Hiring your first apprentice: what changes and what it actually costs

A first-year apprentice at $24.00 an hour costs about $28.44 an hour on the tools once the employer's statutory costs are in. That is before boots, phone, a spot in the van, or the hours your journeyperson loses teaching. Work out the arithmetic before the hire and the first apprentice is a margin decision. Skip it and the crew feels busier without earning more.

The other half of it is administrative. The day you have an employee, five obligations start at once, and two of them have deadlines measured in days.

What starts the day you hire

A payroll account. You need an RP payroll program account under your business number before the first pay run, because remittances become due on a schedule CRA assigns you. Get the worker's social insurance number and a completed federal and Ontario TD1 before you run the first cheque.

Source deductions and a remittance schedule. CPP, EI and income tax come off the apprentice's pay and go to CRA with the employer's share attached. When you pay is set by your average monthly withholding amount:

A shop hiring its first apprentice is almost always a regular remitter, and quarterly is available to small employers with a clean record. Most people find out they qualify for quarterly a year after they could have started using it.

T4s. The T4 information return is due by the last day of February for the preceding calendar year. Late slips carry a penalty from the first day, starting at $100 for a return of one to five slips.

WSIB coverage. An apprentice is a worker, their earnings are insurable, and premiums run at your class rate. If this is your first employee you have 10 calendar days from hiring to register. The mechanics, the rates by class and the reporting frequencies are in our post on WSIB coverage for Ontario trades.

Employment Standards Act minimums. Vacation pay is at least 4% of gross wages for employees with less than five years of employment and 6% at five years or more. Ontario has nine public holidays. Public holiday pay is "all of the regular wages earned by the employee in the four work weeks before the work week with the public holiday plus all of the vacation pay payable to the employee with respect to the four work weeks before the work week with the public holiday, divided by 20." Overtime starts after 44 hours in a work week at one and a half times the regular rate. The general minimum wage is $17.60 an hour to September 30, 2026 and rises to $17.95 on October 1, 2026, which is a floor rather than a going rate for a trades apprentice.

Ontario's Employer Health Tax is one you can usually stop worrying about. Eligible private-sector employers get a $1,000,000 exemption, so a first apprentice does not put you into it.

The training agreement and the sponsor

The apprentice needs a sponsor, and Skilled Trades Ontario describes the sponsor as typically the employer, responsible for making sure the apprentice gets the training the program requires. Once both parties are approved, a Registered Training Agreement is signed and registered. That registration is what makes the arrangement an apprenticeship. An informal setup where your best installer shows a new hire the trade is training, and it is not an apprenticeship, and it does not support a credit claim.

Ratios apply in some trades and not others. Where a trade has a ratio, Skilled Trades Ontario states it is 1:1 journeyperson to apprentice, with the affected trades listed in Ontario Regulation 876/21. Check your trade before you plan a second apprentice, because a one-journeyperson shop with a ratio has a hard ceiling on how many people it can train at once.

What an apprentice hour really costs

Take a first-year apprentice at $24.00 an hour, 2,000 paid working hours, in a specialty trades business rated at $2.15 per $100 for WSIB in 2026.

Divide by 2,000 and the loaded rate is $28.44 an hour, or 18.5% over the wage. The public holiday figure comes from the ESA formula: four weeks at 40 hours and $24.00 is $3,840 of regular wages, plus $153.60 of vacation pay on it, divided by 20. The CPP and EI rates are the 2026 figures and they move every January, so check ours on the 2026 rates page before you rebuild this for next year.

Two things this table leaves out. In-school training blocks take the apprentice off site for several weeks a level, and the fixed costs of employing them do not stop. And a first-year apprentice is not billable for every hour they are paid.

When the crew starts making money

Put that apprentice with a journeyperson and bill their time at $55 an hour, with 60% of paid hours genuinely billable in year one. That is 1,200 billable hours, or $66,000 of revenue against $56,878 of cost. Roughly $9,100 of contribution.

Then take off the drag. If the journeyperson loses 5% of their own billable hours to instruction and rework, and their time bills at $110, that is 78 hours and $8,580 of revenue you no longer sell. Year one lands within a few hundred dollars of break-even.

Year two is where it turns. At $27.00 an hour the loaded cost works out near $32.00, and at 75% billable hours charged at $65 the same apprentice produces $97,500 against roughly $64,000 of cost. Take off a smaller supervision drag and you are around $30,000 of contribution from one person.

That is the shape of the decision. The first year buys the second and third, and it only works if the apprentice stays. It also only works if your billed rate covers loaded cost with margin on top, which is a different calculation from the one most shops run. We work through it in the post on what an hour actually costs to sell.

The credits, briefly

There is a federal credit worth having. The Apprenticeship Job Creation Tax Credit is a non-refundable investment tax credit on eligible apprentice wages, with a cap per apprentice per year, and it applies to registered contracts in prescribed trades during the first two years. The eligibility conditions, the carryback and carryforward rules and the ways employers lose the claim are set out in our post on the apprenticeship tax credit. On the year-one numbers above it converts a break-even hire into a modest positive.

The provincial side is where the outdated advice sits. Ontario's own Apprenticeship Training Tax Credit is closed to new hires. The province's page states that "the Apprenticeship Training Tax Credit is not available to apprenticeship programs that commenced on or after November 15, 2017," and that it "is available only in respect of apprenticeship programs that began on or before November 14, 2017." We confirmed that wording in August 2026. Anyone quoting you a $5,000 Ontario credit for a hire made this year is working from material that is nearly a decade out of date. Ontario's remaining support for sponsors is grant-based and changes with each budget, so confirm current terms with the program before you build them into a hiring budget.

Setting it up once

The payroll account, the WSIB registration, the training agreement and the credit tracking all land in the same fortnight, and each one is easier to do properly on day one than to correct in month nine. Isolate the apprentice's wages in their own payroll item from the first pay, because the credit is a percentage of that specific number and nobody enjoys reconstructing it from timesheets. Diarize the 10-day WSIB clock and the last day of February. Get the training agreement registered before the apprentice's start date rather than after, since the eligible period runs from registration and not from the handshake.

This is the cluster we set up for trades and contractors when the first hire happens, and it takes an afternoon at the front end.

All of our contractors and trades work

General information only, current at August 2026. Tax rules change and GST/HST status is fact-specific. Confirm your own position before relying on anything here.