Today is Thanksgiving, which for a lot of young workers in Ontario means either an unexpected day off or a shift they did not want. Either way, there is money attached to it, and a surprising number of people never check whether they got it.
Here is what Ontario’s Employment Standards Act actually requires on a public holiday, and how to work out whether your pay is right.
The nine public holidays
Ontario has nine public holidays:
- New Year’s Day
- Family Day
- Good Friday
- Victoria Day
- Canada Day
- Labour Day
- Thanksgiving Day
- Christmas Day
- Boxing Day, December 26
That list is closed. Easter Sunday, the August civic holiday and Remembrance Day are not public holidays under the ESA in Ontario. Some employers give them off anyway as a matter of policy, but that is a contractual benefit rather than a legal entitlement.
You qualify from day one
There is no minimum length of service. A student hired last week qualifies for public holiday pay on Thanksgiving the same as someone with four years in.
What there is instead is the “last and first” rule. To qualify, you must work your entire last regularly scheduled shift before the public holiday and your entire first regularly scheduled shift after it, unless you have reasonable cause for the absence. Note that this refers to your last scheduled shift, not the calendar day before. If you were not scheduled to work Friday, Friday is not your last scheduled day.
Failing the last-and-first rule without reasonable cause is the one thing that costs you public holiday pay. It is also why calling in sick the Sunday before a long weekend gets scrutinised.
The formula
Public holiday pay is calculated as follows:
All the regular wages you earned in the four work weeks before the work week containing the public holiday, plus all the vacation pay payable to you over those four work weeks, divided by 20.
Read that carefully, because two details trip people up.
The four work weeks are the four before the work week with the holiday, not the four days or the four weeks before the holiday date. And the divisor is always 20, regardless of how many days you actually worked. That means a part-time student who worked twelve shifts in four weeks gets a proportionally smaller amount than a full-timer, which is the intended effect: public holiday pay is roughly an average day’s pay.
The regular wages figure excludes overtime pay and excludes public holiday pay itself. It includes your ordinary hourly earnings.
If you worked no hours at all in the four preceding work weeks, your public holiday pay works out to zero. That is not an error, it is arithmetic.
If you did not work the holiday
If Thanksgiving was a day off for you and you meet the last-and-first rule, you get the day off with public holiday pay calculated by the formula above. That is the whole of it.
If you did work the holiday
This is where most disputes happen. Ontario gives the employer a choice between two options, and you should know which one you were put on.
Option one: you are paid your regular wages for every hour you worked on the public holiday, plus you get a substitute day off work with public holiday pay. The substitute day has to be scheduled, and the employer is required to give you a written statement setting out the holiday, the substitute day and the date the statement was given.
Option two: you are paid public holiday pay for the holiday, plus premium pay for every hour you worked on it. Premium pay is one and a half times your regular rate. Under this option you do not get a substitute day off.
Premium pay and overtime pay are not stacked on the same hours. You get one or the other for a given hour, not both.
If you worked Thanksgiving and your pay stub shows only your ordinary hourly rate for the day, with no premium and no substitute day recorded anywhere, something is likely wrong.
How to check your own stub
Work through it in order.
- Confirm you met the last-and-first rule.
- Identify the four work weeks before the work week containing the holiday. Your employer’s work week may not start on Monday; check your stub.
- Add your regular wages across those four weeks, add vacation pay payable, divide by 20. That is your public holiday pay.
- If you worked the day, check whether you were given premium pay or a written substitute-day statement.
If the numbers do not match, ask your manager first and ask in writing. Payroll errors on public holidays are genuinely common, especially at employers with a lot of part-time staff and rotating schedules.
If asking does not resolve it, filing an employment standards claim in Ontario is free and there is a two-year window from when the wages came due. Reprisal for asking about your ESA rights or filing a claim is prohibited.
A few related things worth knowing
Vacation pay accrues at 4% from your first paycheque in Ontario, not after a year. You are entitled to a 30-minute eating period within every five consecutive hours of work. Overtime starts after 44 hours in a week at one and a half times. Your employer cannot deduct till shortages, breakage or a dine-and-dash from your wages. If you are sent home early after reporting for a scheduled shift, the three-hour rule applies.
Ontario’s general minimum wage rose to $17.95 on October 1, 2026, with the student rate at $16.90. If you are still on the old rate, that is worth a conversation this week.
If your current job is not working out, entry-level postings on Youth Workforce are all early-career, and narrowing to something like retail takes seconds. Every candidate on the site has five years of experience or less, so you are not competing against people with a decade of history. Registering as a candidate is free.
This is general information, not legal advice. Rules differ by province.
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