Moving company payroll: crews, tips, and a season that doubles your headcount

Day labour is still employment

The industry habit — cash per job, everyone is casual — does not create contractors; it creates employees with no records. Movers who work your jobs, on your trucks, under your foreman fail CRA's independence tests on every factor: no tools of their own, no chance of profit or loss, no customers except yours. Casual is not a category the ESA or CRA recognizes, and a T4A does not launder any of it. The genuine subcontract does exist — a crew with its own truck, its own insurance and its own WSIB account, quoting you a price for the job — but if you set the hourly rate and the start time, that is not what you have.

Retroactive conversion is the expensive path: both shares of CPP and EI with interest, vacation pay claims, and WSIB premiums assessed on everything you paid. Converting on your own schedule, priced into next season's quotes, costs a fraction of that.

Overtime: three thresholds on one job

Moving is one of the industries where Ontario's 44-hour overtime line moves depending on the seat. Local cartage — goods carried for hire within a city and its surrounding area — puts both the driver and the driver's helpers at a 50-hour threshold. Highway transport puts the driver at 60, but that special rule names only drivers, so a helper on a long-haul move falls back to 44.

In a July week the same mover can sit in more than one category, so we tag hours by role and job type in the time system and let the pay run apply the right line — guessing at year-end is how companies discover they owe a summer of overtime.

Tips: who touched the money decides the payroll

Cash a customer hands the crew at the door is a direct tip: it never enters your books, carries no CPP or EI, and does not appear on a T4 — though each mover must still report it as income. A tip added to the invoice or paid by card reaches you first, which makes it a controlled tip: when you pay it out, it is employment income with tax, CPP and EI withheld through the run. Ontario's tips rules add the employer-side rails — you cannot keep employee tips beyond administering an agreed pooling arrangement. Pick one model, put it in the crew handbook, and run it consistently; mixing the two is how tips end up half-taxed and fully disputed.

The surge: staffing up in May, standing down in September

Seasonality is a payroll workflow, not just a hiring problem. Onboarding means digital TD1s and direct deposit before the first move, not after; most summer hires earn the general minimum wage, because the lower student rate covers only workers under 18 inside its hours limits. Pay vacation pay at 4 percent on every cheque, with written agreement, so October holds no accrued surprise. When a booked move cancels after the crew reports in, the three-hour rule pays them anyway. And at season's end, file ROEs through ROE Web promptly — returning crews live on EI over the winter, and a slow ROE is the fastest way to lose your best foreman to the competitor who files on time.

WSIB rides on every crew-hour

Register with WSIB within 10 days of hiring your first worker; moving-industry rate classes are priced for stairs, appliances and winter loading docks, so the premium is a core labour cost rather than a rounding error. Premiums apply to insurable earnings including vacation pay, helpers hired through uninsured subs are your workers in WSIB's eyes, and the annual reconciliation catches growth between filings. We fold the premium into a loaded cost per crew-hour so quotes are priced off reality — the same per-job labour view our moving company bookkeeping reports monthly. Crews that cross the border for US jobs raise a separate set of questions — days in the US, state payroll exposure, USD revenue — which live in our cross-border tax page for movers.

Source: Ontario — Industries and jobs with ESA exemptions or special rules.