Security company payroll: premiums, licence checks, and ROEs at turnover speed

Premiums are wages, and they compound

A night or weekend differential is not a side payment — it joins the wage base and changes three other numbers. Ontario's rule for employees with two or more regular rates settles the overtime question cleanly: each hour past 44 is paid at one and a half times the rate that applied to the work performed in that hour, so a guard whose 46th hour falls on a night post earns overtime on the night rate, not the base rate. The public-holiday formula — regular wages over the four work weeks before the holiday week, divided by twenty — picks premiums up too, because they are regular wages; overtime pay is what the formula excludes.

Configure the premium codes once in the payroll system so the knock-ons happen automatically; companies that bolt premiums on as flat adjustments recalculate every holiday by hand and still get it wrong.

24/7 rosters meet the ESA

Round-the-clock coverage collides with rules written for daytime work, and the collisions have specific fixes. Overtime past 44 hours needs either the premium paid or a written averaging agreement spreading hours over up to four weeks — useful for four-on-four-off patterns. Rest rules bind scheduling: 11 consecutive hours free of work each day, and 8 hours between shifts when the combined shifts run past 13 hours, unless the guard agrees in writing. When a client cancels coverage after a guard reports in, the three-hour rule pays them three hours anyway. The practical answer is one pipeline: the scheduling system carries the rules, and payroll imports from it rather than from memory.

The licence check is a payroll control

Under Ontario's private security legislation, every guard on a post needs a valid individual licence and the company holds its own agency licence — and a lapsed guard licence discovered by a client or an inspector puts the contract and the agency licence both in play. We treat licence data as payroll data: number and expiry captured at onboarding beside the TD1s and direct deposit form, expiries surfaced weeks ahead, and scheduling blocked for anyone lapsed. A guard who cannot legally stand the post should be impossible to pay for standing it.

Turnover: ROEs, final pay, and the paperwork treadmill

Churn is structural in guarding, so exits are a workflow, not an event. Each departure or work shortage needs an ROE through ROE Web within five calendar days of the end of the pay period, with the reason code chosen carefully — coding a quit as a shortage of work, or the reverse, generates EI disputes and Service Canada follow-ups that cost more time than the original filing. Final pay lands by the later of seven days after the exit or the next regular payday, including every dollar of accrued vacation. One filing you can skip: moving a guard between sites is not an interruption of earnings, so site reassignments within the company generate no ROE at all. And because addresses go stale fast in a high-turnover workforce, collect a personal email at onboarding so February's T4s actually reach former guards.

Price the loaded guard-hour, then bid

A contract bid quoting bare wages funds everything else from margin: employer CPP and EI, vacation and holiday pay, WSIB premiums, Employer Health Tax once payroll clears the exemption, paid training hours that never bill, and supervision. We maintain a loaded cost per guard-hour by shift type, so bids start from reality — the same contract-level margin discipline as our security company bookkeeping. For the occasional US-headquartered client paying in USD, the billing and withholding questions sit in our cross-border tax page for security companies, and the full engagement scope is on the payroll services page.

Source: Ontario — Your guide to the Employment Standards Act.