Ontario severance calculator
Answer a few questions about your job and how it ended. You'll get an Ontario ESA statutory minimum and a common-law reasonable-notice range — free.
Your details
What the Act sets
| Length of service | Notice or termination pay |
|---|---|
| Less than 3 months of service | 0 weeks |
| 3 months or more, but less than 1 year | 1 week |
| 1 year or more, but less than 3 years | 2 weeks |
| 3 years | 3 weeks |
| Each additional completed year after 3 | 1 more week |
| 8 years or more | 8 weeks (the cap) |
Severance pay, added on top
Applies from 5 years of service, and only if your employer's payroll is $2.5 million or more (the Act counts all of its employees, not only those in Ontario), or it permanently discontinued all or part of the business at a location and let go 50 or more employees within six months as a result. It is one week of pay for each completed year of service, plus a twelfth of a week for each completed month of the partial year, up to 26 weeks. All of your time with the employer counts toward this, whether or not it was continuous.
Mass termination
If 50 or more employees at the same establishment are let go within the same four weeks, the Act sets a mass-termination notice period instead: 8 weeks (50 to 199 employees), 12 weeks (200 to 499) or 16 weeks (500 or more). An employer's locations in the same municipality count as one establishment, and so can locations linked by written seniority rights. A fully remote employee's home counts as one of the employer's locations. Different rules apply to assignment employees of temporary help agencies. It does not apply if those let go are not more than 10 per cent of the employees there with at least three months' service and none of the terminations came from permanently closing part of the business at that establishment. This calculator includes it when you answer the question above about employees let go within the same four weeks.
Exclusions
Some employees are excluded from notice, termination pay or severance pay by Ontario Regulation 288/01, for example construction employees, some fixed-term contracts and employees on a temporary lay-off. This calculator does not check for those exclusions.
Rules current to September 28, 2026 (latest official consolidation) · checked September 30, 2026 · Source: Employment Standards Act, 2000 (Ontario) Part XV and O. Reg. 288/01