Ontario Statutory Holidays 2026 and 2027: Adding All Nine to Your Staff Schedule in One Go

Ontario has nine public holidays under the Employment Standards Act: New Year's Day, Family Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Three are still ahead in 2026, and one of them, Boxing Day, falls on a Saturday, which changes what a small business with weekday staff has to plan.

Why holidays go wrong on a small team's schedule

Picture a cleaning company in Mississauga with 18 staff. Most of the crew works Monday to Friday; four people cover the Saturday office contracts. In September the owner builds the schedule for the rest of the year and types the holidays in by memory.

Three things slip. The Civic Holiday from August is still on somebody's list as a paid day, although the province does not require it. Boxing Day goes in as "Saturday, closed", and nobody notices that the fourteen weekday cleaners have just lost a day off they were owed. And the overtime rule in the payroll sheet still says 40 hours, copied from a template written for a different province.

None of that is carelessness. Holidays are entered once a year, by hand, by somebody who has a business to run. The fix is to start from a list somebody checked against the province's own page, and to see the weekend problem before the schedule goes out.

Ontario's nine public holidays, and what the rule says

Employment rules in Canada are provincial. This section quotes Ontario only; British Columbia, Alberta, Quebec and the other provinces publish their own lists, and federally regulated employers such as banks and airlines follow the Canada Labour Code.

In Ontario, the province's guide to the Employment Standards Act on public holidays (Checked on 7 October 2026) lists the nine days and adds:

While some employers give their employees a holiday on Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, the first Monday in August, or Remembrance Day, the employer is not required to do so under the ESA.

Here are the dates for this year and next, worked out from that list:

Three of these land on a weekend: Boxing Day 2026, and both Christmas Day and Boxing Day 2027.

The same Ontario page says what happens then. When a public holiday falls on a day that is not ordinarily a working day for an employee, or during their vacation, the employee is entitled to a substitute holiday off with public holiday pay, or to public holiday pay for the holiday itself if they agree to that electronically or in writing. It says a substitute holiday is scheduled no later than three months after the public holiday, or up to 12 months with the employee's written agreement, and that the employee gets a written statement naming the holiday being substituted and the substitute date before the public holiday.

Two more lines from that page answer the questions owners ask most. Qualified employees can be full time, part time, permanent or on a term contract, and it does not matter how recently they were hired. And public holiday pay is worked out from the regular wages and vacation pay of the four work weeks before the holiday's week, divided by 20.

Ontario's overtime page (Checked on 7 October 2026) says that for most employees overtime begins after 44 hours in a work week, at one and a half times the regular rate.

This is general information, not legal advice: check with the agency or an employment lawyer for your case.

What Boxing Day on a Saturday means for your schedule

Go back to the cleaning company. Saturday 26 December is a normal working day for the four Saturday cleaners and a normal day off for the other fourteen. Under the rule quoted above, the fourteen weekday cleaners get another day off in its place, for example Monday 28 December, paid as a public holiday. In short: staff whose day off it is get a substitute day off.

That is the part a hand-typed holiday list hides. Write "Boxing Day, Saturday" on the calendar and the weekday crew looks unaffected. Put the substitute day on the schedule instead, and the Monday after Christmas is planned for, not discovered when half the crew asks for it.

Adding Ontario's holidays to Shiftelio in one go

Shiftelio keeps holidays on the Leave and holidays page. For a company in Canada, the owner sees a card there: Starter pack: add the usual holidays, overtime plan and leave types for your country in one go. Here is the cleaning company's set-up.

At the bottom, Where this comes from lists every ontario.ca page the pack was built from, with the date it was checked, and What this pack does not do says what is still yours to handle.

What the Starter pack leaves to you

Be clear about the edges before you rely on it:

Holidays for one location, not everybody

If you run a cleaning crew at two client sites, or two stores, a closure at one is not a day off at the other. In Shiftelio a holiday can be set for one branch or one department without giving it to everybody, so a site-only closure does not quietly turn into a paid day for the whole team. The Starter pack adds the province-wide days; you add the local ones on the same page.

You can see how scheduling works on the shift roster page, the rest of the app on the features page, and how it works for teams in Canada on the Canada page.

Frequently asked questions