything that gives you more than the Act does.

The termination Part has its own, much longer, list of exclusions, and it's unusually broad. Sections 50 to 57 don't apply at all to the construction industry, to a seasonal or intermittent operation that runs less than six months a year, or to employees represented by a union for collective bargaining (Yukon ESA s. 49). Nor do they apply where you were discharged for just cause, where your employer broke the employment contract, where you're on temporary layoff, where the contract was made impossible by an unforeseeable event, where you refused reasonable alternative work from the same employer, or where you were hired for a project or assignment of no more than twelve months that ended. Read that list before you read the schedule: in a territory with a lot of construction and seasonal work, it decides whether the rest of this page applies to you at all.

One test comes before even that. If your employer is in an industry Parliament regulates rather than the territory, the Canada Labour Code applies instead: banks, air transport, interprovincial trucking, telecom, and most Crown corporations. Those jobs belong on the federally regulated page.

Notice of termination, and the pay that replaces it

Section 50 opens with the threshold: "No employer shall terminate the employment of an employee who has been employed for six consecutive months or more unless the employer gives" the notice it sets out (Yukon ESA s. 50). Below 6 months, no statutory notice is owed.

Source: Employment Standards Act, s. 50 — Notice required. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. Notice is owed once you have 6 months of continuous service.

This is the part worth knowing. Most statutes jump in wide bands, so a seven-year employee and a four-year employee land on the same number. Yukon doesn't: after the first two rungs it adds one week for every additional year, so the ladder has eight rungs and your notice tracks your service almost exactly until it tops out. At seven years of service you're owed 7 weeks, which is more than most provinces give at the same point.

Working notice or termination pay

Your employer can keep you working through the notice, or end the job and pay instead. Termination pay is "an amount equal to the amount that the employee would have been entitled to receive as their regular wages for their normal hours of work for the period prescribed by subsection 50(1)" (Yukon ESA s. 51). Regular wages for normal hours, not overtime, and not the busiest week you ever had.

One Yukon rule catches people by surprise: termination pay can be paid out in instalments on your usual pay days, as long as the whole amount reaches you inside the period the notice would have covered (Yukon ESA s. 65). A lump sum is not guaranteed. While notice is running, your employer can't change your wage rate or any other term or condition of your employment without your consent, the notice period can't overlap your annual vacation, and if you keep working after the notice expires it has no effect (Yukon ESA s. 54).

Temporary layoff

A temporary layoff is an interruption "not exceeding 13 weeks of layoff in a period of 20 consecutive weeks", or a longer one if the employer calls you back inside a time the director sets (Yukon ESA s. 48). Once a layoff goes past that, you're treated as having been terminated at the start of it, and termination pay is owed from that earlier date (Yukon ESA s. 53). An employer can ask the Employment Standards Board for leave to extend a layoff, so ask whether that was done. Temporary layoff rules compares the fourteen.

A worked example

Ryan has seven full years at a Whitehorse wholesaler and is let go with no notice. His regular pay is $1,050 a week. Seven years puts him on the rung worth 7 weeks, so his termination pay is $7,350.00. His employer can pay that across his usual pay days rather than all at once. Had he been let go a year later, he'd have been on the top rung instead.

There is no separate severance pay in Yukon

The word severance does not appear in Yukon'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 51, the wages you'd have earned during the notice period, and that's what the calculator produces.

Section 3 preserves anything more favourable to you under any law, custom, contract or arrangement, 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. 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, and the layoff rule people miss

Section 58 catches an employer that terminates, "either simultaneously or within any period not exceeding four weeks, the employment of a group of 25 or more employees", and it then has to give notice to the Director of Employment Standards on top of the notice each employee is owed (Yukon ESA s. 58).

Source: Employment Standards Act, s. 58 — Notice to director (group termination). Reviewed on September 6, 2026. An employer ending 25 or more jobs at once, or inside four weeks, must warn the Director of Employment Standards four, eight, twelve or sixteen weeks ahead, depending on how many people are affected. That warning is on top of the individual notice each employee is owed. An employer putting 50 or more people on temporary layoff at once, or inside four weeks, owes the director four weeks of notice as well.

The second half of section 58 is the one nobody quotes: an employer putting 50 or more people on temporary layoff at once, or inside the same window, owes the director four weeks of notice as well. A mass layoff that isn't called a termination still triggers a duty. Unlike the Northwest Territories, Yukon doesn't require a copy to the union under this section. Mass termination and group layoffs has the other thirteen.

The notice you owe when you quit

Yukon asks more of an employee who quits than almost anywhere else in Canada. Section 50(2) runs its own ladder, and a long-serving worker owes real weeks, not a courtesy two weeks' notice.

Source: Employment Standards Act, s. 50 — Notice required. Reviewed on September 6, 2026.

If you quit without giving it, your employer can deduct one week's wages at your regular rate for normal hours, but only with your consent. Without your consent it has to pay that amount to the director, who investigates and decides whether it goes back to the employer or to you (Yukon ESA s. 52). It can't simply keep the money, and it can't touch your vacation pay. How much notice you owe when you quit compares all fourteen.

Vacation pay on your final pay

Yukon's vacation minimum is the plainest in Canada, and it never moves. The Act defines vacation pay as "four per cent of the wages of an employee during a year of employment in respect of which the employee is entitled to a vacation" (Yukon ESA s. 19), and that rate applies at every length of service.

Source: Employment Standards Act, s. 21 — Entitlement to vacation with pay. Reviewed on September 6, 2026. If your job ends before you finish a year of employment, the employer has seven days from the termination date to pay you any vacation pay still owing for earlier completed years plus four per cent of the wages you earned in the part-year. That four per cent on the part-year is only owed if you were continuously employed for at least 14 days.

When the job ends before you finish a year of employment, your employer has seven days from the termination date to pay any vacation pay still owing for earlier completed years, plus the percentage on the wages you earned in the part-year (Yukon ESA s. 25). That last piece is owed only if you were continuously employed for at least fourteen days. Vacation pay is deemed to be wages for every purpose of the Act, so it carries the same protection and the same enforcement as your regular pay.

Back to Ryan. Since his last vacation payout he had earned $37,000 in wages. At 4%, that is $1,480.00 owing on his final pay, 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

Yukon calls them general holidays and names 11, one of the longest lists in the country. Discovery Day is Yukon's alone, and the territory is one of the few whose statute names National Indigenous Peoples Day (Yukon ESA 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: Employment Standards Act, s. 1 — Definitions, including "general holiday". Reviewed on September 6, 2026. The statute names 11 holidays.

How the day is paid depends on how you're paid (Yukon ESA s. 30). Weekly and monthly employees simply don't have their pay cut for the period the holiday falls in. Daily and hourly employees get what they'd have earned at their regular rate for their normal hours. Anyone paid another way gets their average daily wage, excluding overtime and bonus, for that week. Employees on irregular or less than standard hours get a different measure again: "at least the equivalent of 10 per cent of the employee's wages, excluding vacation pay, for the hours worked in the two week period immediately preceding the week in which the general holiday falls". Working the holiday adds the applicable overtime rate for the hours worked, or a substituted day off.

You aren't paid for a holiday you didn't work if it falls in your first thirty calendar days with that employer, if you were called in and didn't show up, if you'd already been on unpaid leave you asked for during the fourteen straight days before it, or if without your employer's consent you failed to work either the last scheduled day before or the first scheduled day after (Yukon ESA s. 34). A holiday on a non-working day gives you the next working day off with pay. Statutory holiday pay by province has the rest.

When your final pay has to arrive

Section 65(2) is blunt: "When the employment of an employee is terminated at any time, the employer shall pay to the employee within seven days from the date of termination all wages other than termination pay under section 51 then owing to the employee" (Yukon ESA s. 65). Two things follow. The deadline is the same 7 days whether you were let go or you quit, because the section covers termination "at any time". And termination pay is the single item carved out of it, because the Act lets your employer spread that across the notice period instead. Everything else, vacation pay included, is due inside the week. 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 a Yukoner 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. Yukon's EI regions, the hours they ask for and a worked example are on the Yukon 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 or more vacation, and section 3 keeps the better term alive. It can't promise less.
• A collective agreement. If a union represents you for bargaining, the termination Part doesn't apply to you at all and your remedy is a grievance.

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 file a complaint

The window is 6 months, and section 73(3) counts it carefully: for wages, it runs "within six months after the last date on which payment of the wages was to be made to an employee and an employer failed to make it", and for anything else from when the matter arose (Yukon ESA s. 73). Since your final wages were due within 7 days of your last day, the clock starts almost immediately.

Anyone can complain in writing to the Director of Employment Standards or an employment standards officer. You can ask for your name to be withheld, and it stays withheld unless disclosure is needed for a proceeding or is in the public interest, which matters in small communities where everyone knows the employer. The director can issue a certificate for unpaid wages, and certificates and other decisions can be appealed to the Employment Standards Board. Filing costs nothing. The Employment Standards Office of the Department of Community Services runs it, and the wage complaint form is at yukon.ca.