Property management payroll: site staff, on-call supers, and who employs whom

Employer of record: settle it before the first hire

Payroll obligations follow whoever hires, directs and pays the worker — not whoever's building they stand in. If your management company employs the site staff and recharges owners, the recharge is part of your taxable management service, HST applies to it, and every source deduction, WSIB premium and ESA obligation is yours. If an owner employs a super directly and you merely administer the pay, the owner needs their own payroll account and the T4 carries the owner's name. Both models work. The failure mode is the blur: staff paid ad hoc out of owner funds with nobody filing T4s, which leaves the ESA and CRA free to pick the deepest pocket later — usually yours.

We put the answer in the management agreement, then build the payroll file to match it, building by building.

The roster, role by role

A mid-size manager's pay run usually spans five kinds of people, each on different rules:

When you recharge an owner for site staff, recharge the burdened cost — wage plus employer CPP and EI, WSIB, vacation accrual, and EHT once your Ontario payroll clears the $1 million exemption. Recharge the bare wage and the site staff quietly eat your management margin. The live-in super's suite benefit — fair market rent, reduced where duties diminish it — is the same math we walk through on our landlord payroll page, and it belongs in every run.

On-call supers: what the clock counts

Waiting at home with a phone is generally not working time; responding is. When a super attends a 2 a.m. flood, the hours worked are payroll hours, and Ontario's three-hour rule can top up short call-ins for staff who regularly work longer days. Live-in supers sit outside the hours-of-work rules, but mobile supers do not — so the after-hours premium you promise has to exist as an explicit earning code, not goodwill. The practical fix is capturing after-hours responses in the same work-order app that dispatches them: payroll hours then come from a record you already keep, and an ESA claim meets a timestamped answer instead of a shrug.

The contractor network needs a paper trail, not a rate sheet

A genuine trade business — own tools, other clients, own insurance, own WSIB account — is a supplier. Keep the evidence current: certificate of insurance, a WSIB clearance pulled before dispatch, their invoice per work order. The risk concentrates in the tech who stopped being a business somewhere along the way: five days a week on your dispatch, parts from your account, no other customers. That person is an employee, and the CPP, EI and WSIB assessments arrive retroactively, addressed to you. Property managers rarely meet the more-than-half-construction test that triggers T5018 slips, but classification does not care which slips you file. One hard boundary: payroll and contractor payments run from your operating account — owners' trust funds are never a float for labour costs, and our property management bookkeeping keeps that line bright.

When the owner is a non-resident, you are the withholding agent

Managing for a non-resident owner makes you the agent CRA looks to: withhold 25% of gross rents, remit by the 15th of the following month, and file NR4 slips — or get the owner's NR6 approved so withholding runs on expected net income instead. Miss it and the tax, penalties and interest can be assessed against you, not just the owner. The elections, the section 216 returns and the gross-versus-net mechanics live in our cross-border work for property managers. What payroll contributes is discipline about the same underlying question: who pays whom, from which account, on whose behalf — answered once, in writing, per building.

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