The Record of Employment, the ROE, is the single most important document behind a former employee’s Employment Insurance claim, and it is the one piece of Canadian HR paperwork small employers most often issue late, incomplete, or with the wrong code. Unlike vacation, stat holidays or termination notice, the ROE is not a province-by-province patchwork: it is a federal obligation to Service Canada that works the same way whether your employee is in Halifax or Kelowna. This guide walks through when you have to issue one, the deadline that catches people out, the fields that decide a claim, and the records you need to have on hand before you start.
The ROE is federal, and it is not optional
Every employer in Canada must issue an ROE whenever an employee has an interruption of earnings, regardless of the employer’s size and regardless of whether the employee actually plans to apply for EI. It is not something you fill in only when someone asks. Service Canada uses the ROE to decide whether a person qualifies for Employment Insurance, for how long, and at what rate, so an inaccurate or missing ROE directly delays money reaching someone who has just lost their income.
When you have to issue an ROE
The trigger is an "interruption of earnings," and it is broader than a permanent departure. In general terms you have an interruption of earnings when:
- An employee has, or is expected to have, seven consecutive calendar days with no work and no insurable earnings. This is the classic case, and it covers a layoff, a firing, a resignation, a leave, or the end of a contract.
- An employee’s salary drops below 60% of their normal weekly earnings because of illness, injury, quarantine, pregnancy, the need to care for a newborn or a newly adopted child, or the need to provide care or support to a family member. In these cases the interruption is tied to the drop, not to seven days off.
- It is most often triggered when an employee leaves, but a maternity, parental, sickness or caregiving leave triggers one too, which is the case small employers forget.
Because the reason for issuing changes what an EI claim looks like, it is worth confirming the exact trigger before you file. When an employee leaves is the obvious case, but the leave-of-absence and reduced-earnings triggers are where a small team without a payroll department tends to miss an ROE entirely.
The deadline is shorter than most small employers think
The ROE is time-sensitive. When you file electronically through ROE Web, which is now the default, the ROE is generally due by the fifth calendar day after the end of the pay period in which the interruption of earnings falls, with some variation for how often you pay (weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly or monthly). Paper ROEs, which are being phased out, run on a tighter five-calendar-day clock from the first day of the interruption. The exact timing rule depends on your pay cycle and filing method, so confirm the current deadline for your situation against Service Canada. The practical point stands either way: this is a within-days obligation, not an end-of-month one, and a departing employee’s EI claim stalls until it lands.
Electronic by default: ROE Web and payroll filing
Most ROEs are now filed electronically, either directly through Service Canada’s ROE Web portal or automatically by a payroll provider that submits on the employer’s behalf. Electronic ROEs go straight to Service Canada, so the employee does not need a paper copy to apply for EI. Paper serialized forms still exist for employers not yet on ROE Web, but they are the exception and the government is steering everyone toward electronic filing. Whichever route you use, the ROE is produced from your payroll and employment records, which is why those records have to be right before anyone hits submit.
The blocks small employers get wrong
An ROE is a structured form of numbered blocks, and a handful of them account for most of the errors:
- Block 15A, total insurable hours: the hours that count toward the EI claim, drawn from the relevant number of pay periods. Getting the hours wrong understates or overstates what the person qualifies for.
- Block 15B, total insurable earnings: the insurable earnings over the required period, which is not always the same as gross pay.
- Block 16, reason for issuing: the code that tells Service Canada why the person is no longer earning. This is the field that matters most (more below).
- Block 17, vacation pay, statutory holiday pay and other monies: pay-in-lieu, severance, retiring allowances and accumulated vacation each go in specific sub-blocks, and lumping them together or omitting them distorts the claim.
Block 16: the reason code decides the claim
Block 16 is a single letter code and it carries more weight than any dollar figure on the form. Common codes include A for shortage of work or a layoff, D for illness or injury, E for a resignation, and M for a dismissal, among others. The code shapes whether and how quickly the person can collect EI, and using the wrong one, for example coding a layoff as a quit, creates a dispute that the former employee has to untangle with Service Canada at the worst possible time. If you are unsure which code applies, confirm it before you file rather than guessing.
Why an inaccurate ROE is a bigger deal than it looks
An ROE is not an internal document you can quietly correct later. It goes to a government agency, it is the basis of someone’s income while they are between jobs, and the employee can see what you reported. A late ROE delays their first EI payment. Wrong insurable hours or earnings change the amount they receive. A wrong reason code can suspend the claim entirely. And because Service Canada can audit ROEs, a pattern of sloppy filings is an employer risk, not just an inconvenience for the employee. The cheapest place to get an ROE right is before you issue it, from clean records.
A quick checklist before you issue one
- Confirm there is a genuine interruption of earnings and identify the exact date it began.
- Pull the employee’s insurable hours and insurable earnings for the required number of pay periods from your payroll records.
- Choose the correct Block 16 reason code, and confirm it if the departure is at all ambiguous.
- Account for vacation pay, statutory holiday pay, severance and any other monies in the right Block 17 sub-blocks.
- File electronically through ROE Web or your payroll provider within the deadline for your pay cycle.
- Keep the ROE and the underlying records on file, because the same employee records you already have to keep are what a Service Canada audit would ask for.
That last point connects the ROE to the rest of your record-keeping: the hire date, last day worked, reason for leaving, and time-off history that an ROE draws on are exactly the same employee records you already have to keep for years under employment-standards and tax rules.
Where Workleaf fits (and where it does not)
Workleaf is the system of record underneath an ROE, not the thing that files it. It holds each employee’s hire date, last day worked, province, division and location, their documents, and their time-off and vacation history, so when an interruption of earnings happens the dates and the reason for leaving are already captured accurately in one place instead of being reconstructed from memory and email threads. That is the "have the truth ready" half of the job, and it is where late and inaccurate ROEs actually come from.
To be precise about the line: Workleaf does not run payroll, does not calculate insurable hours or earnings, and does not file the ROE with Service Canada or issue it through ROE Web. It keeps the employment records, dates and time-off history that an accurate ROE depends on, and hands them cleanly to the payroll or ROE Web filing you already use. Native payroll and an applicant tracking system are on the roadmap, not in the product 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.