Note: This article only applies to Canadian customers. 

Employment Insurance (EI) hours, or insurable earnings hours / insurable hours, are the number of hours worked by your employees that is insurable, or subject to EI. Generally, all paid working hours are typically included as insurable hours. EI hours are reported on the employee’s Record of Employment (ROE), which is used to determine their entitlement to EI benefits.  

Review the CRA’s article about insurable hours for more information. 

What is the difference between the regular EI hours and the EI hours shown on the paystubs and reports?  

‘Regular EI hours’ is a predefined accrual payroll category that is provided to every Canadian database out of the box.  

This category counts the hours for employees who are salaried or have any other lump-sum, non-unit-based earnings. Typically, this category will not apply to your hourly employees, because the hours worked by your hourly employees are tracked using different hours-based payroll categories, such as Hourly Wages.  

The ‘EI hours’ on the reports and paystubs is the total sum of all insurable hours, which includes, for example, the predefined regular EI hours from above, hourly wages, overtime, and statutory holiday hours. In order for a payroll category to be considered as insurable hours, all the following requirements must be met:  

• The payroll category is unit-based,  
• The payroll category’s units refer to “Hours”, and 
• The payroll category is subject to Employment Insurance (EI) 

Payroll categories meeting only some or none of the above requirements will not be considered as insurable hours. The predefined Regular EI Hours payroll category from above is the only exception. 

Let’s look at an example of two (2) employees – one salaried and one hourly. 

The salaried employee (Chandler) uses the Regular EI Hours payroll category to track hours worked. On the other hand, the hourly employee (Ross) does not have any hours in the Regular EI Hours payroll category, but instead has the hours tracked in the Hourly Wages payroll category. You can see in the EI Hours line for both employees, that both payroll categories are included.  

If instead the employee has both the Regular EI Hours and Hourly Wages line, the EI Hours line in the report will include both:  

As you can see above, the employee has a total of 75.50 EI hours, which is the sum of Hourly Wages (55.50) and Regular EI Hours (20).