Brokerage payroll: who is on your T4, and who is paid through the trust

Commissions run through the trust, not the pay run

Because agents and brokers are independent registrants under TRESA, their share of every commission is paid out through the disbursement process described on our brokerage bookkeeping page, a split paid against their own invoice, with no source deductions, no T4, and no CPP or EI withheld. That is true whether the split lands personally or in a PREC. It is also why a brokerage's payroll headcount can look surprisingly small next to a roster of forty or fifty registrants: the registrants are not employees at all. A T4A is generally not required for a split paid to a corporation such as a PREC either, since that slip is aimed at fees paid to individuals; splits paid to an unincorporated registrant are the case worth tracking for T4A purposes.

Who is actually on the brokerage's T4 payroll

The people who run through payroll deductions are the staff the brokerage genuinely employs to keep the office functioning: reception and front-desk staff, a marketing coordinator, listing and transaction coordinators who prepare paperwork, and often the broker of record if that role is compensated with a salary rather than a share of commission income. Each of these is a standard T4 employee: CPP, EI, and income tax withheld, vacation pay accrued, and a Record of Employment issued if they leave. Ordinary Employment Standards Act rules apply to this group the same way they would in any small office — vacation entitlement that grows after five years of service, public holiday pay, and overtime once weekly hours pass 44 — none of which touches your registrants, whose hours and holidays are entirely their own to manage.

Team leads who start paying like employers

A growing pattern in busy brokerages is the internal team: a top producer builds a group of showing partners or junior buyer's agents and pays them directly rather than having them registered under their own splits. The moment that pay looks like a salary or hourly wage, with the team lead setting hours, assigning leads, and directing the work closely, it starts to carry the same classification risk any business faces when it calls someone a contractor but treats them like an employee. See how the CRA actually decides employee versus contractor status. We review team-lead pay arrangements specifically because this is where brokerages most often discover a payroll obligation they did not realize they had — often only once a departing junior agent files an ROE request the brokerage was never expecting to issue.

Where WSIB fits, and where it does not

Real estate registrants are independent contractors carrying their own liability, and WSIB coverage for that group works differently than it does for a standard employer's staff, so it is worth confirming your brokerage's specific classification directly with WSIB rather than assuming coverage either does or does not extend to a given role. Your true T4 employees — reception, coordinators, a salaried broker of record — follow the standard employer obligations that apply to any small office. Getting this distinction right before an incident happens, not after, is the whole point of checking it early.

The practical payroll rails

Once a brokerage has even a handful of true employees, an RP payroll account, a cloud platform such as Wagepoint or QuickBooks Online Payroll, a standard remittance schedule with CRA, and T4s filed by the last day of February are the baseline. Ontario's Employer Health Tax exemption on the first $1,000,000 of payroll covers most single-office brokerages comfortably, but a multi-office group under common ownership needs to confirm how that exemption is shared across the associated entities rather than assuming each office gets its own. We run this alongside the trust and commission accounting so the two payroll worlds, real employees and independent registrants, never get mixed on the same report. As the office grows past a handful of true employees, a short annual review of every role against the table above is worth the hour it takes, since job duties tend to drift over time in ways an original hiring decision never anticipated.