Free tool
If tariffs have cut the work available to your employees, Work-Sharing lets you keep them on reduced hours with Employment Insurance topping up the difference, instead of laying them off. This page tells you whether you likely qualify, and helps you assemble what the application actually asks for. It is free, it has no accounts, and nothing you type on it leaves your browser.
Who likely qualifies: a private business or eligible not-for-profit that has operated year-round in Canada for at least 2 years, and has seen the work available to its employees fall by at least 10% over the last 6 months because of tariffs or the threat of them. Public sector employers are not eligible.
What you need: at least two core employees who agree to cut their hours by the same percentage (10% to 60%) and share the work, recovery measures for the agreement period, and forms EMP5100 and EMP5101, filed at least 10 business days before a Sunday start date. Under the tariff special measures, which run to 31 March 2027, an agreement can last up to 76 weeks.
This is a preparation aid. Work-Sharing is a three-way agreement between you, your employees - and their union, if there is one - and Service Canada. This page does not negotiate that, does not submit anything on your behalf, and cannot approve anything. It applies the published criteria to what you tell it, and it lays out the questions on forms EMP5100 and EMP5101 in the order they are asked, so filling them in becomes transcription rather than research.
It is not legal or HR advice, and it is not a substitute for Service Canada's own guidance, which is linked at the bottom of every section here. Approval is theirs to give. Where the answer here is "not clear", that is genuinely the answer, and the Employer Inquiry Unit will tell you for nothing.
It expects to go out of date. The tariff special measures are temporary and currently run to 2027-03-31. A new programme, announced on 25 August 2026, will fold Work-Sharing and the Worker Retention Grant together, and its details had not been published when this page was built. Every criterion below carries the government page it came from and the date it was read - 2026-08-27 - so you can check any of them in about a minute.
Nothing here is saved. There is no account, no database and no browser storage: the page holds your answers in memory and forgets them when you close the tab. That is deliberate - this form collects payroll figures and employee names - but it means you should build and copy the draft before you go anywhere.
Ten questions, all of them drawn from the published criteria. Each one shows the rule it is applying in the government's own words, so you can disagree with this page and check who is right. The first question decides which rulebook the rest are read against.
These are the questions EMP5100 and EMP5101 ask, in the order they ask them, with the official guidance for each one underneath. Fill in what you can, leave the rest, and build a draft at the bottom - a working sheet you print or copy and then transcribe into the real form or into GCOS. It will flag the handful of mistakes that cost people a start date.
The draft is not the form. Service Canada's EMP5100 and EMP5101 are fillable PDFs and this page cannot write into them - a static site with no server has no way to. What you get is your answers, laid out to match. Downloading the real forms, checking every line and submitting the package stays yours to do.
Read it before you use it. Anything marked not filled in is a question the real form will still ask you.
Work-Sharing is not a download. It is a negotiated agreement with a lead time, a start date that has to fall on a particular day of the week, and obligations that run for months afterwards. Worth knowing before you start rather than after.
The employer, the participating employees and the union - if there is one - all have to agree to take part before anything is submitted. You designate an employer representative with signing authority who is not in the Work-Sharing unit; the employees authorise a representative of their own, who in a unionised workplace may be designated by the union. Both attest to the application and to Attachment A.
EMP5100 plus one EMP5101 per Work-Sharing unit, plus - if you are applying by email or mail rather than through GCOS - a recent CRA payroll deductions document showing your legal name, legal address and RP number. Everyone in a unit reduces their hours by the same percentage and shares the available work, whether or not they personally qualify for EI.
Online through GCOS is the recommended route, and the account needs identity verification, so set it up early rather than the week you apply. Otherwise it goes by email to your regional Work-Sharing unit, copied to every representative. Agreements can only start on a Sunday, and they cannot be backdated.
You are attesting to a minimum 10% drop in business activity in the last six months, and agreeing to hand over sales or production figures and payroll records if asked. Deliberately giving false information is an offence under the Employment Insurance Act.
Each participant manages their own Employment Insurance claim, using a reference code valid for the week they start. You take on reporting obligations for the life of the agreement. Extensions need to be requested at least four weeks before the end date - agreements are never extended automatically.
One regional unit per work location. Copy the employer, employee and - if applicable - union representatives on the same email.
The employee side of this is simpler and already well served, so there is no parallel tool here and there should not be. Employees on a Work-Sharing agreement claim Employment Insurance themselves, and the temporary EI flexibilities announced alongside the tariff measures - the waived waiting week, benefits before separation payments are used up, extra weeks for long-tenured workers - are handled by Service Canada rather than by you.
Read on 2026-08-27. Each criterion above shows its own quote and its own link; these are the pages they were read from. Programme details in this area are changing month to month - if you are reading this well after that date, treat the government pages as current and this one as a starting point.
Back to the directory Tariff calculator Counter-tariff gap About this site
This is an independent site, not a government service. Nothing here is legal, HR, tax or immigration advice, nothing here guarantees approval, and nothing here replaces Service Canada's own guidance or the negotiation with your employees. It is free, and it will stay free: there is no paid tier of this tool and there is not going to be one.