Nearly one-third of employed Canadians spend more than 30 minutes of every workday dealing with, or thinking about, their personal finances. That time appears in no job description and on no timesheet. It is simply missing from the work.
The National Payroll Institute has now put a price on it. Its 18th annual survey of working Canadians, released this morning, estimates that financial stress costs employers $74.3 billion a year in lost productivity. Peter Tzanetakis, the institute’s president and CEO, told me in an interview that figure counts only lost time. The sick days, personal days and extra draw on benefits plans that follow financial stress are not included. The real bill is larger, and nobody has added it up.
The backdrop needs little explanation. Fuel costs have risen with the U.S. and Israeli conflict with Iran and the war in Ukraine and Russia; and inflation has followed. Donald Trump’s trade war has put tariffs into prices and doubt into job security. Political stability, at home and abroad, feels less like a given than it did a year ago. Workers are paying attention. Global issues (53 per cent), recession (52 per cent) and tariffs (49 per cent) top their list of economic worries. Only 18 per cent believe their income increases are keeping pace with the cost of living.
The numbers that follow are grim. Some 44 per cent of working Canadians they are financially stressed, up from roughly a third historically. That group is more than double the size of the financially comfortable. Half of employed Canadians spend all or more of their net pay, up from 41 per cent in 2025. The share who would struggle if a paycheque arrived one week late has climbed to 28 per cent, the highest in five years. And the leading source of stress is not a mortgage or a car loan. It is groceries and household products, cited by 55 per cent.
Not a salary problem
It would be easy to treat all this as a low-wage issue, something to be settled in the next round of compensation reviews. The data does not allow it.
Tzanetakis says employees with six-figure salaries can land in the financially stressed category. The survey sorts people by how they save, spend and handle debt, not by what they earn. Chuck Grace, co-founder of Canada’s Financial Wellness Lab at Western University, makes the same point: financial wellness is shaped by more than income, and consistent saving is what gives people options when something goes wrong.
A raise can be approved in a meeting. A habit cannot.
The habits are heading the wrong way. The share of Canadians trying to save more fell from 51 per cent to 43 per cent. Only 31 per cent report making progress on savings. Meanwhile, 37 per cent are carrying more debt than in previous years, and 30 per cent say they feel overwhelmed by it. Tzanetakis notes that most Canadians do not have even $2,000 or $3,000 set aside for an emergency. When the furnace fails or the car needs a transmission, the bill goes on a credit card at interest rates that turn a bad week into a bad year.
It comes to work
Employers who regard this as a private matter are running against the evidence. Nearly one in four employed Canadians say financial stress is hurting their performance at work, rising to 53 per cent among the financially stressed. Some 45 per cent report anxiety or depression tied to money worries. More than a third report lost sleep, and the same share report trouble concentrating. Nearly a quarter say they are quicker to lose their temper. None of that gets left in the parking lot.
“People do not leave their problems at home,” Tzanetakis said. “This one especially is being brought into the workplace.”
The optimism figures are worse. Only 26 per cent of employed Canadians feel optimistic about the future. Among financially stressed households, three-quarters describe themselves as very pessimistic. A workforce that expects things to get worse tends to behave accordingly: 45 per cent have delayed or cancelled a major purchase, and 59 per cent say they have grown more cautious with money.
What employers can do
Employers are fond of saying most of this is beyond their control, and most of it is. No HR department sets the price of diesel or negotiates with Washington. Tzanetakis concedes it is “very difficult for an employer to really get into everybody’s individual financial situation,” and few employees would want their manager reviewing their Visa statements.
But every employer controls one moment that touches every worker’s finances: the moment the money arrives. The institute’s case for “pay yourself first” programs rests on that. A small percentage of each paycheque goes into savings before the employee ever sees it, using payroll systems the company already runs.
The appetite is there. Only 23 per cent of workers have access to such a program, yet 78 per cent participate when one is offered, a take-up rate most voluntary benefits would envy. Nearly half say they would value an employer-sponsored emergency savings plan.
Tzanetakis’s summary of the approach is to make it “as easy to save as it is to spend.” Spending has been engineered to be effortless for years, with tap payments, saved cards and subscriptions that renew without asking. Saving is still left to willpower, at the end of the month, after everything else has had its turn. Moving it to the front of the line changes the order of events, not the size of the paycheque.
It will not lower grocery prices or end a trade war. It does not require a new platform, a wellness app or a lunch-and-learn. The employer supplies the plumbing, and the employee supplies the money.
That makes it one of the few workplace benefits paid for entirely by the people who receive it, which makes it hard to explain why more than three in four workers still don’t have access to it.
