Terminating a Long-Service Employee in Ontario: Why Notice Risk Climbs

A twenty-year employee and a two-year employee both get terminated without cause, and both are owed the same statutory notice under Ontario's Employment Standards Act, right? Not quite, and the gap between those two situations is where a lot of Ontario employers underestimate their real exposure.

Terminating a long-service employee brings a layered risk that a shorter-tenured termination usually doesn't: a statutory floor that stops climbing well before it should, a potential separate severance obligation, and a common-law exposure that behaves very differently from either.

Two Very Different Notice Concepts

Ontario employers dealing with a termination are really navigating two separate legal concepts:

• ESA minimum notice — a statutory floor set out in the Employment Standards Act, 2000, based on length of service, that cannot be contracted below.
• Common-law "reasonable notice" — a separate, fact-specific entitlement that applies absent an enforceable contractual limit, assessed on the individual's circumstances rather than a fixed formula.

These are not the same number, and for long-service employees, they can diverge significantly.

The ESA Floor Plateaus — It Doesn't Keep Climbing

(As of mid-2026 — verify current figures before relying on them.)

Notice that the ESA table caps at 8 weeks. An employee with 10 years of service and an employee with 30 years of service receive the identical statutory minimum. The floor simply stops climbing — but that doesn't mean the employer's total exposure does too.

Severance Pay: A Separate, Additional Entitlement for Some

On top of statutory notice, some long-service employees are also entitled to statutory severance pay, a distinct entitlement, not just more notice. Broadly, this can apply where the employer's global payroll is $2.5 million or more, or where 50 or more employees are severed within six months due to a permanent closure, and the employee has at least five years of service, up to a cap of 26 weeks' regular wages. (As of mid-2026 — verify current figures before relying on them, since these thresholds can change.) This entitlement exists specifically because of long service — it has no equivalent for short-tenured employees.

Why Common-Law Notice Behaves Differently

Where no enforceable contractual limit applies, a dismissed employee may be entitled to common-law "reasonable notice" instead of just the ESA minimum. Courts assess this on the specific facts — factors commonly considered include the employee's age, position, length of service, and the availability of comparable employment — and there is no fixed formula for translating any of these into a number. Any claim that a set number of months per year of service is "the rule" should be treated with skepticism; it isn't how the assessment actually works.

What matters for this article's purposes is simpler: unlike the ESA floor, common-law notice does not plateau at a low, fixed cap tied to a handful of years. Long service is one of several factors that can support a materially larger common-law notice entitlement than the ESA minimum would suggest.

Why This Combination Raises Employer Exposure

Put together, a long-service termination without an enforceable contractual limit can involve a statutory notice obligation that plateaued years ago, a possible separate severance entitlement, and a common-law exposure that isn't capped the same way, all for the same employee. Restructuring decisions that disproportionately affect longer-tenured, often older, employees can also raise separate fairness and discrimination considerations that deserve their own legal advice, on top of the notice analysis.

Practical Risk-Management Steps

• [ ] Confirm whether an enforceable termination clause actually limits the employee to the ESA minimum — many don't hold up, especially in older employment contracts
• [ ] Check severance pay eligibility separately from notice — it's easy to miss because it isn't triggered for every termination
• [ ] Get an assessment of likely common-law exposure before making an offer, rather than defaulting to the ESA minimum out of habit
• [ ] Document the genuine business reason for the termination, particularly where the employee is older or long-tenured
• [ ] Budget for negotiation — long-service terminations without an enforceable contractual cap are one of the more common sources of post-termination disputes that end up in litigation

Frequently asked questions