How to Read Your Canadian Pay Stub and Spot Missing Overtime

The law does not leave the contents of a pay statement to the employer's discretion — at least not entirely, and the requirements differ by regime.

In Québec, the rule is the most detailed. Under the Loi sur les normes du travail (LNT), art. 46, the employer must give the employee, together with their wages, a pay statement containing "mentions suffisantes pour lui permettre de vérifier le calcul de son salaire" — enough detail to let the employee verify the calculation of their wages. And the article is specific: the statement must show, among other things, "5° le nombre d'heures payées au taux normal; 6° le nombre d'heures supplémentaires payées ou remplacées par un congé avec la majoration applicable." In plain terms: a Québec pay stub must separately show the number of hours paid at the normal rate and the number of overtime hours, paid or replaced by leave, at the applicable premium. If your Québec stub bundles everything into one undifferentiated line of "hours," it is not meeting art. 46 — and it is hiding exactly the number you need.

In Ontario and the federal regime, the pay statement itself can be terser, but the employer's underlying records are not optional. Federally, the employer must record "the hours worked each day" and the amounts paid as overtime (Canada Labour Standards Regulations, s. 24(2)). In Ontario, the employer must record the dates and times worked (ESA s. 15(1), para 3.1) and hours over 44 in a week (s. 15(4)). So even where your stub does not spell out the overtime split, the data exists behind it and you are entitled to see it.

Whatever your regime, three checks will surface most overtime problems.

1. Are hours over the threshold shown at 1.5×? Find your total hours for the week and compare them to your threshold: 40 hours federally and in Québec, 44 hours in Ontario. Every hour beyond that line should be paid at one-and-a-half times your regular rate. If your stub shows 48 hours all paid at the same base rate, with no separate overtime line, that is a red flag. In Québec specifically, art. 46 entitles you to see the overtime hours broken out at the premium — so the absence of that line is itself a problem.

2. Is holiday premium shown separately? A general holiday (federal) or public holiday (Ontario) that you actually worked can attract 1.5× for the hours worked on top of your holiday pay — s. 197 federally, and premium pay under s. 24(2) in Ontario. This is distinct from weekly overtime. If you worked a statutory holiday and see only your ordinary rate, a premium may be missing.

3. Does your effective hourly rate clear the minimum wage? Divide your gross pay for the period by the hours you actually worked. That effective rate can never fall below the applicable minimum wage — a figure that is indexed and differs by jurisdiction (see our guide on the Canadian minimum wage). If unpaid overtime has dragged your real hourly rate below the floor, that is a second, independent claim.

A pay stub only tells you what the employer says you worked. The audit that matters is the comparison between that and what you actually worked. This is why keeping your own dated, contemporaneous log of hours is so valuable: it gives you the other half of the equation.

Line up your log against each pay period. Do the total hours match? Do the days match? If your record shows 47 hours in a week and the stub shows 44 with no overtime line, you have found a discrepancy — and under the record-keeping rules, the employer's own files should be able to confirm or rebut it. A gap between your log and the stub is the clearest early signal that you have a claim.

Before you interpret a single line, confirm which regime governs you — federal, Ontario, or Québec — because the threshold you measure against changes. Applying Ontario's 44-hour line to a Québec stub would make you miss four hours of overtime every week that the law says you are owed; applying Québec's 40-hour line to an Ontario stub would make you over-read the stub. The rate (1.5×) is constant across all three; the threshold is not. If you are unsure whether you are federally or provincially regulated, settle that first.