Quick answer: if you use a temporary help agency in Ontario, four bodies of law apply at once. Since 1 July 2024, the agency must hold a temporary help agency (THA) licence, and it is illegal for you to knowingly use an unlicensed one. The Employment Standards Act (ESA) governs wages, hours and assignment-employee rights, and can make you jointly and severally liable for unpaid wages. WSIB governs workplace-injury coverage. And the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OHSA) keeps site-safety duties on you even though the agency is the employer of record, with penalties up to $2 million per offence. This guide explains exactly who is responsible for what, and how to stay on the right side of all four. It is general information, not legal advice.

Using an agency does not outsource your compliance obligations; it splits them, and the split is not intuitive. The agency handles payroll and is the employer of record, which leads many clients to assume the agency now carries the risk. For some things it does. For the things that hurt most, safety and, in several cases, unpaid wages, the liability stays with you. This guide walks through THA licensing, the ESA, WSIB and the OHSA in turn, sets out the penalties for each, and ends with a practical checklist. Treat it as a map of your obligations, not a substitute for advice from an employment lawyer on your specific situation.

Four laws, one worker, at the same time. The reason temp-agency compliance feels complicated is that four separate legal regimes apply to the same person simultaneously, each administered by a different body with a different test. THA licensing (Ministry of Labour) asks whether the agency may legally operate. The ESA (employment standards officers) governs wages and hours. WSIB (the board) handles injury coverage and premiums. The OHSA (Ministry inspectors and the courts) governs prevention and carries criminal-scale penalties. No single contract clause satisfies all four, which is why a checklist beats a handshake.

Who Is Actually the Employer When You Use an Agency?

Both of you, for different purposes. This is the single fact that explains every compliance question that follows.

The agency is the employer of record. For a temporary placement, the agency employs the worker as an “assignment employee” under Ontario’s ESA rules for temporary help agencies. It pays the wages, makes source deductions, issues the Record of Employment, and remains the worker’s employer whether or not they are currently on an assignment with you.

What “employer of record” actually means in practice. Being the employer of record is not a formality; it is a bundle of concrete duties the agency performs. It runs the payroll, calculates and remits CPP, EI and income tax, tracks vacation and holiday entitlements, issues T4s and Records of Employment, and manages terminations and the associated notice. When an assignment ends, the worker does not become unemployed in the eyes of the law; they remain the agency’s employee, available for the next placement. That continuity is precisely why the agency, not you, owns the payroll-side compliance for that worker.

You are the client, and you control the worksite. You direct the work, set the hours on site, and control the physical environment. That control is what pulls health-and-safety duties onto you regardless of who signs the paycheque, and it is why “they’re the agency’s employee” is not the shield employers assume.

The relationship must be genuine. This split only holds if the arrangement is a real temporary-help relationship. Labelling someone an “agency worker” or “independent contractor” to sidestep obligations does not change what they are in law: the CRA and the ESA look at the substance of the relationship, not the label on the invoice. Misclassification is its own liability, covered below. The plain-English breakdown of how these roles interact is set out in our guide to WSIB and the ESA for employers using agencies.

The mental model that keeps you compliant. Picture two hats on every agency worker. The agency wears the payroll hat: it hires, pays, deducts, and covers for injuries through WSIB. You wear the worksite hat: you direct the work, control the hazards, and supervise the floor. Compliance failures almost always come from assuming the agency wears both hats. It does not, and the law was written on the understanding that whoever controls the workplace controls the risk. Keep the two hats separate in your head and most of this guide becomes obvious.

THA Licensing: Is Your Agency Legally Allowed to Operate?

This is the newest obligation and the easiest one to fail, because it is a hard yes-or-no with your name attached.

The rule. Since 1 July 2024, every temporary help agency and recruiter operating in Ontario must hold a licence under the ESA licensing framework, and a client is prohibited from knowingly engaging or using an unlicensed agency. There is no grace period and no good-faith exception for “we didn’t check.” The duty to check is yours.

Why this rule exists. Ontario introduced mandatory licensing to drive underground operators out of the temporary-help market, agencies that misclassified workers, skimmed wages, ignored safety and undercut compliant competitors on price. By making clients liable for using an unlicensed agency, the law turns every employer into an enforcement checkpoint. That is deliberate: the cheapest quote in the market is now often the one that will cost you a penalty, because a rate that undercuts everyone else usually means the agency is saving money somewhere you are liable for.

How to check. Ontario publishes a public list of licensed agencies and recruiters with each licence’s status. Look your agency up by legal name, confirm the licence is active, and keep a dated screenshot on file. Ask for the licence number in writing before the first shift. Trimax Employment operates under licence THA-0000002854.

Recruiters need a licence too. The licensing regime covers two roles, not one: temporary help agencies and recruiters. If you use a third party to find and place permanent hires, not just temporary assignment employees, that recruiter generally also needs to be licensed, and the same public list shows recruiter licences. Employers focused on their temp agency sometimes overlook a separately engaged recruiter, which carries the same knowingly-using-an-unlicensed contravention. Check both against the list, and keep proof for each.

What changed in 2026. As of 1 January 2026, a THA licence application carries a $1,500 fee and a licence generally expires two years after it is issued or renewed. Practically, that means a licence you verified in 2024 may lapse, so re-checking the public list periodically, not just once at onboarding, is now part of the job.

Build it into your process, not your memory. The practical failure mode is not refusing to check; it is checking once, filing it, and forgetting that licences expire. Put a recurring calendar reminder against each agency you use to re-verify its licence on the public list, and make licence re-confirmation a line item in your annual vendor review. It takes two minutes and it is the difference between a documented good-faith process and an open contravention you did not know you had.

The penalty. Contraventions of the ESA, including operating without a licence or knowingly using an unlicensed agency, carry escalating administrative penalties of $15,000 for a first contravention, $25,000 for a second and $50,000 for a third within a three-year period, and providing false or misleading information on a licence application sits in the same range. These land on the client as well as the agency, which is the point most businesses miss.

Keep the dated proof, because memory is not evidence. When you verify a licence, capture the moment: a screenshot of the public-list entry showing the agency’s legal name, licence number and active status, with the date visible. Store it in that agency’s file. If a licence later lapses and a dispute arises about what you knew and when, a dated record showing the licence was active when you engaged the agency is the evidence that establishes you met your duty to check. The verification only protects you if you can prove you did it.

The ESA: What Are You On the Hook For?

The Employment Standards Act sets the floor for wages, hours and assignment-employee rights. The agency carries most of the day-to-day obligations, but two things reach back to you.

Joint and several liability for unpaid wages. This is the big one. Where an assignment employee’s wages go unpaid, the client can be held jointly and severally liable with the agency for regular wages, overtime, holiday pay and vacation pay for the hours the worker was assigned to you. If the agency fails to pay or disappears, the worker can pursue you. Vetting an agency’s financial stability is therefore not optional diligence; it is direct liability protection.

The scenario nobody plans for. An agency wins your business on a low markup, runs thin, and then misses a payroll or folds mid-assignment. The workers, unpaid, have a direct claim, and joint and several liability means they can come to you for the wages, overtime, holiday and vacation pay covering the hours they worked on your site, even though you already paid the agency’s invoice. You can end up paying twice. This is exactly why the lowest quote is frequently the highest risk, and why an agency’s balance sheet is a compliance document, not just a commercial one.

No reprisal. A client is prohibited from penalising an assignment employee in any way for exercising an ESA right, for example asking about unpaid wages or refusing unsafe work. Reprisal is a contravention in its own right.

Reprisal is easier to trigger than employers expect. The reprisal rule is broad. Reassigning, cutting the hours of, or ending the assignment of a worker shortly after they asked about unpaid wages, raised a safety concern, or refused unsafe work can look like reprisal even if that was not your intent, and the burden can effectively fall on you to show the action had a legitimate, unrelated reason. The practical guard is documentation: if you end or change an assignment, have a contemporaneous, business reason on record. Assignment employees have the same right to refuse unsafe work as your direct staff, and penalising them for using it is its own violation regardless of how the underlying safety question resolves.

The core ESA standards the arrangement must meet, whoever administers them:

The record-keeping trap. Both the agency and the client must record the hours each assignment employee works, each day and each week, and keep those records for three years. “The agency tracks that” is not a defence when an employment standards officer asks you for your copy. The overtime threshold in Ontario is 44 hours, not 40, and clients importing a 40-hour assumption from elsewhere create liability without realising it, because the hours are controlled on your site. Ontario’s general minimum wage is $17.60 an hour, per the Ministry of Labour.

The 44-hour rule catches out-of-province employers constantly. Many national operators run a 40-hour overtime assumption because that is the federal and US norm. In Ontario the ESA threshold is 44 hours, and because you control when the assignment employee works, an instruction from your floor to work a 45-hour week creates an overtime entitlement whether or not your scheduling software flagged it. The agency pays the overtime, but a systematic underpayment traced to your scheduling is the kind of thing that surfaces in an ESA claim and pulls you into it.

WSIB: Who Carries the Workplace-Injury Coverage?

Usually the agency, but you must confirm it in writing, and coverage is not the same as safety responsibility.

The default. For temporary assignments the agency is the employer of record and normally carries WSIB coverage and pays the premiums, so an injured assignment employee claims through the agency’s account. But do not assume: get written confirmation of the agency’s WSIB account number and good standing before the first shift, and re-confirm it periodically.

Why the claim history still matters to you. Even when the agency holds the account, injuries on your site affect the agency’s claims record and, over time, its premiums, which flow back into the markup you pay. More importantly, a WSIB claim from your floor can trigger a Ministry of Labour inspection of your worksite, where the duties in the next section become very real, very quickly. A cheap agency with a bad safety record is not cheap.

Injuries on your floor are your data too. Even though the claim runs through the agency’s WSIB account, the incident happened under your supervision and layout. An inspector responding to it will examine your walkways, your machine guarding, your training records and your supervision, not the agency’s payroll. The agency’s coverage settles the worker’s benefits; it does nothing for your prosecution exposure if the inspection finds the incident was preventable. Treat every agency worker’s safety as your liability, because in the moment that matters, it is.

Coverage is not a safety transfer. This is the misconception that costs employers the most. WSIB coverage pays for injuries after they happen; it does nothing to move the duty to prevent them. That duty sits under the OHSA, and it does not travel with the payroll.

A concrete example of the split. Suppose an agency worker on your loading dock is injured by a pallet jack. The agency’s WSIB account pays the worker’s medical costs and lost wages, that is the coverage working as designed. Separately, a Ministry inspector attends, finds the dock had no marked pedestrian lane and the worker never received a site orientation, and lays charges. Those charges are against you, the controller of the workplace, under the OHSA, and the agency’s WSIB coverage does nothing to answer them. Same incident, two entirely different systems, and the expensive one is yours.

Coverage and prevention are different systems. It helps to see WSIB and the OHSA as two halves that people wrongly merge. WSIB is no-fault insurance: it pays an injured worker’s benefits regardless of who was at fault, funded by employer premiums. The OHSA is fault-based prevention law: it punishes the party who failed to make the workplace safe. An agency worker injured on your floor gets WSIB benefits through the agency’s account, and you can still be prosecuted under the OHSA for the unsafe condition that hurt them. One does not cancel the other; they run on parallel tracks.

The OHSA: The Duty That Never Transfers

This is the section that carries the largest penalty in the entire guide, and the one employers most often assume the agency has covered. It has not.

You control the workplace, so the duties are yours. Under Ontario’s Occupational Health and Safety Act, the employer or constructor who controls the workplace must provide a safe environment, information, instruction, supervision and the required training, and those duties apply to every worker on site, including agency assignment employees. The agency cannot perform them for you because the agency does not control your floor.

Agency workers carry more risk, not less. New and short-tenure workers are consistently over-represented in workplace-injury statistics, because they do not yet know the site, its traffic routes, its blind corners or its equipment. A worker on their first shift needs your orientation more than a ten-year veteran does, not less, which is why skipping the induction on a busy morning is precisely the decision that turns into an incident.

What a compliant site induction actually covers. A defensible orientation is short but specific: the traffic routes and pedestrian walkways, the location of emergency stops and exits, the hazards of the specific area and equipment, who the worker’s supervisor is, how to report a hazard or refuse unsafe work, and a signed, dated record that it happened. Ten minutes at the start of the first shift, documented, is both the control that prevents the injury and the evidence that protects you if one occurs anyway. Undocumented training is treated as no training in an inspection.

Equipment competency is on you. Where a role involves regulated equipment, the duty to verify competency stays with the employer controlling the site. Under the Industrial Establishments Regulation (O. Reg. 851), a lift truck must be operated by a competent person, and verifying that, even for an agency-supplied operator, is your responsibility. The full breakdown is in our guide to forklift certification and employer responsibilities.

The penalties. Under the OHSA penalty provisions, a corporation can be fined up to $2 million per offence, a director or officer up to $1.5 million, and any other individual up to $500,000, each with up to 12 months’ imprisonment. These are not theoretical ceilings; the Ministry prosecutes, and “the worker came from an agency” has never been a defence.

Directors and officers are personally exposed. The number that changes behaviour in a boardroom is not the corporate $2 million; it is the $1.5 million and up to twelve months’ imprisonment that can attach personally to a director or officer. Health-and-safety liability under the OHSA does not stop at the corporate veil. A director who knew, or ought to have known, that agency workers were operating equipment without verified competency, or working a site without proper orientation, can be prosecuted individually. That personal exposure is why safety compliance for agency labour belongs on the leadership agenda, not just the floor supervisor’s.

Misclassification: The Compliance Failure That Looks Like a Saving

Trying to save on statutory costs by calling a worker something they are not is one of the most expensive mistakes in this area, precisely because it looks like a saving on the invoice.

What it is. Treating a worker as an “independent contractor” when they function as an employee, to avoid CPP, EI, vacation pay and other obligations. The CRA determines status by the substance of the relationship, control, ownership of tools, chance of profit and risk of loss, not by the wording of a contract or the fact that an invoice is issued.

What it costs. If the CRA or a tribunal finds an employment relationship, you can be assessed the unremitted CPP and EI (both employee and employer shares), plus interest and penalties, often for multiple years at once, along with any unpaid ESA entitlements such as vacation and holiday pay. A small per-hour saving becomes a large retroactive liability.

The tell that you are misclassifying. If a worker uses your tools, works your hours, at your site, under your direction, and cannot realistically profit or lose from how they do the work, they are almost certainly an employee no matter what the contract says. The independent-contractor label survives scrutiny only when the person genuinely runs their own business, sets their own methods, and serves other clients. When in doubt, the safest route is a genuine agency placement, where the licensed agency is the clear employer of record and the classification question never arises.

Contractor, agency temp, and employee are three different things. These get blurred, and the blurring is where liability hides. A genuine independent contractor runs their own business and bears its risks. An agency assignment employee is a real employee, of the agency, placed with you. A direct employee is yours outright. The dangerous middle ground is the “contractor” who is really a disguised employee, because that is the arrangement the CRA and tribunals unwind retroactively. Routing genuinely employee-like work through a licensed agency converts that grey area into a clean, defensible structure with an unambiguous employer of record.

How a legitimate agency removes the risk. A genuine THA relationship, where the licensed agency is unambiguously the employer of record and remits all deductions, takes this exposure off your books rather than creating it. The clarity is the point: there is no argument about who the employer is. This is one of the underrated compliance advantages of the agency model over informal or in-house arrangements.

How Do You Vet an Agency for Compliance?

Before you sign, confirm all of the following in writing. A compliant agency provides them without hesitation; hesitation is itself the answer.

Keep the evidence, not just the assurance. Compliance is proven with documents, not memories. For each agency, keep a dated file containing the verified licence record, the WSIB account confirmation, the signed division-of-duties schedule, your own hour records, and your site-induction sign-offs. If an employment standards officer or a Ministry inspector ever calls, the difference between a quick close and a costly finding is whether you can produce that file in five minutes. Building it costs almost nothing; not having it is what turns a routine inspection into a penalty.

• Active THA licence. Get the number, verify it on Ontario’s public list, and keep a dated record. Re-check periodically, since licences now expire on a two-year cycle.
• WSIB account in good standing. Written confirmation of the account number and current standing, re-confirmed periodically.
• Proof of coverage and remittances. Evidence that the agency actually remits CPP, EI and taxes, not just that it says it does.
• Clear division of safety duties. A written schedule of who verifies credentials, who delivers site orientation, who supervises and who reports incidents.
• Financial stability. Because you can be jointly liable for unpaid wages, an agency that cannot make payroll is your problem, not just theirs.
• Credential verification process. Exactly how the agency verifies certifications and tickets before mobilisation, and what documentation you receive.

This vetting is also how you tell a compliant partner from a cheap vendor. An agency that treats these questions as routine is one that has built the compliance capability you are relying on; the questions that reveal whether an agency is a vendor or a partner overlap almost entirely with the compliance checklist. When we assess agencies for a given sector, compliance is the first filter, as in our ranking of the top warehouse and logistics staffing agencies in Canada.

The Compliance Checklist, in One Place

Everything above, condensed to what you actually have to do.

Print this and give it to whoever manages your agencies. The single most effective compliance step most operations can take is to hand this responsibility to a named person with a written checklist, rather than leaving it diffused across procurement, HR and floor supervision, where everyone assumes someone else checked the licence. Ownership plus a checklist plus a dated file is the whole system. It is unglamorous, it takes an hour a quarter, and it is the difference between a business that can prove its compliance on demand and one that discovers its gaps during an inspection.

What an inspection actually looks like. An employment standards or health-and-safety inspection is not usually adversarial from the outset; it becomes costly when the paperwork is missing. An officer will typically ask to see the agency’s licence status, your hour records for the assignment employees, evidence of who was trained and when, and the written division of responsibilities. A business with a maintained agency file answers each in minutes and the visit closes. A business relying on “the agency has all that” spends weeks producing documents it does not control, and every gap becomes a potential finding. The file is the difference, and it is built long before the inspector arrives.

The Bottom Line

Using a staffing agency simplifies your operations but not your compliance. It splits responsibility along a line that is easy to misread: the agency owns payroll, deductions and, usually, WSIB coverage, while you keep control of the worksite and therefore the safety duties and, in several cases, wage liability. The costliest mistakes all come from assuming the agency’s role is larger than it is, that its licence is your problem solved, that its WSIB account moves safety off your desk, that “they’re the agency’s worker” answers the inspector’s question. None of those are true.

The one-sentence test. If you are ever unsure who is responsible for something involving an agency worker, ask a single question: does this concern how the person is paid and employed, or how and where they do the work? Pay and employment point to the agency. How and where the work is done, and whether it is safe, point to you. That test resolves the large majority of day-to-day compliance questions correctly, and it is the through-line of every section above.

Compliance done right is a competitive advantage. It is tempting to see all of this as overhead, but the operators who treat compliance as a discipline rather than a nuisance end up better off commercially. They avoid the penalties, of course, but they also build relationships with agencies that can actually document their licensing, coverage and verification, which are the same agencies that supply reliable, screened, safe workers. Sloppy compliance and sloppy staffing tend to travel together; so do rigorous compliance and dependable labour. Getting this right is not only about avoiding downside, it is how you end up with a workforce you can count on.

The protective posture is simple to state and worth doing properly: use only a licensed agency and re-verify it, keep your own hour records, get WSIB and remittance confirmation in writing, orient and supervise every worker on your floor exactly as you would a direct hire, and make sure the employment relationship is genuine. Do that, and the agency model is not a compliance risk; it is a compliance advantage, because a good agency has already built the licensing, payroll and verification machinery that would otherwise be your liability to run. Choose the agency accordingly, and treat this guide as a map rather than as legal advice, which for your specific situation you should get from an employment lawyer.

Provinces differ, so confirm your own. This guide describes Ontario, where the THA licensing regime and the specific ESA rules are among the most developed in Canada. Other provinces regulate temporary help, employment standards, workers’ compensation and occupational health differently, with different thresholds, penalties and, in some cases, no THA licensing scheme at all. If you operate across provinces, do not assume the Ontario framework travels with you. Confirm the equivalent obligations in each jurisdiction where your workers actually perform the work, because that is the law that applies to them.

The work location decides the law, not your head office. A common cross-border error is assuming your home jurisdiction’s rules govern. They do not. Employment standards and occupational-health law generally apply where the work is physically performed, so a worker on a site in one province is governed by that province’s ESA-equivalent, minimum wage, overtime threshold and safety regime, regardless of where your company or the agency is based. For multi-site operators this means the compliance answer can differ from one warehouse to the next, and the only safe approach is to map obligations site by site.

A worked cross-province example. Consider an operator running distribution centres in Ontario and British Columbia using the same national agency. In Ontario, overtime starts at 44 hours and the agency must hold a THA licence. In BC, the overtime rules differ, daily overtime can apply after 8 hours, and there is no equivalent THA licensing regime. Same agency, same job description, two different compliance pictures. An employer who standardises on the Ontario assumptions underpays or misclassifies in BC, and vice versa. The obligation follows the worker’s location, so the compliance map has to as well.

Federally regulated workplaces are different again. One more layer worth naming: a minority of workplaces, such as those in banking, interprovincial transport, telecommunications and a few other sectors, are federally regulated and fall under the Canada Labour Code rather than a provincial ESA, with its own standards and its own overtime and safety rules. Most warehouse, logistics and light-industrial operations are provincially regulated, but if any part of your operation is federal, the agency-worker obligations there follow the federal regime. When in doubt about which applies, that is a question for an employment lawyer, not an assumption.

Compliance is a feature you are paying for. It is worth reframing the markup in this light. Part of what a legitimate agency’s markup buys is a fully operated compliance function: licensing, payroll remittances, WSIB administration, records retention, and credential verification, all maintained by people who do only that. Building and running that in-house for a fluctuating temporary workforce is expensive and error-prone. When an agency’s quote looks high next to an unlicensed operator’s, the difference is often precisely the compliance you are legally required to have. You are not overpaying; you are paying for the thing that keeps you out of a penalty.

Want an agency where compliance is already handled? Trimax Employment is a THA-licensed Canadian staffing agency (licence THA-0000002854) that verifies every worker’s credentials through Trimax Verify before they reach your site, carries WSIB coverage, and provides clear documentation of the compliance split. Talk to us about your operation and we will show you exactly where responsibility sits. For the staffing decisions around compliance, see our complete guides to warehouse staffing, skilled trades hiring and agency versus in-house hiring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do temporary help agencies need a licence in Ontario?

Yes. Since 1 July 2024, every temporary help agency and recruiter operating in Ontario must hold a licence under the ESA licensing framework, and clients are prohibited from knowingly using an unlicensed one. You can verify any agency on Ontario’s public list of licensed agencies. As of January 2026 a licence application costs $1,500 and the licence generally expires after two years.

What happens if I use an unlicensed staffing agency?

Knowingly using an unlicensed temporary help agency is a contravention of the ESA, carrying escalating administrative penalties of $15,000 for a first contravention, $25,000 for a second and $50,000 for a third within a three-year period. The duty to verify the licence is the client’s, and “we didn’t check” is not a defence. Verify the licence on Ontario’s public list and keep dated proof.

Am I liable for wages if the agency doesn’t pay its workers?

Potentially, yes. Under the ESA rules for temporary help agencies, a client can be held jointly and severally liable with the agency for unpaid regular wages, overtime, holiday pay and vacation pay for the hours a worker was assigned to it. If the agency fails to pay, the worker can pursue the client, which is why vetting an agency’s financial stability is a direct compliance protection.

Who is responsible for safety when I use agency workers?

You are, for the worksite. The agency is the employer of record and normally carries WSIB coverage, but under the Occupational Health and Safety Act the party controlling the workplace must provide a safe environment, orientation, instruction, supervision and required training to every worker on site, including agency assignment employees. This duty does not transfer to the agency, and penalties reach $2 million per offence for a corporation.

Who carries WSIB coverage for a temp worker?

Normally the agency, as employer of record, holds the WSIB account and pays premiums, so an injured assignment employee claims through it. But you should get written confirmation of the agency’s WSIB account number and good standing before the first shift. Coverage pays for injuries after the fact; it does not move the OHSA duty to prevent them, which stays with you.

What are the penalties for health and safety violations in Ontario?

Under the OHSA, a corporation can be fined up to $2 million per offence, a director or officer up to $1.5 million, and any other individual up to $500,000, each with up to 12 months’ imprisonment. These apply to the party controlling the workplace, so they can fall on the client even when the worker is an agency assignment employee.

What is worker misclassification and why does it matter?

Misclassification is treating a worker as an independent contractor when they function as an employee, to avoid CPP, EI and other obligations. The CRA judges status by the substance of the relationship, not the contract wording. If it finds an employment relationship, you can be assessed unremitted CPP and EI (both shares), interest, penalties and unpaid ESA entitlements, often for several years at once. A genuine licensed-agency relationship removes this risk because the employer of record is unambiguous.

Do I have to keep records of agency workers’ hours?

Yes. Both the agency and the client must record the hours each assignment employee works, daily and weekly, and retain those records for three years. Relying on the agency’s records alone is a contravention risk; keep your own, since you control the hours on site.

Is overtime owed after 40 or 44 hours in Ontario?

44 hours. Ontario’s overtime threshold is 1.5 times the regular rate after 44 hours in a work week, not 40, per the ESA. The agency pays it, but you control the hours on site, so a 40-hour assumption imported from elsewhere creates liability. Ontario’s general minimum wage is $17.60 an hour.

How do I verify a staffing agency is compliant?

Confirm in writing: an active THA licence (verified on Ontario’s public list), a WSIB account in good standing, evidence of CPP/EI/tax remittances, a written division of safety duties, financial stability, and a clear credential-verification process. A compliant agency provides these readily. Keep dated records of each.

Does using an agency make me more or less compliant?

More, if the agency is licensed and genuine. A legitimate THA relationship removes misclassification risk, hands payroll and remittance compliance to a specialist, and gives you a clear employer of record. It does not remove your worksite safety duties or your own record-keeping, and it does not cover you if you knowingly use an unlicensed agency. Compliance is shared, not outsourced.

What changed for temp agency licensing in 2026?

As of 1 January 2026, a THA licence application carries a $1,500 fee, and a licence generally expires two years after issue or renewal. Because licences now lapse on a cycle, verifying an agency once at onboarding is no longer enough; re-check the public list periodically to confirm the licence is still active.

Is this guide legal advice?

No. This is general information about compliance obligations in Ontario as of 2026, not legal advice, and it does not create a lawyer-client relationship. Employment standards and safety law change, and how they apply depends on your specific circumstances and province. For advice on your situation, consult an employment lawyer or the relevant regulator directly.