Private school payroll: ten months of work, twelve months of pay

Pick a pay calendar on purpose

Both structures are legitimate; they just behave differently at the edges. Under a ten-month schedule the salary is paid as it is earned and stops in June. Under a twelve-month spread, part of each month's earnings is held back and paid through July and August — smoother for staff, but it means the school is always holding wages that have already been earned.

Whichever calendar you run, the contract should state the annual salary, the spreading method, and the daily-rate math for partial years. Those three sentences prevent most of the disputes we get called into, and they need to appear in every offer letter, not just the faculty handbook nobody signed.

Departures are where spreading bites

A teacher on a twelve-month spread who resigns in June has already earned everything the school planned to pay in July and August — that balance is not a parting courtesy, it is wages owing, and it belongs on the final pay along with accrued vacation pay where the contract provides vacation on top of breaks. The same arithmetic runs in reverse for a January hire: a contract that defines the per-day rate makes the proration mechanical instead of negotiable. Terminations mid-year add ESA notice on top, calculated on the real earnings, not the smoothed monthly figure.

ECE and early-years staff run on different rules than faculty

Schools with junior and pre-kindergarten programs employ registered early childhood educators alongside teaching faculty, and the two groups do not interchange. RECE registration needs to sit on the employee record, and if the before- and after-care or preschool operation is licensed child care under the CCEYA, staffing ratios constrain scheduling the way they do in any centre — and a program enrolled in CWELCC carries wage-floor obligations for eligible RECEs. Many private schools stay outside CWELCC, but that is a decision to make knowingly, not a default to discover during a funding review. The full mechanics live in our daycare payroll guide.

Summer is three payrolls in one

July and August look quiet and are not. Twelve-month administrative and facilities staff carry on normally. Teachers on spread pay keep receiving cheques with regular source deductions — CPP, EI, and tax withhold on what is paid, when it is paid. And schools that run camps add a third population: seasonal hires, many of them students, on casual T4s with vacation pay on each cheque and an ROE within five days of the camp's end. Ontario's student minimum wage — a lower rate for workers under 18 within weekly hour limits — is set each October, so camp rate sheets need an annual check, and under-14 volunteers versus paid junior counsellors is a line worth drawing in writing.

Benefits, pensions, and the perks that end up on a T4

Group benefits should continue through the summer for returning teachers on either calendar — a lapse is both a morale problem and a plan-administration mess. On retirement savings, some independent schools participate in the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan while most run a group RRSP match; either way the deduction codes need to survive the summer pay pattern. The perk that surprises schools most: discounted or free tuition for staff children is generally a taxable benefit, valued and reported on the T4 — a policy worth pricing before it is promised. How tuition revenue, deposits, and the NFP-versus-for-profit distinction (including the Employer Health Tax exemption for charitable schools) flow through the ledger is covered in our private school bookkeeping guide, and international-student and US curriculum questions sit on our cross-border page for private schools.

Source: CRA — T4130, Employers' Guide: Taxable Benefits and Allowances.