Payroll services in Burlington

Payroll covers the source deductions for CPP, EI premiums and income tax, the remittances to the CRA, the year-end T4 and T4A slips, and access through My Business Account.

Updated October 2026.

Who we run payroll for in Burlington

Burlington’s key industries, as its economic development office lists them, include advanced manufacturing, food and beverage, professional and technical services, information technology, and tourism and hospitality. Those sectors produce very different payrolls. A plant may run shifts with overtime and shift premiums. A technical consultancy pays a few salaried professionals and the owner. A restaurant or event business on the waterfront hires heavily for the summer and lets most of those staff go in the autumn, which means a stream of new-hire records, final pays and Records of Employment. The obligations underneath are the same for all of them, and so is the cost of getting the order of operations wrong.

The Ontario employer health tax rate is chosen before the exemption, not after

Ontario’s employer health tax is graduated rather than flat, and the order of operations is where employers lose money. You select your rate from the band table using total Ontario remuneration before any exemption is deducted. Only then do you subtract the exemption and apply the chosen rate to what remains. Reading the table the intuitive way — deducting the exemption first, then finding your band — puts you in a lower band than you belong in and understates the tax.

The bands run from 0.98% on Ontario payroll up to $200,000, through a series of steps between $200,000.01 and $400,000, to 1.95% on payroll over $400,000. The exemption is $1,000,000. No exemption at all is available where the employer or its associated group has more than $5,000,000 of annual Ontario payroll, and associated employers must file an allocation agreement to share the single exemption between them. All of it is tabled with its source on the Ontario tax facts page.

Family groups are where the exemption disappears

Many Burlington businesses are owned through more than one corporation: an operating company and a holding company that owns the building, two operating companies run by different family members, or a manufacturer with a separate distribution entity. Each arrangement is ordinary, and each collides with the employer health tax rules, because the exemption belongs to the associated group rather than to each corporation. Without an allocation agreement, each entity can end up claiming a full exemption it is not entitled to.

The practical consequence is that the calculation has to be done at group level and then allocated, in that order. Doing it entity by entity and summing the results produces a number that is wrong in a predictable direction. The associated corporations note covers the parallel issue on the corporate tax side, where the same group shares one business limit.

WSIB, and the federal deductions underneath

Workplace coverage in Ontario runs through the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board, which is entirely separate from the Ministry of Finance and carries its own registration, classification and clearance obligations. It is driven by the same payroll data as everything else but reported to a different body on a different schedule. For a Burlington manufacturer or contractor the classification matters, and construction owners face compulsory coverage that reaches the owners themselves; see trades accounting in Burlington.

Beneath both provincial layers, the federal obligations are the same everywhere in Canada. Income tax, CPP and EI are withheld from each pay run and, with the employer’s contributions, remitted to the CRA on the schedule assigned from your average monthly withholding amount. A missed or late remittance draws penalties quickly, which is why we log each payroll account’s dates at setup. Payroll remittances and the RP account covers how the schedule is set.

Seasonal staff, shifts and public holidays

Ontario recognizes nine public holidays. Public holiday pay is regular wages and vacation pay from the four work weeks before the holiday week, divided by twenty. For a hospitality employer with variable hours, or a plant where overtime changes week to week, that formula produces a different figure for each employee each holiday, and a flat day’s pay is not a substitute for it. Seasonal hiring adds its own work: new TD1 forms, a first pay with the right deductions, and a Record of Employment when the season ends.

We set up pay schedules, vacation accruals and holiday calculations once, check them against the Ontario rules, and run each pay from the same records that feed the books, so payroll and the ledger agree at year-end without a reconciliation exercise.

Owner pay in a Burlington corporation

An owner-manager can take salary, dividends or a mix. Salary goes through payroll with CPP and a T4; dividends go on a T5 and do not. The choice affects the corporation’s deduction, the owner’s RRSP room and CPP entitlement, and the Ontario surtax and health premium on the personal return. We run the owner’s salary through the same payroll as the staff, and model the mix with the personal tax side before the year-end so the decision is made once, deliberately.

What is covered

• Pay runs with Ontario tax tables applied to Ontario employees
• Income tax, CPP and EI withheld and remitted on your CRA schedule
• Employer health tax calculated at group level, with the band selected correctly
• Allocation of the exemption across associated employers where one applies
• WSIB registration support and payroll reporting
• Public holiday and vacation pay calculated under Ontario employment standards
• Records of Employment for seasonal and departing staff
• T4 and T4A slips and summaries filed by the last day of February

Remote, and there is no Burlington office

EverStone is a fully virtual CPA firm serving BC, Alberta, Ontario and Manitoba. There is no Burlington office and no Halton branch — Burlington employers are served entirely online through video calls, secure document exchange and e-signature. Payroll is well suited to that arrangement because none of the inputs or outputs are physical: hours arrive from your time system or a spreadsheet, pay goes out by direct deposit, and remittances are made electronically. The nearest larger city page is payroll in Hamilton, part of our Hamilton accounting work. The payroll hub collects the underlying guides and calculators.

What a lender or a shareholder actually reads is year-end statements in Burlington.

The year end this all feeds into is corporate tax in Burlington.

Each company in a group remits on its own dates, so map all of them on a thirteen-week cash forecast.

Other Burlington services: small business accounting in Burlington, corporate tax (T2) in Burlington, personal tax (T1) in Burlington, monthly bookkeeping in Burlington, GST/HST filing in Burlington, year-end financial statements in Burlington, fractional CFO support in Burlington, trades and construction accounting in Burlington, agency and studio accounting in Burlington.