Integrated strategy for human resources and pay: Quarterly progress report - Summer 2025
Integrated strategy for human resources and pay
Quarterly progress report: Summer 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.
What’s in it for employees
The employee experience is at the centre of our efforts. Since the spring, we continue to make progress to ensure employees can easily consult their HR and pay information and get adequate support when needed.
This report highlights key projects we are leading to support Government of Canada employees, including:
Strategy health
Since last quarter, the integrated strategy has continued to progress within the established scope, cost and milestones.
Cost
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 2025, we’ve achieved a government-wide average biweekly payroll accuracy of 98.4%.
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.
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Featured project: Reducing the backlog of pay transactions
Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress in reducing the number of pay cases that are more than one year old. This improvement is the result of hard work by compensation staff across the organization, combined with more efficient ways of working. We are:
- using new tools and technologies to reduce manual processing
- streamlining workflows through a targeted backlog reduction strategy
- focusing efforts on the most complex and long-standing cases
These efforts are paying off. From October 2024 to October 2025, the number of cases over 1 year old decreased by 76K (note: this volume includes ESDC repatriated cases and aligns with what is published on the Public Dashboard for October 2024), and now sits at 130K. In particular, we have reduced the number of transfer cases awaiting processing from 4K (backlog only) to 700 (backlog only). This helps minimize delays for employees in accessing their accounts and benefits when moving from one department to another.
Overall, fewer employees are waiting for pay issues to be resolved. We’re continuing to make real progress in addressing long-standing challenges. By sharing updates of our progress, we’re helping employees stay informed. We’re also showing the impact of sustained, coordinated action across the organization. Additional information is available on our Public Service Pay Centre dashboard, updated every month.
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.
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Featured project: Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant
The Artificial Intelligence Virtual Assistant (AIVA) is helping transform the way HR and pay services are delivered to public servants. By automating routine tasks for compensation advisors, AIVA allows workload to be redistributed toward backlog and more complex cases while improving both the speed and quality of service. It also plays a crucial role in facilitating the transition from Phoenix to Dayforce, by supporting the reduction of outstanding cases and enhancing the accuracy and integrity of HR and payroll data.
Since its introduction in 2024, AIVA continues to evolve. Constant enhancements increase its efficiency, enabling compensation teams to respond to employee needs more quickly and accurately. This progress embodies the Human Capital Management (HCM) vision of delivering modern, standardized, and dependable HR and payroll services. As a vital component of our broader digital transformation, AIVA plays a key role in managing transactions at the Pay Centre and helps to process transactions faster and with greater accuracy.
Currently, multiple solutions are under development and being tested by compensation advisors and subject matter experts. AIVA aims to build the capacity to automate case processing to alleviate manual work on new, simple cases and reorient employees towards complex cases to prevent backlog accumulation. Since April 2025, AIVA has built 14.38% of its targeted capacity for June 2026, when it’s expected to support 160,000 transactions, helping prevent future backlogs and improving service for public servants.
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.
- $327.7 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
- $252.1 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
- $82.2 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
- $70.7 million (9%) for business support and internal services, including program oversight, training, reporting to management and other departments, and more
- $45.2 million (6%) 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
- $16.4 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.
- $255.6 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: Process all priority backlog transactions
- In progress: Launch new course on HR-to-pay for employees (FON308) by Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (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: Launch a portfolio-based pilot by the compensation team providing service to the Canada School of Public Service
- Completed: Onboard the internal MyGCPay application to the Golden Gate 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
Project spotlight
Each quarter, we put the spotlight on an element of work being done to improve HR and pay to better serve employees.
Departmental readiness for the Dayforce HR and pay solution
The Government of Canada is modernizing how it manages human resources and pay. A significant clean-up of its systems containing HR and pay data will be required for departments and agencies to be ready to onboard onto Dayforce, the new HR and pay system. The clean-up of our data is crucial and will ease the transfer between systems.
We have ramped up engagement with GC organizations to promote a targeted organizational cleanup. The Vanguard departments (Shared Services Canada, PSPC, and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission), who will be the first to onboard, are already tackling this work and making good progress.
Preparing for change
Vanguard departments were provided a list of pre-onboarding actions required, including:
- Eliminating multi-banking: phasing out situations where more than one permanent employee is assigned to the same position. Going forward, staffing actions will only be approved if they use a truly vacant position.
- Reducing vacant positions: Reduction to the recommended 5% in accordance with the TBS-OCHRO guidelines.
- Assigning unique position numbers: Every employee will soon be assigned a unique position number. Until now, this has not been the case for certain assignments, casual roles, or other temporary staffing actions.
- Strengthening manager accountability: Increased monitoring of managers’ actions relating to pending time and labour transactions in the pay system.
These early steps will help organizations onboard smoothly when the new system goes live.
Supporting change together
We’ve recently relaunched user awareness sessions to ensure we frequently connect with employees and provide an opportunity for everyone to become more familiar with the new platform. The current sessions focus on a guided tour through the configured interface and show results of feedback we’ve received from employees.
Looking ahead
The HR and Pay Transformation Project will improve data quality, enhance service delivery, and build trust in the HR and pay system. Together, departments are laying the foundation now for a sustainable, people-centred future.
Status: Ongoing
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