Minimum Wage in Canada: How to Check You're Not Being Underpaid

Employment standards in Canada are set separately for each jurisdiction, and the minimum wage is the clearest example. Which one governs you depends on a single question: is your employer federally regulated or provincially regulated?

• Federally regulated workers (banks, interprovincial and air transport, telecommunications, broadcasting, postal service, and similar federal undertakings) fall under the Canada Labour Code. The federal minimum wage exists under section 178 of the Code and is adjusted annually on April 1.
• Ontario workers (the vast majority of employees in the province) fall under the Employment Standards Act, 2000. The general minimum wage is set by regulation under the ESA and is adjusted annually on October 1.
• Québec workers fall under the Loi sur les normes du travail. The minimum wage is fixed by regulation and adjusted on May 1 each year — it was $16.10/hour as of May 1, 2025 (Règlement sur les normes du travail, N-1.1, r. 3).

Because these three regimes never mix, the first thing you must confirm is which one covers you. Apply the wrong jurisdiction's floor and every downstream number — including your overtime — is wrong. If you are unsure whether you are federally or provincially regulated, our complete guide to unpaid overtime in Canada walks through that threshold question first.

Notice what we did not do above: we did not print a current federal or Ontario dollar figure. That is deliberate. The federal rate (April 1) and the Ontario rate (October 1) are re-indexed every year, and the only responsible way to know the figure for your pay year is to read it from the official source at the moment you check:

• Federal: the Labour Program pages on canada.ca.
• Ontario: the minimum-wage pages on ontario.ca.
• Québec: the CNESST minimum-wage page (the regulated rate published in the Gazette officielle du Québec).

The single Québec figure we cited — $16.10 as of May 1, 2025 — is included only to show what indexation looks like in practice. Even that will have moved on the next May 1. Do not rely on any dollar amount in this article to decide whether you are underpaid. Verify the rate for your jurisdiction and your pay year from the official source.

The minimum wage protects the hours you actually worked, not the hours on your contract. Employers rarely underpay by writing a sub-minimum rate on a payslip; they underpay by leaving hours off the record — unpaid prep time, working through breaks, staying late "to finish up." The way to catch this is to compute your effective hourly rate:

Effective hourly rate = total pay for the period ÷ hours actually worked in the period

Add up everything you were paid for a given pay period, then divide by the real number of hours you worked — including the ones that never made it onto the timesheet. Compare the result to the statutory floor for your jurisdiction and pay year. If your effective rate falls below that floor, you are being underpaid, no matter what your nominal hourly rate says.

A worked illustration (figures illustrative only): suppose you are paid a flat $760 for a week and your contract assumes 40 hours — that reads as $19/hour. But if you actually worked 48 hours that week, your effective rate is $760 ÷ 48 = $15.83/hour. Whether that breaches the floor depends entirely on the current statutory minimum for your jurisdiction that year — which is exactly why you check the live figure.

Even if you earn comfortably above minimum wage, the floor still matters, because your overtime builds on your actual wage — and that wage can never legally be less than the applicable minimum. Overtime in every Canadian jurisdiction is paid at 1.5× the regular rate (Canada Labour Code s. 174; Loi sur les normes du travail art. 55; ESA s. 22). At minimum, that means an overtime hour is worth 1.5 times the statutory floor for your pay year.

So the check is two-layered: first, confirm your regular rate is at or above the current minimum; second, confirm your overtime hours are being paid at 1.5× that (correctly floored) rate. An employer who quietly pays overtime on a base that has slipped below the indexed minimum is underpaying you twice over.