How to file an ROE online in Canada: a guide for employers

An employee resigns on a Tuesday. By the following Friday there’s a farewell card circulating, a laptop to collect and a final pay run to close. Somewhere in that shuffle, a legal clock starts: depending on your pay cycle, you may have as few as five calendar days to file a Record of Employment with Service Canada. If you’re searching for how to file ROE online before that clock runs out, you’re in the right place.

Miss the deadline and the consequences land on both sides of the employment relationship. Your former employee’s Employment Insurance (EI) claim stalls while they wait, and your business is exposed to fines of up to $2,000 for a federal compliance violation.

The encouraging news is that filing electronically makes the whole task lighter. Electronic ROEs process faster, carry fewer errors and save you up to 12 minutes per record compared to paper, according to Service Canada.¹ They also help departing employees receive their EI payments sooner, at exactly the moment they need the money most. This guide walks through when an ROE is required, the deadlines that catch employers out and a step-by-step look at Service Canada’s ROE Web portal.

Want every deadline, trigger and reason code on a single page beside your desk?

Understanding the Record of Employment (ROE)

A Record of Employment (ROE) is a mandatory official Canadian document that reports an employee’s work history, including their start and end dates and any interruption of earnings, for the Employment Insurance (EI) program. Every employer in the country issues them, yet plenty of business owners meet the form for the first time in the middle of a resignation, a layoff or a parental leave, which is the worst possible moment to be learning the rules.

If you’d like a deeper grounding in what a Record of Employment (ROE) is, we’ve covered the fundamentals separately. For this guide, three things matter most.

First, the ROE is how Service Canada decides EI eligibility. The agency uses the information you report to determine whether your former employee qualifies for benefits, how much they’ll receive each week (typically calculated from their highest-paid weeks) and how long the payments last. One wrong figure can shrink someone’s benefit or delay it entirely, which is why the ROE deserves a permanent line on your employee offboarding checklist.

Second, the ROE has a life beyond EI. Lenders reference it during mortgage approvals, banks may request it for loan applications and some new employers ask for it as official proof of work history.

Third, don’t confuse the ROE with a T4. A T4 is an annual tax document showing an employee’s total employment income for the year. An ROE documents a specific interruption of earnings for EI purposes. Employees need both, and one never substitutes for the other.

Triggers and requirements for issuing an ROE

Here’s the rule that surprises employers most: you’re legally obligated to complete and issue an ROE every time an employee experiences an interruption of earnings. Whether they ask for one is irrelevant. Whether they plan to apply for EI is irrelevant too. The obligation sits with you either way.

So what counts as an interruption of earnings? Two triggers cover almost every case.

The seven-day rule

An interruption of earnings occurs when an employee goes seven consecutive calendar days without work and without insurable earnings. The nuance many guides miss: that count starts the day after their final paid day, not their last physical day in the workplace. Suppose an employee gives two weeks’ notice and works right through it. If their final pay period still creates a seven-day gap with no insurable earnings, an ROE is required, notice period or not.

The salary drop

The second trigger has nothing to do with leaving. When an employee’s salary falls below 60% of their regular weekly earnings because of illness, injury, pregnancy, maternity or parental leave, quarantine or caregiving responsibilities, that also counts as an interruption of earnings and requires an ROE.

The special cases

A few scenarios generate ROEs even when nobody’s pay is interrupted. If your business changes its pay period type, you must issue an ROE for every employee. If the business changes ownership, ROEs are required for all staff unless there’s no break in earnings and the new employer agrees to issue a single ROE covering both periods. Employees can also accumulate multiple ROEs with the same employer over time; a female employee who takes more than one maternity leave, for example, may have several.

How to file ROE online: submission methods and deadlines

There are two ways to get an ROE to Service Canada: electronically or on paper. The choice affects far more than your filing experience, because each method carries its own deadline and its own processing speed.

Electronic filing wins on nearly every measure. Electronic ROEs process faster, have lower error rates and put EI payments in your former employee’s account sooner. Paper adds friction at every step; if you issue a paper ROE, you must give the original Part I (the white copy) to the employee in person or by mail, then submit the rest to Service Canada separately.

The deadlines are where employers stumble most often, so here they are side by side. Knowing how to submit an ROE to Service Canada matters less than knowing when it’s due.

Treat these dates as hard stops. Failing to issue an ROE on time is a violation of federal law that delays your former employee’s EI claim and can result in fines of up to $2,000. The electronic route is faster to complete and far easier to defend if questions come up later.

Record of Employment on the Web (ROE Web) overview

ROE Web is Service Canada’s secure, web-based portal for creating, submitting and amending ROEs online. Your data travels encrypted and sits behind Service Canada’s firewalls, so the security worries that once kept employers on paper no longer hold up.

The portal also fits around your payroll rhythm. You can issue ROEs according to your own pay cycle instead of scrambling each time an interruption of earnings occurs. High-volume employers can create and submit up to 1,200 ROEs in a single batch using a payroll extract. And when you’re filing one at a time, the ROE Web assistant asks you plain-language questions and automatically completes and issues the ROE as you answer.

Before you register, confirm your setup meets the system requirements. You’ll need high-speed internet, cookies and JavaScript enabled, Adobe Acrobat Reader version 5 or later and a supported browser or operating system: Google Chrome 84+, Safari 13.1.2+, Microsoft Edge 85+, Mozilla Firefox 68+, iOS 13+ or MacOS 10.15+.

Keep the full filing process within arm’s reach the next time an employee moves on.

Creating and registering an ROE Web account

Registration happens entirely online, and it starts with a decision: who in your business will be the Primary Officer?

The Primary Officer acts as the administrator of your ROE Web account. They read and accept the ROE Web Privacy Statement and Terms of Use on behalf of the business, manage who else can access the account and carry responsibility for what’s filed under it. Because of that authority, Service Canada requires them to pass strict identity validation, either online through the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) or in person at a Service Canada Centre. Employers whose payroll function operates outside Canada can use an alternate identity validation method.

Once validated, signing in is simple. You can use a GCKey, the federal government’s own credential, or a Sign-In Partner, which lets you authenticate through your existing Canadian online banking details.

Then comes the step that saves the most time in the long run: connecting your payroll software. Platforms such as QuickBooks can bridge your internal payroll data with Service Canada’s serialized forms using EFILE, so ROE fields populate from numbers you’ve already processed rather than being rekeyed by hand. If you’re weighing platforms with ROE support in mind, our guide to the best payroll software in Canada breaks down the options.

One extra requirement applies to payroll service providers issuing ROEs on behalf of clients. Both parties must sign a Client Employer Consent Form and keep it on file, and the provider adds the client’s CRA business numbers directly in ROE Web. No faxing to Service Canada required.

Completing, correcting and amending ROEs

Most of the ROE form is mechanical: dates, earnings, hours. Two areas cause a disproportionate share of trouble, and both are avoidable once you know the rules.

Choosing the right reason code

Every ROE asks why you’re issuing it, answered with a standard reason code. The four you’ll use most often:

Code M deserves a closer look, because it carries a legal distinction employers routinely get wrong. Termination for cause requires serious misconduct, something like theft or violence. Poor performance or repeated lateness do not meet that high legal threshold. Termination without cause simply means the employment ended for business reasons and the employee did nothing wrong. Both situations use Code M.

The Block 18 trap

This is where well-meaning employers create real delays. A persistent myth says you should write “termination without cause” in Block 18, the comments field, to clarify a Code M. Don’t. According to Service Canada, entering any comment in Block 18 removes the ROE from the automated processing system and triggers a manual review by a Service Canada officer. That review slows processing and delays your former employee’s EI payments, which is precisely the outcome you filed electronically to avoid. Reserve Block 18 for genuinely exceptional circumstances.

Fixing mistakes

Errors happen, and ROE Web makes them painless to correct. Retrieve the original ROE in the portal, make your changes on screen and resubmit. There’s no need to re-enter everything from scratch.

One more myth worth retiring: you don’t have to amend an ROE using the same submission method as the original. A paper ROE can be amended electronically through ROE Web. Enter “Amending a paper ROE” in Block 18 along with the serial number of the original paper form, and Service Canada accepts it as a valid amendment (this comes straight from Canada.ca, despite what several competing guides claim).

The errors to watch for are the usual suspects: incorrect earnings calculations, the wrong reason code and missing employment dates. A slow reread before you submit costs a minute and can save weeks.

Compliance, record retention and support

Filing the ROE isn’t quite the end of the story. Per Canada.ca, employers must retain copies of paper ROEs (Part 3) and related payroll records for six years after the year to which the information relates. Note the wording carefully: it’s six years after the year the information relates to, not six years after the year you issued the form. If retention rules across your payroll function feel murky, our guide on how long to keep payroll records in Canada lays them out in full.

Your former employees have their own access too. Anyone with a My Service Canada Account (MSCA) can immediately view, download and print their electronic ROEs online, with no waiting on the mail.

And if the shoe is ever on the other foot, when a previous employer fails to provide an ROE, the employee should contact Service Canada directly. The agency will follow up with the employer itself.

For anything this guide doesn’t cover, the Employer Contact Centre and Service Canada’s official ROE guides are the authoritative resources.

File it once, file it right

The ROE earned its reputation as one of Canadian payroll’s fiddlier chores back when it lived on carbon-copy paper. Online, it’s a different task altogether. Register once, connect your payroll data and learn the handful of rules that genuinely trip people up: the day-after start of the seven-day count, the Block 18 trap and the real retention window. Do that, and the five-day deadline stops feeling like a threat. Your part of the process shrinks to minutes, and your former employees get their EI benefits when they need them most.

See how Employment Hero supports Canadian businesses with payroll from first hire to final pay run.