Car wash payroll: student crews, rain days, and detailers paid per car

Student attendants and the wage tiers

Ontario runs more than one minimum wage, and a car wash is one of the few businesses that uses two of them at once. The student rate applies to workers under 18 who work 28 hours a week or less while school is in session — and during summer holidays it applies regardless of hours, which is exactly when your tunnel crew doubles. The same attendant crosses to the general rate on his 18th birthday or when school-year hours climb past 28, so the tier has to be checked per person, per period, not set once at hiring. Every rate also resets each October 1 when Ontario adjusts its minimums, which is why our fall payroll calendar includes a repricing pass before the change lands mid-pay-period.

Age drives statutory deductions too: CPP contributions begin at 18 while EI applies from the first dollar at any age, so a crew of sixteen-year-olds is cheaper than the wage gap alone suggests — but only if birthdates are in the payroll system correctly. Tips at a full-serve or detail counter follow CRA's control test: passed to the attendant exactly as the customer gave them, they stay off the T4; pooled and split by your formula, they become insurable wages through payroll.

Rain days and the three-hour rule

Weather is the scheduling fact of this business, and Ontario's ESA draws one clean line through it. Cancel a shift before the attendant reports and no wages are owed for it. But once someone who regularly works more than three hours a day has shown up, sending him home when the sky opens costs at least three hours of pay — a 1 p.m. closure on a crew that started at noon is a three-hour payroll event per person. The operational answer is to make the call early on bad-forecast mornings rather than eating the floor across a six-person crew, and to keep a written record of who was reached before showing up. Public-holiday pay adds its own wrinkle for variable-hours staff: the entitlement is the previous four weeks' wages divided by twenty, so a rainy stretch before Canada Day genuinely lowers it.

Detailers: per-car pay and the classification line

Paying detailing staff per vehicle is standard and legal — as employment income. A detailer working your bays, on your schedule, with your chemicals and compounds, is an employee no matter how the pay is calculated, so hours still get tracked and per-car earnings divided by hours must average at least minimum wage in every pay period, with overtime past 44 hours owed during the spring backlog weeks. The genuine contractor looks different on the facts: his own mobile rig, his own customers, his own HST registration, invoicing you for overflow work — that relationship produces a T4A, not a T4. One more line the ESA draws hard: a swirl mark or a scratched panel can never be deducted from anyone's cheque, because deductions for faulty work are prohibited outright. That risk is priced into insurance, not into wages.

The season, as a payroll calendar

The winter row is where operators get hurt. Every seasonal departure needs an ROE filed through ROE Web within five days, with the reason code chosen honestly — shortage of work is the normal code for a seasonal layoff, and it is what lets your best people collect EI over winter and come back in March. Miss the ROEs and the calls come to you, not Service Canada.

The rails underneath, all year

The fixed machinery is the same in every season: an RP account before the first hire, source deductions to CRA by the 15th of the following month, T4s by the end of February, vacation pay at 4 percent on each cheque under a written agreement, and WSIB premiums on every wage dollar including the per-car ones. Ontario's Employer Health Tax stays theoretical below $1 million of payroll, which covers nearly every single-site wash. Your own pay is a salary-versus-dividend decision we model annually alongside the T2. Payroll is also only half the labour story at a wash — membership revenue pays these wages, and that deferral math lives in our car wash bookkeeping service, while the tunnel the crew operates arrived through the one big import covered in the car wash cross-border guide. Fixed fees, quoted after a discovery call.

Source: CRA — Payroll.