How to Prove the Hours You Worked (Even Without a Timesheet)

Some articles you may find online promise that "if your employer has no records, they automatically lose." Be careful. In Australia, employment law does codify a genuine shift of the burden of proof onto the employer where records are missing (Fair Work Act, s. 557C). Canada does not have an equivalent statutory rule. Do not build your claim on the assumption that missing records automatically decide the case in your favour.

What Canadian law does give you is different, and still powerful: a statutory obligation on your employer to keep detailed records of your hours. When they haven't, you can argue — reasonably and honestly — that the gap should not be held against the worker who is trying to reconstruct the truth. That is an argument in your favour, not an automatic win. Frame it that way.

The lever is the recordkeeping obligation. It exists in all three regimes, and it is specific about hours.

• Federal: the Canada Labour Standards Regulations, s. 24(2), require the employer to keep — for at least three years after the work is performed — "the hours worked each day," the wage rate (indicating whether it is hourly, weekly, monthly or otherwise), and the actual earnings, "including the amounts paid as overtime pay."
• Ontario: the ESA, s. 15(1), para 3.1, requires the employer to record "the dates and times that the employee worked." Even where an employee's hours are otherwise exempt from tracking, s. 15(4) still requires recording hours worked beyond 44 in a week. These records must be kept 3 years (s. 15(5)).
• Québec: the Règlement (N-1.1, r. 6), art. 1, requires a register showing, for each pay period, the hours worked per day, the weekly total, and the overtime hours paid or replaced by leave with the applicable premium — and this must also appear on your pay statement under art. 46 of the LNT.

In other words: your employer was legally required to keep exactly the record you are missing. That is the foundation you build on.

The strongest evidence a worker can create is a contemporaneous, timestamped log — hours written down as you work them, not reconstructed from memory months later. Courts and regulators give far more weight to a record kept day by day than to an after-the-fact estimate.

This is precisely what a tool like PayeMesHeures produces: a dated, hour-by-hour log of your actual working time that you can place next to your pay records. Start it today, even mid-claim — every future week you log is a week of clean evidence.

If you are starting from scratch, reconstruct as much as you honestly can, and be transparent that it is a reconstruction. Anchor each entry to something verifiable rather than pure memory.

A log is stronger when independent sources back it up. Gather whatever you can:

• Emails and messages with timestamps — the first message you sent in the morning and the last at night bracket your real day.
• Badge, access-card, or building entry/exit data — often the cleanest objective proof of when you were on site.
• Schedules, rosters, and shift assignments your employer issued.
• GPS, delivery, or app-based activity logs if your work generates them.
• Colleagues who can confirm your regular hours.
• Your own pay stubs, which under the recordkeeping rules should reflect normal and overtime hours — a stub that shows fewer hours than your log did is itself a discrepancy worth documenting.

Each source on its own may be partial. Together, they build a picture that is hard to dismiss.

Because the law requires your employer to hold these records, you can formally request them. Do it in writing, so there is a paper trail. Two outcomes both help you:

1. They produce complete records — you can reconcile them against your own log and your pay stubs. Any hours you worked but were not paid for become the heart of your claim.
2. They produce nothing, or something incomplete or inconsistent — you now have a documented gap in the records the law required them to keep. That does not hand you an automatic win, but it strengthens the reasonableness of relying on your own contemporaneous log to establish the hours.

Missing a timesheet does not sink your claim. Keep a contemporaneous, timestamped log from today forward, corroborate it with emails, access data and schedules, and request in writing the hour-by-hour records your employer was legally required to keep. If those records are missing or contradict your pay stub, that supports — without over-promising — your reconstruction of the hours. Next, learn how to read what your employer did record on your pay stub in How to Read Your Canadian Pay Stub and Spot Missing Overtime.