Integrated strategy for human resources and pay: Quarterly progress report - Fall 2025
Integrated strategy for human resources and pay
Quarterly progress report: Fall 2025
The Government of Canada is changing the way it manages human resources (HR) and pay for public servants.
This report provides an update on our integrated strategy for human resources and pay. It details how we’re improving and addressing challenges with the current pay system and our operations. It also highlights our work to explore a new, modern HR and pay solution for Government of Canada employees.
Projects spotlights
The employee experience is at the centre of our efforts. Since the summer, we continue to make progress to ensure employees can easily consult their HR and pay information and get adequate support when needed.
The following key projects spotlight on an element of work being done to improve HR and pay to better serve employees.
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Data migration and parallel testing
Data migration
We are moving data from Phoenix to Dayforce. A move like this is called a “migration.” We are moving the data in advance to make sure the new system works well from the start. We began work to migrate and convert data during the feasibility phase in 2024. Before we move data, we clean it up organize and check to make sure everything is okay. We can then load the data into Dayforce. We are keeping data in Phoenix as well until Dayforce is fully rolled out.
After the feasibility phase ended in early 2025, we continued to move data.
Wave 1 will include the following 3 pilot organizations, which will be the first to transition to Dayforce:
- Shared Services Canada (SSC)
- Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC)
- Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC)
Since September 2025, we imported 96% of PSPC employee records and 98% of SSC records into Dayforce.
Parallel testing
Moving data in advance helped with our testing.
Parallel testing means running multiple tests at the same time. We ran tests to compare pay results from Dayforce to those from Phoenix for the same employees and pay periods.
Parallel testing helped confirm Dayforce calculates pay correctly.
Parallel testing cycles
Cycle 1 began on November 21, 2025. The goals are to:
- set up the testing process
- confirm the data is ready for testing
- compare gross and net pay between Dayforce and Phoenix
A report with the results will be available by March 31, 2026.
Cycle 2 will run from April 20 to June 30, 2026. It will include more employees, which will make the testing more complex.
Looking ahead
We will continue supporting pilot departments with data uploads and parallel testing activities. We will also begin working with Wave 2 organizations and then with partners who are not using MyGCHR.
Engaging early with partners is important. It gives them time to prepare and validate their data, and helps them understand requirements before moving to Dayforce.
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Organizational readiness strategy
This quarter, we continued to help departments get ready for the rollout of Dayforce. We created strategies to support these efforts.
These strategies include a “playbook” with step-by-step instructions, readiness criteria, and change management tools and templates.
We also developed:
- memorandums of understanding with the first 3 organizations
- a pre-onboarding checklist
- a communications toolkit
- a transformation hub; which is a centralized bilingual platform that provides public servants with up-to-date project information, such as readiness resources, and the new communications toolkit to support the transition to Dayforce
Engaging with departments across the government continues to be a key part of readiness. This quarter we:
- met with HR and deputy minister communities
- held 81 user awareness sessions for more than 3,900 employees
- held 108 workshops to help organizations prepare for standardized HR and pay processes
These workshops complement earlier transformation work. They emphasized the importance of consistent process mapping and preparation across departments.
Readiness activities also advanced across the areas of technology, data, and policy. This included work on data clean up and migration, planning for integrating data, and steps to prepare for future policy changes. Together, these activities are providing organizations with the information and tools the need to prepare for the transition to Dayforce.
Strategy health
Since last quarter, the work as defined in the integrated strategy has continued to progress within the established scope, cost and milestones.
Scope
The integrated strategy for HR and pay is divided into 2 components: current operations and transformation. Learn more about our featured projects for each component.
Current operations
We continue our efforts to maintain and improve our current pay system.
So far in 2026, we’ve achieved a government-wide average biweekly payroll accuracy of 98.8%.
We also continue to work towards reducing the number of outstanding transactions. Our current goal is to reach steady state, which is defined as processing transactions within service standards 95% of the time and having no outstanding transactions more than 1 year old.
Transformation
While improving our current operations, we continue to explore options to replace our existing HR and pay systems. We're also experimenting with various data management models.
Cost
It’s crucial that we invest in the current HR and pay systems and operations so the 430,000 current and former employees across the public service receive their biweekly pay. This includes employees served by the Public Service Pay Centre and other pay processing organizations. Investments are also needed to resolve backlog transactions from past years. At the same time, we continue towards a final build and testing phase of a new, modern and integrated HR and pay solution designed to meet the current and future needs of the public service.
Fiscal year 2025 to 2026
Current operations
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Current operations (2025 to 2026)
These are the final amounts for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year.
- $318.4 million (41%) for the Pay Centre and its compensation advisors to handle pay and benefits transactions for over 250,000 employees, as well as to reduce outstanding transactions; this includes processing transactions like actings, new hires, transfers and promotions
- $252.5 million (32%) for pay applications and information technology (IT) support, which includes programming, and improving the pay and HR systems, as well as 24/7 IT operations to ensure systems work correctly
- $79.6 million (10%) for pay administration, which is responsible for managing pay and benefits for over 430,000 current and former employees, ensuring data is accurate, implementing collective agreements, issuing tax slips, conducting audits, and more
- $76.1 million (10%) for business support and internal services, including program oversight, training, reporting to management and other departments, and more
- $43.0 million (5%) for the Client Contact Centre, which answers questions from all public servants and retirees and handles simple issues; this funding also supports the MyGCPay application, which helps employees understand their pay and benefits
- $16.0 million (2%) for the Pay Administration Transformation, which takes a strategic and business-focused approach to transformation; it also explores new, innovative methods to optimize AI projects and centrally coordinates the current business’s contribution to the development of Dayforce.
Transformation
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Transformation (2025 to 2026)
These are final amounts for the 2025 to 2026 fiscal year.
- $255.4 million (100%) for PSPC to continue testing a new HR and pay system to replace Phoenix; this includes advancing the Dayforce Vanguard pilot project
Milestones
Project milestones allow us to track and publicly report on our progress.
Checkmark = Completed; Circle = In progress
2024
Spring
- Completed: Launch of the new GC Employee Pay and Benefits Facebook page to support employees
- Completed: Budget 2024 provided funding for the exploration of a new HR and pay system
- Completed: Launch of the Data hub initiative Request for information
Summer
- Completed: Publish the first quarterly progress report
- Completed: Deployment of 4 new HR and pay best practices across departments, through the Unified actions for pay
- Completed: Begin using an AI virtual assistant to support compensation advisors
- Completed: Launch of the Case Client Relationship Management tool initiative request for information and request for proposals for advisory services
- Completed: Launch of the new phone menu option at the Client Contact Centre to better help employees
- Completed: Start of the Dayforce user awareness sessions available to Human Capital Management employees, to continue testing this new potential HR and pay solution
Fall
- Completed: Upgrade the pay system database to a supported platform offered by Oracle
- Completed: Publish the second quarterly progress report and hold engagement sessions with employees, unions, and media, as part of the Transparency by Design initiative
- Completed: Engage Government of Canada employees with the Dayforce user awareness sessions, to maximize the number of participants testing this potential HR and pay solution
- Completed: Release 50 internal documents on October 2 and 49 more documents on December 2 relating to HR and pay initiatives on the Open Government Portal
- Completed: Launch improvements and expansion of MyGCPay to include additional HR information
- Completed: Publish 4 new how-to videos to support employees
2025
Winter
- Completed: Publish the third quarterly progress report and continue engagement sessions as part of the Transparency by Design initiative
- Completed: Release 281 new internal documents in the last fiscal year relating to HR and pay initiatives on the Open Government Portal
- Completed: Launch MyGCPay external for all government employees
- In progress: Launch new course on HR-to-pay for employees (FON308) by TBS-OCHRO and PSPC to improve HR-pay understanding, streamline processes, and ease system strain; to date, the course has seen 33,467 enrollments, 27,175 completions, with self-assessed knowledge on HR-to-pay for employees rising from 6 to 8/10
Spring
- Completed: Publish Dayforce Feasibility Report on June 11, 2025
- Completed: Launch 8 new commitments as apart of the 2025 to 2026 progress tracker
- Completed: Data Hub Invitation to Qualify
- Completed: TBS-OCHRO introduces pay rate updates for the EX Group to apply increases on their effective date, reducing retroactive pay and manual transactions
Summer
- Completed: Publish the fourth quarterly progress report and continue engagement sessions as part of the Transparency by Design initiative
- Completed: Release 55 new internal documents on June 23 relating to HR and pay initiatives on the Open Government Portal
- Completed: Deploy 3 new HR and pay best practices across departments (measures 5, 6 launched in the spring and 7 in the summer), through the Unified Actions for Pay
- Completed: Discontinue measures 1 and 3 of the Unified Actions for Pay
- Completed: Data Hub qualified vendor engagement (review, refine requirements phase) and launch of new Sovereign Data Hub invitation to qualify
- Completed: TBS-OCHRO launches the Directive on Union Dues effective September 1, 2025; the Directive was modified to improve the administration of dues on behalf of the bargaining agent by eliminating complexities with retroactive transactions, further simplifying pay administration for departments and bargaining agents
Fall
- Completed: New Sovereign Data Hub invitation to qualify and established pool of qualified sovereign Canadian suppliers
- Completed: Onboard the internal MyGCPay application to a new reporting environment, with the goal to reduce the load on Phoenix production
- Completed: Release the new tax tab feature to improve navigation to tax slips in MyGCPay
2026
Winter
- Completed: Document all HR and critical to pay requirements for the Core Public Administration
- Completed: Develop and deliver 5 cloud extensions for Dayforce, confirming we are ready for validation
- Completed: Continue standardized process reviews with partner organizations, advancing alignment through “adapt to adopt” project principles; this work supports alignment with the new HR and Pay system functionality, enabling increased process automation and consistency across the Government
- Completed: Run the first payroll in Dayforce, providing critical early insights into required adjustments and informing refinements to system design and configuration
- Completed: Lead engagement workshops on Dayforce processes with 26 organizations
- Completed: Define and document formal data governance and master data management approach, establishing the rules of the approach for how HR and Pay data will be managed moving forward
- Completed: Finalize Dayforce Privacy Impact Assessment and Information Sharing Arrangements with pilot departments, strengthening privacy and responsible data sharing
- Completed: Achieve a near real time replication of 160 Phoenix pay tables in the Data Hub, representing the first large scale ingestion of pay data into the platform
- Completed: Full return of end-to-end management for emergency salary advances and priority payment transactions to organizations, including responsibility for recovery
- Completed: Provide training to close to 400 compensation advisors across the government of Canada on processing Workforce Adjustment Transactions (between December 1, 2025, and February 2, 2026)
- Completed: Integrate Services Framework proof of concept, demonstrating that Data Hub capabilities can be used to exchange data between Dayforce and other systems (gaps identified in the feasibility project)
- Completed: Launch of the MyGCPay newsfeed
- Completed: Implement enhancements to the MyGCPay HR tab
- In progress: Process all priority backlog transactions
- In progress: Develop the first iteration of the Dayforce Hypercare strategy for the HR and pay solution, outlining the post-go-live support framework and governance required to ensure a stable transition from implementation to steady-state operations for departments and employees
- In progress: Develop the first iteration of the Departmental Deployment Execution Strategy, outlining how the project team will collaborate with departments to transition to the new HR and pay solution, including the establishment of a readiness structure, a specialized "Surge team" resource model for peak periods, and an inventory of tools to support a successful launch
- In progress: Launch of the development of the Dayforce training strategy to address the diverse needs of HR and pay stakeholders, empowering them to adopt Dayforce and perform their respective roles effectively
- In progress: Initiate user testing with a diverse group of Government of Canada users; informing the design, enhancement, and improvement of the Dayforce landing pages, strengthening usability and accessibility
Spring
- In progress: Launch the HR and Pay Transformation Hub, a centralized bilingual platform providing public servants with up-to-date project information, readiness resources, and a communications toolkit to support the transition to Dayforce
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