The most common question I got when I was consulting on Canadian payroll went like this: "How many paid sick days do I have to give my employees?"
The honest answer — the answer that makes lawyers visibly twitch because it's simultaneously correct and useless — is: it depends on which province they're in, how long they've been employed, what triggered the absence, and whether your internal policy is more generous than the floor.
There is no national paid-sick-leave law in Canada. There is federal law for federally-regulated workers, and then thirteen provincial and territorial Employment Standards Acts that each set their own rule. The gap between the most generous jurisdiction and the least generous is roughly ten paid days versus zero. If you operate in more than one province, you're running at least two different sick leave policies whether you realize it or not.
The four patterns
Looking across the fourteen jurisdictions, sick leave breaks into four patterns.
- Paid + unpaid, substantial coverage. Federal (Canada Labour Code) is the outlier at the top: 10 paid days per year, with 3 paid at start and 1 earned per month up to the cap, plus unused days carrying forward. British Columbia offers 5 paid days plus 3 unpaid. These are the real paid-sick-leave jurisdictions.
- A few paid days on a tenure ladder. Quebec gives 2 paid days once an employee has 3 months of service. Prince Edward Island climbs from 0 to 3 paid days over 3 years of tenure.
- Job-protected but unpaid. Alberta, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Yukon, and the two northern territories give between 3 and 12 job-protected unpaid sick days per year. The employee can take the time without being fired. The paycheque for those days is their own problem.
- Nothing legislated. Nunavut (as of the current Labour Standards Act review) has the thinnest explicit sick-leave entitlement of any Canadian jurisdiction — which is not the same as saying employees there can be dismissed for being ill, but it does mean the statutory floor is effectively nil on paid side.
The 2026 table
| Jurisdiction | Paid days | Unpaid days | Qualifying period | Medical note required after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Federal (Canada Labour Code) | 10 | 0 | 30 days | 5 consecutive days |
| British Columbia | 5 | 3 | 90 days | Reasonable proof |
| Prince Edward Island | 0 → 3 (tenure-based) | 3 | 3 months | 3 consecutive days |
| Quebec | 2 | — | 3 months | Only after 3 leaves of 3+ days |
| Alberta | 0 | 5 | 90 days | Employer policy |
| Manitoba | 0 | 3 (Family Leave) | 30 days | Reasonable proof |
| New Brunswick | 0 | 5 | 90 days | 4 consecutive days |
| Newfoundland & Labrador | 0 | 7 | 30 days | 3 consecutive days (family) |
| Nova Scotia | 0 | 5 own + 3 family | None | >5 days OR 2+ instances |
| Ontario | 0 | 3 | 2 weeks | Cannot require a medical certificate |
| Saskatchewan | 0 | 12 (non-serious) / 12 wks (serious) | 13 weeks | Employer discretion |
| Yukon | 0 | 12 (1 per month) | None (accrual) | Employer discretion |
| Northwest Territories | 0 | 5 | 30 days | 3 consecutive days |
| Nunavut | — | Labour Standards Act review in progress | — | — |
The compliance traps
Trap 1 — Treating BC and federal as if they were Ontario. If your HR system was set up for Ontario (3 unpaid days, period), you are underpaying every sick day taken by a BC or federally-regulated employee. Five paid days in BC is not a courtesy. It is a statutory minimum. The same goes for Quebec's two paid days and PEI's tenure-based schedule. Multi-province payroll that applies the Ontario rule across all employees is silently violating four separate provincial statutes.
Trap 2 — Ontario's "cannot require a medical certificate" rule. Ontario is unusual. Its ESA explicitly prohibits employers from requiring a doctor's note for the 3-day personal emergency leave, even though "reasonable proof" can be requested. A surprising number of employers still demand a note, which would survive in Saskatchewan but is a direct violation of the Ontario Employment Standards Act. The Ministry of Labour fines for this are small on a per-incident basis but escalate fast on pattern. And the employees remember.
Trap 3 — The tenure ladder in PEI. Prince Edward Island ramps paid sick leave with service: no paid days before 12 months, 1 paid day between 12-24 months, 2 paid days between 24-36 months, 3 paid days after 36 months. This is one of the most-missed rules in the country because most payroll systems treat sick-leave entitlement as static. An employee who just crossed a tenure anniversary is entitled to more than they were last week, and your system won't know unless someone told it.
Trap 4 — The federal carryover rule. Federal Labour Code sick days carry forward year-to-year up to the 10-day cap. Most provincial rules don't carry over. If your sick-leave policy says "10 days, use them or lose them" and you have federally-regulated employees, you are violating the Code — they're entitled to accumulate unused days up to the cap. Most SMBs default to a reset-each-year model because that's simpler; for federal employees specifically, it isn't compliant.
What this costs when it goes wrong
On paid-sick-leave gaps: the calculation is mechanical. An underpaid BC employee entitled to 5 paid days at, say, $200/day of pay means the employer owes $1,000 per employee per year they were underpaid, plus two years of back-pay plus interest if an ESA officer confirms the pattern. Times the number of affected employees. A 15-person BC team that was treated as Ontario for the last 18 months comes in at the high four figures without trying.
On medical-note violations in Ontario: smaller direct cost, but the downstream damage is worse. An employee who takes 3 sick days, returns to work with their doctor's note demanded by the manager, and then learns from a co-worker that the ESA forbids it, is an employee who files with the Ministry of Labour or, more commonly, leaves. Replacement cost on a middle-skill role is 30% of annual salary. One bad sick-leave conversation with a senior person is easily a five-figure hit on its own.
The fix
You cannot remember fourteen rules. Even the lawyers who specialize in this work from updated reference tables on every file, because the statutes move — BC added 5 paid days in 2022; federally-regulated moved to 10 paid in December 2022; Saskatchewan's reforms shifted the qualifying period. The people who get this right are the ones who have a system that knows the rule for every province, applies the right entitlement by employee location, and surfaces accrual or qualifying-period boundaries in advance so the manager doesn't get surprised by them.
If the person running HR at your company is staring at a spreadsheet trying to decide how many sick days to approve for your new Prince Edward Island hire, that is the signal.
Related calculators
- Vacation Pay in Canada by Province — same multi-province compliance landscape, different statute section. Canada's vacation rules also vary sharply by province.
- Stat Holiday Pay in Canada by Province — four different formulas, six to ten holidays per year depending on where your employee lives.
- Severance Pay Calculator — statutory minimums for termination. Sick leave, vacation pay, and severance all pull from the same provincial ESA; the logic for getting them right is the same.