Saskatchewan Stat Holiday Pay 2026: The 5% Formula, 10 Public Holidays, and the Ontario Default That Costs You

Saskatchewan stat holiday pay 2026: the quick answer

Saskatchewan public holiday pay is calculated at 5% of the employee's total wages in the four work weeks immediately before the holiday. Overtime is excluded. Vacation pay is excluded. Ten holidays qualify in 2026. The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation does not.

If you arrived here because your payroll software is configured for Ontario and you have Saskatchewan employees, read the fourth section. The formulas are different in a direction that matters.

The ten Saskatchewan public holidays in 2026

Two absences worth noting. Boxing Day is a paid statutory holiday in Ontario and several Maritime provinces; it does not appear in the Saskatchewan Employment Act's list of public holidays. Employers who moved operations from Ontario to Saskatchewan, or who have employees in both provinces, sometimes carry Boxing Day forward as a de facto policy in Saskatchewan without realising the statute does not require it.

September 30 (National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) is a federal paid holiday under federal legislation, applying to employers and employees governed by the Canada Labour Code, federally regulated sectors such as banking, inter-provincial transport, and telecommunications. For the large majority of Saskatchewan workers employed under provincial jurisdiction, September 30 is not a paid stat. The confusion is understandable given the holiday's national profile, but the two legislative frameworks run in parallel, and proximity to the federal calendar does not create a provincial obligation. An SMB in Regina with ten employees in finance or retail owes nothing on September 30 unless it has chosen to grant the day voluntarily.

How the 5% formula works

The Saskatchewan Employment Act, Part II, Division 4, prescribes a straightforward calculation: statutory holiday pay equals five percent of the wages the employee earned in the four work weeks immediately preceding the holiday.

A few terms carry weight here.

"Wages" in this context means regular pay, including commissions and piece-rate earnings. It excludes overtime premiums and vacation pay. This last exclusion is the one payroll software set to Ontario defaults tends to miss, and the downstream effect is discussed below.

"Four work weeks" means the four complete work weeks before the holiday, not the four calendar weeks. For a weekly payroll this is straightforward. For bi-weekly or semi-monthly payroll, the lookback period needs to be computed correctly — partial weeks at the edges of the four-week window are included only in proportion to the days that fall within the window.

A worked example. An employee in Saskatoon earns $900 a week, works standard hours, takes no vacation in the month before Canada Day. Their July 1 statutory holiday pay: $900 x 4 = $3,600 in wages; $3,600 x 5% = $180.00.

If that same employee worked extra hours in one of the four preceding weeks and earned $200 in overtime premium, the overtime is excluded. Wages for the lookback: $3,400. Holiday pay: $3,400 x 5% = $170.00.

The formula is not complicated. The errors that accumulate come from wrong inputs — chiefly including vacation pay accruals or overtime premiums in the base.

The Ontario default problem

Saskatchewan and Ontario both belong to the Canadian provincial employment-standards framework, but they use different formulas for statutory holiday pay. Ontario's formula, established under the Ontario Employment Standards Act and modified by the 2018 amendments that followed the partial rollback of Bill 148, calculates holiday pay as one-twentieth (1/20) of the wages earned in the four work weeks before the holiday. For a standard weekly-paid employee the arithmetic is nearly identical to Saskatchewan's 5% rule (1/20 = 5%), but the definition of the base differs.

The practical divergence: Ontario's payroll infrastructure, including many mid-market HRIS and payroll software products built primarily for the Ontario SMB market, sometimes includes vacation pay earned in the lookback period as part of the wage base. Saskatchewan's Act excludes it explicitly.

For an employee earning $45,000 annually with a standard four-percent vacation accrual, including vacation pay in the Saskatchewan lookback inflates the stat holiday calculation by roughly eight dollars per holiday, or around eighty dollars across the ten statutory holidays in a year. Per employee. The number is not dramatic in isolation. Across a workforce of twenty-five employees over three years, it is a meaningful payroll overage with no legal basis, sitting as either an unrecorded liability or a silent drain on the payroll budget depending on how the accounts are structured.

The correction is not to re-calculate retroactively (over-payment is not a deduction right under the Act without employee consent). It is to audit the payroll configuration once and ensure the Saskatchewan lookback formula excludes vacation pay going forward.

Eligibility: Saskatchewan is broader than Ontario

Ontario's Employment Standards Act requires, among other conditions, that the employee work their last scheduled day before the holiday and their first scheduled day after it. The so-called "surrounding days" requirement has been a persistent source of disputes, especially for casual and shift workers whose schedules are irregular.

Saskatchewan's eligibility framework is different. There is no surrounding-days test of the kind Ontario uses. An employee who calls in sick the Friday before a Monday holiday, or who is on an approved leave, does not automatically lose entitlement to the holiday pay. The qualification rules are broader and the test of "wages earned in the lookback" carries most of the eligibility weight.

Substitute days when the holiday falls mid-week

Canada Day falls on Wednesday July 1 in 2026. Remembrance Day falls on Wednesday November 11. Saskatchewan Day, as always, falls on a Monday and presents no scheduling complexity.

For employees who do not normally work Wednesdays (part-time workers on a Tuesday-Thursday schedule, for instance), the mid-week holidays require a substitute day. The Saskatchewan Employment Act provides that if a public holiday falls on a day the employee does not ordinarily work, the employer must grant a substitute holiday on another day, with the holiday pay attaching to that substitute day.

The substitute day is conventionally the next regular working day, but the Act permits the employer and employee to agree on a different day within a reasonable period. The key compliance point is that the substitute day must actually be granted. Paying the five-percent holiday pay without scheduling the substitute day does not discharge the obligation.

Saskatchewan in the Canadian context

The 5% formula Saskatchewan uses is sometimes called the Prairie formula because Alberta and Manitoba share the same approach. British Columbia uses an average-day rule, calculated on the average of the employee's daily wages in the 30 calendar days before the holiday (excluding days where wages were not earned). Ontario uses 1/20 of the prior four weeks' wages plus vacation pay paid in the lookback, with a surrounding-days eligibility condition. Quebec uses the same 1/20 base formula as Ontario but with different premium-pay and substitute-day mechanics.

The variation is not accidental. Each province's statutory holiday framework evolved from its own Employment Standards history, and the inflection points that produced today's rules reflect different provincial political economies and labour-market structures. The Prairie formula's longevity reflects something about Western Canadian SMB labour markets: simple, transparent, easy to explain to a seasonal worker who will ask what they're owed on the August long weekend. Whether it is precisely optimal in a policy-design sense is a separate question, but it has the considerable virtue of being calculable without a spreadsheet.

2026 Saskatchewan stat holiday pay: reference table

For a full-time employee earning $900/week in standard wages (no overtime, no vacation pay included in lookback):

For employees with variable hours, commissions, or wage changes in the lookback window, the base shifts per holiday. Use the stat holiday pay calculator to run the numbers by province for specific employees.

Further reading

For a comparison of how the formula differs across provinces — including BC's average-day rule and Ontario's 1/20 approach — the companion post Stat Holiday Pay in Canada by Province has the full breakdown. The Ontario-specific version of this post is at Stat Holiday Pay in Ontario 2026.

Hibiscus HR's payroll module handles Saskatchewan's 5% formula with the correct lookback definition: wages only, overtime and vacation pay excluded, province set per employee rather than applied as a single national default. If your current setup treats all provinces as Ontario, the audit is worth running before the next holiday hits. The stat holiday pay calculator is free and requires no account.