EI in Ontario (2026): your economic region, the hours you need, the weeks you get

Ontario has seventeen Employment Insurance economic regions, more than any other province, so the first thing to settle on an Ontario claim is which one you live in. For October 11 to November 7, 2026, the top of the scale is 700 hours of insurable work, asked in Thunder Bay at an unemployment rate of 4.8% and in several other regions; the bottom is 595 hours, asked in Oshawa at 8.9%, with London and Huron alongside it. Your region is set by the address you ordinarily live at when the claim starts, not by where your employer is or where you did the work. The federal rules that turn a regional rate into hours, weeks and a weekly amount are laid out once on the main EI page.

Updated October 13, 2026 · Figures verified against the statutes of each jurisdiction · see all figures and their sources · what's new

Seventeen rows, and one of them is yours

Each region's unemployment rate is recalculated every four weeks, and the hours, the best-weeks divisor and the span of weeks in its row move when the rate does. The rows below are the set in force for October 11 to November 7, 2026, and they govern any claim whose benefit period opens inside those dates.

Source: EI Program Characteristics (economic regions, rates, hours and weeks). Table for the period October 11 to November 7, 2026; it is replaced every four weeks.

The provincial unemployment figure on the news plays no part in your claim; the rate of your own region does.

The cities that are regions of their own

Eleven of Ontario's regions are built around one city. Schedule I of the Employment Insurance Regulations defines each by a census metropolitan area, or in Kingston's case a census agglomeration, so the edge follows Statistics Canada's commuting map rather than city limits. The core city is always inside its own region: Toronto, Hamilton, Oshawa, Kitchener, London, Windsor, St. Catharines, Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Kingston and the Ontario side of Ottawa each have a row to themselves. The Quebec side of the capital is counted on the Quebec EI page.

Suburbs are where people guess wrong. A commuter town can sit just inside a metropolitan area or just outside it, and that line decides which row is yours. If you live on the fringe of one of these cities, run your postal code through Service Canada's region lookup first.

The six large regions, county by county

The rest of the province is grouped into six regions made of whole counties and districts, plus the leftover parts of the ones a metropolitan area cuts through.

• Central Ontario: Hastings, Prince Edward, Northumberland, Peterborough, Kawartha Lakes, Muskoka, Haliburton, Bruce and Grey, plus the parts of Lennox and Addington, Durham Region and Simcoe County outside the Kingston, Oshawa and Toronto areas. Belleville, Quinte West, Bancroft, Prince Edward County, Cobourg, Port Hope, Peterborough, Huntsville, Bracebridge, Owen Sound and Kincardine are all here.
• Eastern Ontario: Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry, Lanark and Renfrew, plus the parts of Prescott and Russell and of Leeds and Grenville outside the Ottawa area and the part of Frontenac outside Kingston. Cornwall, Smiths Falls, Carleton Place, Pembroke, Petawawa, Arnprior and Renfrew are in it.
• Northern Ontario: the districts of Nipissing, Parry Sound, Manitoulin, Timiskaming, Cochrane, Algoma, Rainy River and Kenora, plus whatever of the Sudbury and Thunder Bay districts lies outside those two metropolitan areas. North Bay, Parry Sound, Timmins, Kapuskasing, Hearst, Moosonee, Kirkland Lake, Sault Ste. Marie, Elliot Lake, Wawa, Fort Frances, Kenora and Sioux Lookout are here.
• South Central Ontario: Wellington, Perth, Oxford and Huron counties, plus the parts of Dufferin, Waterloo and Middlesex outside the Toronto, Kitchener and London areas. Guelph, Stratford, St. Marys, Woodstock, Ingersoll, Tillsonburg and Goderich belong to it.
• Niagara: Brant and Haldimand-Norfolk, plus the part of the Niagara peninsula outside the Hamilton and St. Catharines areas and the eastern end of Elgin County. Its main places are Brantford, Norfolk County and Haldimand County.
• Huron: Chatham-Kent and Lambton, plus the rest of Elgin County outside the London area and the part of Essex County outside the Windsor area. Sarnia, Petrolia, Point Edward and Chatham-Kent are in it.

A Peterborough resident who drives to a Toronto job every morning files in Central Ontario, and someone living in Cornwall who works in Ottawa still files in Eastern Ontario. Home on the day the benefit period opens is what counts.

Three names trip people up. The region called Huron is Sarnia, Chatham-Kent and the Lambton shore, while Goderich and the rest of Huron County sit in South Central Ontario. The region called Niagara is mostly Brantford and Haldimand-Norfolk; the St. Catharines metropolitan area is a separate row, and a peninsula town lands in one or the other depending on which side of that line it falls. And Kingston is its own region, not part of Eastern Ontario: the part of Frontenac outside the Kingston area belongs to Eastern Ontario, and the part of Lennox and Addington outside it belongs to Central Ontario.

What separates Thunder Bay from Oshawa on a claim

The gap between the hardest and easiest Ontario rows shows up in three numbers. The first is hours. The Employment Insurance Act, s. 7(2), sets a sliding requirement, highest at 700 hours in the regions with the least unemployment and lowest at 420 hours in those with the most (EI Act s. 7). Thunder Bay needs 700 hours and Oshawa 595 hours, so a worker whose hours fall between the two qualifies in one city and falls short in the other.

Next comes the divisor. The Act takes the total of your highest-earning weeks and divides it by a figure tied to your region's rate (EI Act s. 14). Thunder Bay divides by 22 this period, Oshawa by 19. A short work history is still divided by the full figure, so gaps cost more where it is high.

Last is length. Schedule I reads your insurable hours against your region's rate (EI Act, Schedule I). In Thunder Bay this period it gives between 14 weeks and 36 weeks; in Oshawa, between 18 weeks and 42 weeks. The rate of 55% and the ceiling of $729.00 per week are the same on both ends.

Lucas in Sarnia: one claim, start to finish

Lucas lives in Sarnia and was laid off when a maintenance contract at a plant ended. His record of employment and an earlier job together show 980 insurable hours in the last 52 weeks, and his top weeks averaged $1,240 in insurable earnings. Both inputs are invented.

• His region. Sarnia is in Lambton, which puts him in Huron, at 7.8% for this period.
• Qualifying. Huron asks 630 hours. With 980 hours from both employers, Lucas is over the line.
• His weekly amount. His earnings are averaged over 20 weeks. At 55%, $1,240 a week becomes $682.00 before tax, below the weekly maximum of $729.00 per week.
• How long. For Huron this period, Schedule I runs from 17 weeks at the minimum hours to 40 weeks with a full year of work. The estimator above finds the exact cell for 980 hours.

Move Lucas to Thunder Bay with the same hours and pay, and only two things change: the divisor, 22 instead of 20, and his span of weeks, 14 weeks to 36 weeks this period.

The temporary measures, and the date that matters

Three temporary federal measures cover claims that start before they lapse. They undo two things laid-off Ontarians often hear from coworkers: that you always lose the first week, and that a payout from the employer holds EI back.

Plan around the end date printed in that box, not around talk of another extension. If your claim opens by that date, the measures apply to it; if it opens later, the permanent rules are back.

When your employer pays you out: Ontario severance and EI timing

Ontario is one of two jurisdictions in Canada, with the federal one, where severance pay is a separate statutory entitlement on top of termination pay, under s. 64 of the Employment Standards Act, 2000. How much your employer owes is worked out on the Ontario severance and termination pay page from your service and wages.

On the EI side the issue is timing. Under the permanent allocation rule, termination pay, severance pay and vacation pay paid because the job ended count as earnings and are laid over the weeks following your last day, which pushes back the start of benefits without cutting the number of weeks (EI Regulations s. 36). While the temporary measure is in force, that allocation is switched off, so a lump sum from your employer does not delay your first EI payment. Either way, apply as soon as your job ends; a late claim is backdated only with good cause throughout (EI Act s. 10).