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While Canada is the second-largest country in the world in terms of area, it’s only the 37th-largest country by population. It also has the world’s 37th-largest GDP at $2.42 trillion in 2026. Despite the challenges of the global pandemic and inflation, Canada’s GDP has actually increased by an impressive 46% in the past decade, and steady growth is expected in the near future. Canada is home to a labor force of over 22.867 million workers, and as participation in the agricultural and industrial sectors decreases due to automation, an overwhelming majority work in the services sector. Healthcare, retail, financial services, real estate, and professional, scientific, and technical services are all powering growth in this economy. Canadian workers are generally highly skilled and well-educated, placing them in great demand for local and international employers alike.
If you want to get your hands on these quality employees, you have two main options. You can set up an entity in Canada, or you can partner with an EOR, which can hire them on your behalf. We’re going to look at the latter option, explain how it works, and recommend the best Employers of Record in Canada in 2025.
A Canada Employer of Record, or EOR, is a service provider that helps you hire Canadian employees even though you don’t own a legal business entity in the country. Normally, you need to register an entity, set up an HR department, and engage with legal and tax specialists if you want to hire in Canada. However, an EOR combines all of these functions into a single service provision, helping you hire workers, manage their HR needs, and stay compliant with Canadian law.
Here’s how it works.
You first recruit the workers you want to hire, on your own or with the help of professional recruiters, possibly even through your EOR partner. You then engage an EOR. It will use the names and information of these workers to create compliant contracts, then enter into them directly with the employees. This makes the EOR their legal employer in Canada, while you, as the client, take on the role of their workplace employer. While you manage their day-to-day schedules and activities, the EOR does the rest.
Your EOR partner will onboard your workers, adding them to your payroll, and registering them with the Canadian social security and tax authorities. Once they’re ready to work, the EOR will manage your payroll, pay their salaries, withhold taxes, and handle deductions from their pay. It will administer their mandatory benefits, helping them keep track of the time off, breaks, and other entitlements they deserve. Most EORs also provide additional services like background checks, relocation support, and, especially, supplementary benefits administration.
Generally, EORs can help you hire and onboard new workers in just a few days, helping you enter the Canadian market incredibly quickly. Compared to setting up an entity and managing HR in-house, most small and medium businesses (SMBs) can save money by working with EORs to hire small teams in Canada.
A Professional Employer Organization (PEO) is a similar type of service provider you may be familiar with. While both types manage compliance and HR administration for their clients, they differ in one important way – while a PEO will help to manage workers that its clients already employ, an EOR employs them directly, taking on full responsibility for legal compliance. Despite this difference, many providers use the terms PEO and EOR interchangeably.
Not only is Canada’s economy continuing to expand, but its labor force is also growing, largely due to the promotion of skilled immigrant workers into the country. More workers mean more employers, and that, in turn, means more EORs offering services in this market, and it has grown increasingly difficult and time-consuming to choose a partner from so many competitors.
We’ve come to your rescue by creating a list of the top 6 Canada EORs we feel are your best options in 2026. They include:
Of the multitude of EORs operating in Canada these days, Remote People tops our list because of its professional services and affordable prices. This provider is based in New York City and started working in 2018, quickly developing a network of entities in over 150 countries worldwide, including Canada, of course. It allows you to hire employees in Canada for a starting price of just $199/employee per month, and you can also use its platform to hire independent contractors for free. You only pay transaction fees when you pay their invoices. This makes Remote People one of the most affordable EOR providers working in Canada today.
Remote People can typically onboard your employees in just two or three days in Canada. It first guides them through a self-service onboarding system that lets them sign their contracts and upload their important documents. With their information in hand, it adds them to your payroll and sets up their salary payments. It then registers them with the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) for tax and social security purposes so they’re ready to start working. It can also offer you private pension, health insurance (especially vision, dental, prescription drug, and ambulance coverage), and equity plan benefits you can use to make working with your organization more attractive.
However, even before it onboards your workers and starts managing their pay and benefits, Remote People can help you with recruitment. This provider is one of a small number of EORs that also engage in active recruitment services in Canada and around the world. It can help you find candidates quickly by dipping into its talent pools and advertising externally, as well as offering Executive Search services to help you find the best people for your top leadership roles. This service is also guaranteed, so that your candidate will be replaced for free if they choose to leave within their first three months.
The Remote People digital platform helps you manage your employees’ needs and keep them organized. This platform includes a wide range of features, including time and attendance tracking, payroll, benefits administration, expense tracking, and a host of other tools and functions. It’s highly rated for user-friendliness and also integrates with over 50 finance, communications, HR, accounting, and HR apps to make sharing data simple.
This provider works as a Contractor of Record, or COR, meaning that you can engage it to manage your contractors for you, handle their invoice payments, ensure they’re properly classified, and keep legally compliant. Remote People has also outsourced payroll services you can use if you already own an entity in Canada. If you choose to transition to direct hiring in Canada, you can also take advantage of its incorporation services to help you set up your legal entity.
See our Remote People review for more in-depth details.
Like Remote People, Deel also got started in 2019 as remote and international hiring suddenly grew exponentially. From its base in San Francisco, this provider has also spread into more than 150 countries, though Canada was one of the first in which it offered EOR and contractor management services.
In comparison with Remote People, Deel’s EOR fee in Canada is significantly higher at $599/employee per month. It also charges $49/person per month for contractor management services, and these prices place Deel higher than average in the industry. Like Remote People, Deel also functions as a COR to help you handle contractors compliantly for a fee of $325/person per month.
In Canada, Deel is able to onboard new employees very quickly, taking just one day on average to get them fully ready to work for you. Deel, like all EORs working in Canada, manages workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and Canada Pension Plan contributions, as well as provincial health plans in some provinces. In addition, Deel also provides private health and pension plans to help you offer your employees more.
One of the main reasons that Deel charges higher prices than some competitors is that its platform is quite extensive and helps you manage your employees without needing to subscribe to additional HRIS (human resources information system) software. This platform includes performance management, headcount management, employment engagement, time and attendance, and other tools to help you manage everything in one place. While Deel doesn’t offer active recruiting services like Remote People, it helps connect you with pre-vetted agencies in Canada and offers an ATS (applicant tracking system) built into its platform.
Check out our Deel review to learn more about its services.
While most of the EORs on our list are based in the US and provide services in Canada, our next recommendation, Borderless AI, is headquartered right in Canada. It offers EOR and contractor management services in 170 countries worldwide, and can definitely help you connect with Canadian workers.
Borderless AI clearly uses a lot of AI tools to make the services it provides more accurate, efficient, and helpful. It lets clients work with its AI assistant, HRGPT, to receive advice, answers to their legal questions, and documents generated in compliance with Canadian law. At the same time, it also lets clients access human support 24/7 for any issues that can’t be solved with AI help. The Borderless AI platform is rated as highly user-friendly and quick to get used to. While not a complete HRIS like Deel’s, this platform helps admins easily approve payroll and keep an eye on their employees’ entitlements. It also includes a mobile app that lets employees clock their hours, follow their benefits, and view their pay slips.
Borderless AI’s EOR price in Canada starts at $579/employee per month, and it charges $49/person per month for contractor management. Both services come with intellectual property protection, and EOR clients receive support from customer service managers who help them with compliance concerns. Clients can also provide supplementary benefits like private health coverage and life insurance for their employees in Canada.
Rippling, like Deel, is based in San Francisco, though it was founded earlier, in 2016. Instead of offering EOR services, Rippling was initially designed as a workforce management platform, and later branched out into global HR services. It now provides global payroll, HR outsourcing, IT, Contractor of Record, contractor management, PEO, and, of course, EOR services.
While most of Rippling’s pricing isn’t publicly available, it does advertise an EOR price of $599/employee per month, falling in the same range as Deel and Borderless AI. This above-average price reflects Rippling’s extensive HR platform, which all clients can use when they sign up for EOR services. This platform is a full HRIS and then some, with features and tools for performance management, headcount planning, learning management, employee engagement, benefits, payroll, scheduling, internal communications, and more. While Rippling doesn’t offer active recruitment, it includes an ATS and other tools to help you source talent on your own.
Because this platform is so extensive, it can produce a steep learning curve for new users, but it still has its benefits. With Rippling, you won’t need to subscribe to any other HR software packages to manage your employees in Canada and around the world. You may also not need to use IT, spend management, and finance, as you can also manage these business functions through Rippling. If you already use great tools, however, you can usually connect them with the Rippling platform, which offers over 600 pre-built integrations.
Like Remote People, Papaya Global is based in New York, and it now offers services in 160 countries around the world. Like Rippling, Papaya Global has focused on creating an extensive HR platform and then building services around it, including EOR, contractor management, COR, and global payroll services. Its EOR services in Canada start at $599/employee per month, and it charges $30/person per month for contractors.
Papaya Global, like Deel, offers a complete HRIS that helps you take care of all your HR functions in one place, without needing to subscribe to other HR software. Its platform includes useful features like workforce management, performance management, analytics, expense reporting, time and attendance, and more, so you can handle every aspect of your team’s needs in one place. While it only offers 15 pre-built integrations with other software packages, this platform provides what it calls “connectors” to help smooth data sharing with the other tools in your tech stack. Those not as convenient as full integrations, these connectors still save time when transferring data.
Papaya Global gives its clients dedicated customer service agents who help them learn to manage its system and help them troubleshoot issues. It also employs experts in Canadian employment law, so it can generate legal contracts and remain compliant at all times.
The last EOR we’re recommending is another Canadian company, this time, one that provides a wide range of services in this country alone. Pivotal Solutions was established in 1981 as an HR outsourcing company, and more recently has branched into PEO and EOR services. It also offers payroll and HR outsourcing, as well as temporary staffing solutions. Like Remote People, Pivotal also offers recruitment services, using its broad connections in Canada to help local and international clients connect with top-performing employees.
Pivotal’s EOR solution is customized for each client, depending on their specific needs. It therefore doesn’t provide its pricing online. However, this customization helps clients choose exactly the services they need, making this a more tailored service than the other competitors we’ve seen. In addition to the standard payroll and benefits administration services all EORs offer, Pivotal also allows clients to choose to include time, workers’ compensation, recruitment, and other services as they require.
Pivotal also provides managed supplementary benefits packages that can include vision and dental insurance, retirement savings plans, and disability coverage. Each client is assigned a payroll and HR specialist to help them with their hiring and team management, and can also access advice from experts in Canadian HR, law, and taxes.
Instead of setting up your own entity in Canada and managing HR internally, businesses can gain several advantages from partnering with EORs, including:
Canada’s legal system is a blend of British common law and French civil law. Federal laws like the Canada Labour Code (CLC) and the Employment Equity Act dictate minimum protections for workers across the country. However, each of Canada’s ten provinces and three territories also has its own employment and tax laws that must be respected, depending on where your workers are situated. While your EOR will handle compliance for you, it’s important to be familiar with some of these rules so you’ll know what you need to provide for your employees:
While setting up an entity in Canada can be time-consuming and costly, working with an EOR to hire Canadian employees can save you time and money while ensuring compliance and high-quality HR services. Choose a provider from our list of the best Canada Employers of Record and explore hiring in Canada today.
Request a proposal today to find the ideal EOR for your business expansion needs.
When you hire employees in Canada, the labor laws that apply to them are those of the province or territory where they are located. Some federal laws also apply to all employees across the country.
Some EORs employ professional recruiters whom you can engage to source talent for your organization. Others simply connect you with recruitment agencies, and/or provide tools to help you recruit on your own.
