Dump truck payroll: per-load pay, driver classification, and the 50/60-hour rules

Per-load pay is legal — the overtime threshold is the trap

Ontario does not care that you pay per load or per tonne; it cares what the hours add up to. For-hire trucking has its own overtime thresholds under the ESA's special industry rules: a local cartage driver — carrying goods for hire within a municipality or up to five kilometres beyond it — earns overtime past 50 hours a week, a highway transport driver past 60, and a driver moving your own material (a pit owner's own fleet, say) falls back to the standard 44. Every pay run should divide load pay by recorded hours; the result has to clear minimum wage and the right overtime line, and the records have to exist when a claim or an inspection asks for them.

Two more hour rules bite haulers specifically. Waiting counts: a driver required to sit at the pit, the scale, or the paving site is working whether or not a tonne moves. And vacation pay accrues on everything — load pay, standby, bonuses — at 4%, rising to 6% after five years of service. A per-load rate that quietly ignores vacation builds a liability with every haul.

Whose truck is it? One question decides the paperwork

Classification in dump trucking follows the asset. Under CRA's tests — control, ownership of tools, chance of profit, risk of loss — a driver in your truck on your dispatch is your employee whether you pay hourly, per load, or through the numbered company he set up last winter. An owner-operator with his own truck, his own fuel bill, and his own repair risk is a genuine contractor. The middle case is the expensive one: an incorporated driver with no truck of his own is the same arrangement CRA has been reassessing across the trucking industry, and the bill lands on both sides at once — back CPP and EI for you, personal services business treatment for him.

On the slip question: if more than half your revenue comes from construction activities, subcontracted haulage may belong on T5018s rather than T4As. We make that determination once, document it, and file whichever slip the mix supports.

WSIB assumes your drivers are your workers

Contracted drivers and owner-operators are presumed to be your workers for WSIB purposes unless an independent operator determination says otherwise — and that determination should exist before the season's first load, because the retroactive version arrives inside an audit with years of premiums attached. The presumption also runs upstream: the general contractors and aggregate producers you haul for will ask you for a clearance certificate, and jobs stall without one. Keep the WSIB file beside the payroll file; they answer the same question about the same people.

The season ends every year — make the paperwork seasonal too

Most dump fleets park in December and recall in April, which makes ROEs a routine rather than an emergency. Each laid-off driver needs an ROE filed through ROE Web within five calendar days of the end of the pay period, coded as a shortage of work, with final pay — including the vacation accrued on all that load pay — by the later of seven days after the layoff or the next regular payday. Recall the same drivers in spring and the cycle restarts cleanly; lose an address over the winter and February's T4 goes nowhere, so collect personal emails while people are still on the roster. One honest note on the border: hauls in this business are local, and payroll almost never crosses it. The US questions that do come up — equipment auctions, truck and box imports — live on our cross-border page for haulers. Load tickets, fuel, and maintenance feed the same records through our dump truck bookkeeping, and engagement scope sits on the payroll services page.

Source: CRA — RC4110, Employee or Self-Employed?.