Don't Miss the Deadline: Time Limits to Claim Unpaid Overtime in Canada

Before any dates, fix the distinction in your mind:

1. The deadline to FILE — by when must you lodge your complaint or action? Miss it and the door closes entirely.
2. The depth you can RECOVER — once you've filed on time, how far back into your pay history can an order actually reach? Beyond that horizon, the wages are gone even with a perfect case.

A generous filing deadline is useless if the recovery depth is short; a deep recovery window is useless if you've already blown the deadline to file. You have to satisfy both, and the numbers behind each differ by regime.

For federally regulated workers (banks, interprovincial transport, telecom, broadcasting, postal, and similar) under the Canada Labour Code:

• Deadline to file: a complaint of non-payment of wages must be made within six months of the last day the wages were required to be paid (s. 251.01(2)). The Head may extend that period (s. 251.01(3)), but never rely on it.
• Recovery depth: a payment order can reach back up to 24 months immediately before the complaint — or before termination, if your employment ended first (s. 251.1(1.1)).

So federally, the file clock is short (6 months) but the recovery reach is deep (24 months). The lesson: complain quickly to keep the door open, and the two-year depth takes care of the rest.

Under the Employment Standards Act, 2000, an employment standards officer may not order wages that became due more than two years before the complaint was filed (s. 111(1); the same limit runs from the start of an inspection under s. 111(3)). This is a flat two-year recovery ceiling counted back from the day you file.

The catch is subtle but expensive: the ceiling moves with the calendar. Every month you delay, the pay period that just aged past two years falls off the back of the window. You don't lose the whole claim at once — you lose it a slice at a time, quietly, while you wait.

Québec has the shortest and most misunderstood limit of the three. Under art. 115 of the Loi sur les normes du travail, a civil action is prescribed by one year from each due date ("par un an à compter de chaque échéance").

The decisive words are each due date. This is not a single one-year block. It is a rolling clock that resets separately for every pay period. Each pay you were shorted starts its own one-year countdown from the day it should have been paid. So a worker underpaid for two years who waits doesn't keep a two-year claim shrinking slowly — they hold a stack of individual one-year clocks, and the oldest pay periods expire month after month, one at a time.

One partial brake exists: a CNESST investigation notice, sent to the employer by registered mail, suspends prescription for six months for all of that employer's employees (art. 116). But you cannot manufacture that notice — so in Québec, the only safe move is to act now.

Picture a worker who has been underpaid every pay period for the last 24 months and is deciding whether to act today or "later." Here's roughly how much of that history is still recoverable, by regime, depending on how long they wait (illustrative — your recoverable amount depends on your actual hours, rate, and dates):

If you act…	Federal (24-mo reach)	Ontario (2-yr reach)	Québec (1-yr rolling)
Today	~24 months recoverable	~24 months recoverable	~12 months recoverable
In 6 months	~24 months (if filed in time)*	last ~18 months of the old period	~6 months of the old period
In 12 months	file deadline likely blown*	last ~12 months	~0 of the old period

*Federal recovery reaches 24 months back from the complaint, but the complaint itself must be filed within 6 months of when wages were due (s. 251.01) — miss that and the depth is moot.

The shape is the same everywhere but steepest in Québec: waiting silently deletes recoverable pay, period by period. The oldest, often largest, stretch of underpayment is always the first to disappear.

• Identify your regime — federal, Ontario, or Québec. The clocks are not interchangeable; never apply one regime's deadline to another's file.
• Note both dates — your filing deadline and your recovery horizon, using the numbers above.
• Act on the earliest clock — in Québec especially, treat every passing month as lost pay periods.
• Preserve your proof now — a dated hours log today is worth more than a perfect memory next year.