Is Remembrance Day a Stat Holiday? For Federally Regulated Employers, Yes: Set Up All 10 General Holidays in One Go

For employees of a federally regulated employer, yes: the Government of Canada lists Remembrance Day as one of 10 general holidays with pay. For everyone else it depends on the province, and in Ontario, for example, it is not one of the nine public holidays.

Why "is Remembrance Day a stat holiday" has two answers

Every November the same question goes round a small office: do we close on the 11th, and do we pay for it? The answer is different depending on who your employer answers to.

Most businesses in Canada follow their province's employment standards. A smaller group follows the federal ones in the Canada Labour Code: trucking firms that haul across provincial lines, couriers, banks, railways, broadcasters. For that group Remembrance Day is a paid day off. For a café in Toronto it is not required at all.

Picture a trucking firm in Moncton with 14 drivers and 3 dispatchers, hauling freight into Nova Scotia and Quebec. Because the trucks cross provincial lines, the firm is federally regulated. The owner built the holiday list from a provincial calendar three years ago and has copied it forward since. It is missing two days the federal list has, and the overtime rule in the pay sheet still says 44 hours.

None of that shows until a dispatcher asks why the 11th is a normal shift. The fix is to start from the federal list itself, and to see the whole year before the schedule goes out.

The 10 federal general holidays, and what the rule says

Employment rules in Canada are mostly provincial. This section quotes the federal rules only, which apply to federally regulated employers. If your business is not federally regulated, your province's own employment standards page is the one to read.

The Government of Canada's page on hours of work in federally regulated workplaces (Checked on 7 October 2026) names the sectors those standards cover, among them trucking and motor vehicle operations, banking, railway operations, broadcasting, and interprovincial transportation of passengers and goods.

Its page on annual vacations and general holidays (Checked on 7 October 2026) lists 10 general holidays with pay: New Year's Day, Good Friday, Victoria Day, Canada Day, Labour Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Thanksgiving Day, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

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

The same canada.ca page says what happens when one of those days lands on a weekend. When New Year's Day, Canada Day, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, Remembrance Day, Christmas Day or Boxing Day falls on a Saturday or Sunday that is a non-working day for the employee, the employee gets a holiday with pay on the working day immediately before or after it.

The page also says general holiday pay is at least one twentieth of the wages, not counting overtime, earned in the four weeks before the week of the holiday, and that an employee who works on a general holiday gets at least 1.5 times their regular rate for that time, on top of the holiday pay.

On hours, the federal work hours page sets standard hours at 8 in a day and 40 in a week, with overtime paid at least 1.5 times the regular wage, or as time off at 1.5 hours for every hour worked.

For contrast, Ontario's guide to the Employment Standards Act on public holidays (Checked on 7 October 2026) says employers there are not required to give Easter Monday, the first Monday in August or Remembrance Day off, although some do.

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 a Monday to Friday crew

Back to the trucking firm. The dispatchers work Monday to Friday, so Saturday 26 December is their day off. Christmas Day already takes Friday 25 December, so under the rule quoted above their Boxing Day moves to the working day after, Monday 28 December.

The drivers are different. Three of them run a Saturday route. For them Saturday is a working day, so Boxing Day is not a non-working day for them and the move does not apply in the same way. That is the part a holiday calendar on the wall hides: the rule is about each person's own working days, not the office's.

In 2027 it happens twice. Christmas Day is a Saturday and Boxing Day a Sunday, so a Monday to Friday crew gets Monday 27 and Tuesday 28 December.

Adding the federal 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. Only the company owner can open it. Here is the trucking firm's set-up.

At the bottom, Where this comes from lists every 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:

The personal leave rule is worth reading too. The federal leaves page (Checked on 7 October 2026) says personal leave is up to 5 days a calendar year and that the first 3 are paid once the person has three months of continuous employment. That is why the pack splits it into 3 paid days and 2 unpaid ones.

Holidays for one depot, not everybody

If you run two depots, 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 depot-only closure does not quietly turn into a paid day for the whole team. The Starter pack adds the federal 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.

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