How long you must keep employee records in Canada (province by province)

Ask a Canadian HR team how long they have to keep an employee file and you will usually get one of two answers: "three years, I think," or "we keep everything forever, just in case." The first is often wrong, and the second is now a liability in Quebec. Record retention is one of the few corners of Canadian employment compliance where the rule is written down plainly, differs by province, and is almost never configured correctly in the tools HR teams actually use. This guide walks through what each clock says, who sets it, and what your HR system has to be able to produce when someone asks.

There is no single Canadian retention clock. There are at least three.

The reason "how long do we keep this?" is so hard to answer is that at least three separate regimes run at the same time over the same employee file, each with its own length, its own starting trigger, and its own regulator:

• Employment standards: your province, or the Canada Labour Code if you are federally regulated, sets how long you must keep hours, wages, vacation and leave records. This is usually the shortest clock, and it is the one an employment-standards officer audits.
• Tax: the Income Tax Act, administered by the Canada Revenue Agency, sets a longer clock over anything touching payroll, source deductions and the books of account.
• Privacy: in Quebec, Law 25 runs the clock in the opposite direction, obliging you to destroy or anonymize personal information once the purpose it was collected for is achieved.

The practical consequence is that the longest applicable clock governs how long you must keep a record, and the shortest one is never a safe default for deletion. Here is what each one actually says.

The employment-standards clock, province by province

These are the retention periods written into the employment-standards legislation itself. Pay attention to the trigger as much as the number: some clocks run from the date the record was made, others from the date the work was performed or the employment ended, which produces very different real-world answers for a long-serving employee.

• Federally regulated employers (banks, airlines, telecom, interprovincial transport): the record of an employee’s start and termination dates must be kept for at least 36 months after the date of termination, and most other information (wages, hours, earnings, deductions, vacation and leave) for at least three years after the work is performed. Source: Canada Labour Standards Regulations, section 24.
• Ontario: three years is the general rule, with a different trigger per record type (three years after the employee stopped working for name and address, three years after the day or week of work for hours worked), under the Employment Standards Act, 2000, subsection 15(5). Vacation records are the exception and run longer: subsection 15.1(5) requires each vacation record to be retained for five years after it was made.
• British Columbia: four years, the longest employment-standards period of the group, and it runs from creation rather than from termination. Section 28 of the Employment Standards Act requires payroll records to be in English, to be kept at the employer’s principal place of business in British Columbia, and to be retained "for 4 years after the date on which the payroll records were created".
• Alberta: three years, stated in one sentence. Section 15 of the Employment Standards Code reads: "Employment records must be retained by an employer for at least 3 years from the date each record is made."
• Quebec: three years. The Regulation respecting a registration system or the keeping of a register, made under section 29 of the Act respecting labour standards, lists what the register must hold for each employee and each pay period (including the reference year, vacation duration and general holidays), and section 2 states: "The system of registration or register for a given year shall be kept during a 3-year period."

Every other province and territory sets its own period and its own trigger. We have deliberately listed only the jurisdictions we could verify against the legislation itself, because a complete-looking table with one wrong number in it is worse than a short, correct one. Confirm the current figure with the relevant employment-standards authority before you write a retention policy, and treat nothing on this page as legal advice.

The tax clock runs longer, and it usually wins

This is where most retention policies quietly break. An employer reads "three years" in their provincial standards, sets a three-year rule, and starts deleting records the Canada Revenue Agency still expects them to produce. Subsection 230(4) of the Income Tax Act requires records and books of account to be retained, except where another period is prescribed, "until the expiration of six years from the end of the last taxation year to which the records and books of account relate".

Note the trigger: six years from the end of the taxation year, not from the date the record was made, so a record created early in a fiscal year is effectively held closer to seven. Anything feeding payroll, source deductions or the books tends to fall inside it, which means in practice the six-year figure, not the three-year one, sets the floor for much of an employee file. The honest rule of thumb: an employment-standards minimum is a minimum for employment-standards purposes only, never a licence to delete. Work out the longest clock that applies to each category of record, and keep to that one.

In Quebec, keeping everything forever is its own violation

Most HR teams treat retention as a floor: keep at least this long, and past that, err on the side of keeping. Since Law 25, that instinct is itself a compliance risk in Quebec. Section 23 of the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector now reads: "Where the purposes for which personal information was collected or used are achieved, the person carrying on an enterprise must destroy the information, or anonymize it to use it for serious and legitimate purposes, subject to any preservation period provided for by an Act."

Read the closing clause carefully, because it is what reconciles the two directions. A preservation period set by an Act (the labour-standards register, the six-year tax rule) overrides the duty to destroy while that period is still running. But once every applicable clock has expired and the purpose is achieved, the obligation flips: continuing to hold a former employee’s personal information is no longer prudent, it is a breach. "We keep everything forever, just in case" is not a defensible Quebec position, and the same instinct sits awkwardly with the accountability principles federal private-sector privacy law applies elsewhere in Canada.

This is the part almost no HRIS genuinely helps with, and we will be blunt about our own product below rather than pretend otherwise.

What to demand from your HR tool

1. An accurate continuous-service start date and termination date on every employee, since several retention clocks are triggered by the end of employment rather than by the creation of the record.
2. The employee’s province or work location on the record, plus multi-location scoping, because the applicable period changes at the provincial border and a federally regulated workplace follows a different rulebook entirely.
3. A document store attached to the employee file rather than scattered across inboxes and shared drives, because a record you cannot find is, for audit purposes, a record you do not have.
4. An audit trail of who did what and when, so that when a record is questioned you can show its history instead of asserting it.
5. A real data export, so you can produce records on demand and are never locked in by a vendor holding your compliance obligations hostage.
6. Role-based access, because retention and privacy pull the same way: the fewer people who can open a sensitive file, the smaller your exposure during the years you are required to keep it.

Where Workleaf fits (and where it does not)

Workleaf is the system of record underneath these obligations. Every employee carries a hire date and, when they leave, a termination date, which anchor the clocks that run from the end of employment. Each employee is assigned to a location that carries a province, including a federal designation for federally regulated workplaces, so a Vancouver employee on a four-year clock and a Montreal employee on a three-year register are each held against their own jurisdiction instead of one national default. Documents live on the employee file with categories, HR-only and employee-visible flags and an optional expiry date; notes and time-off records sit alongside them. An organization-scoped audit log records the actor, action, target and timestamp behind HR changes. And when you need to produce records, CSV exports cover employees, time-off balances and requests, headcount, and the audit log itself.

To be precise about the line, including where it is unflattering: Workleaf does not automate retention. It does not run a retention schedule, does not track which clock applies to which record, and will not purge or anonymize a file when its period expires. Deciding what to keep, for how long, and when to destroy it stays with the employer, and today that is a manual judgment call. Workleaf also does not run payroll and does not remit to the CRA or Revenu Quebec, and nothing it produces is legal advice. Native payroll and an applicant tracking system are on the roadmap, not in the product today.

What Workleaf does do is make that judgment call possible. The records are complete, attached to the right employee, stamped with the right province, access-controlled, audited and exportable, which is the foundation any retention policy has to stand on, and considerably more than the shared drive and spreadsheet most Canadian SMBs are running today.

Pricing is simple and public. Basic is $15 CAD per month for up to 10 employees, then $1.50 CAD per additional employee. Advanced is $30 CAD per month for up to 10 employees, then $3 CAD per additional employee, and adds the full talent suite (reviews, 1:1s, surveys and analytics). No quotes, no surprises.