Integrated strategy for human resources and pay: Quarterly progress report - Winter and spring 2025
Integrated strategy for human resources and pay
Quarterly progress report: Winter and spring 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 center of our efforts. Since the fall, we have continued 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. These updates include the launch of new measures for the Unified Actions for Pay (UAP) project which is helping improve HR and Pay, the publication of the Dayforce feasibility report, and highlighting our new pay and benefits social media accounts.
Strategy health
To date, the integrated strategy is progressing within the established scope, cost and milestones. This progress report will provide details for each category, as well as featured projects, each quarter.
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.
In 2024, we achieved a government-wide average biweekly payroll accuracy of 98.1%.
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: Unified Action for Pay
The Unified Actions for Pay (UAP) project continues to introduce measures that:
- enhance HR data reliability
- increase pay system automation to reduce delays and risks of errors
- reduce pay-related issues for employees
We successfully implemented the first 4 measures in 2024. Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) and the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat’s Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer (TBS-OCHRO) launched measures 5 and 6 in April 2025. Measure 7 launched in June. These new measures are:
Measure 5
Provides guidance from TBS-OCHRO to help bring greater clarity and consistency in the use of short-term acting appointments of five working days or less for employees acting in Executive Group positions. It provides practical considerations for managers and aims to ensure fairness and transparency in decision-making in line with collective agreements and terms and conditions of employment.
Measure 6
Aims to make employee contact information more accurate. It will do this by ensuring personal email and mailing addresses are available and accurate. We are encouraging employees to add both personal and work email addresses to their department’s systems. Managers should verify addresses and remind employees to update their contact information regularly. This will help ensure accurate pay and timely communication, including in the event of an emergency.
Measure 7
We will start sending automatic email notifications to managers, reminding them to view and approve pay transactions. This will improve data accuracy and ensure that payments and deductions are processed in a timely manner.
By making these improvements to existing HR and pay processes, the UAP project supports a more efficient, reliable, and employee-centric pay system across the Government of Canada.
Employees can find additional information about these measures by visiting: UAP - Toolkit for Managers and Employees (only available via a Government of Canada network).
Status: On track.
Measures 5 and 6 were launched in April 2025. Measure 7 will be launched in June 2025.
Transformation
While improving our current operations, we continue to explore options to replace our existing HR and pay systems and experiment with various data management models.
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Featured project: Dayforce Feasibility Report
We are moving forward with Dayforce as our new HR and Pay system. We went through many phases of testing the Dayforce HR and pay solution. The most recent phase in this effort was a feasibility project, a rigorous evaluation of the Dayforce solution’s potential as a replacement for both the government’s pay system and a significant number of the HR systems in use across the Government of Canada.
This work builds on the 2024 Final Findings Report. It moves from the question of whether Dayforce is a viable solution, to assessing how confident we are about the feasibility of implementing Dayforce across the government. We published our findings in the Dayforce Feasibility Report.
The Feasibility Report outlines the findings, criteria, and results of the feasibility assessment. The project involved further design, testing, validation, and costing to confirm that it is feasible to transform HR and pay. This includes deploying the Dayforce solution across the government. We carried out the feasibility project to ensure that:
- the system will be ready
- the Government of Canada will be ready
- there are solutions to all identified issues and that those issues can be resolved before Dayforce goes live.
Status: Completed
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 2024 to 2025
Current operations
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Current operations (2024 to 2025)
These are the final amounts for the 2024-2025 fiscal year.
- $355.6 million (46%) 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
- $207.9 million (27%) 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
- this amount includes the contract with IBM Canada, valued at $120.2 million (taxes included), for critical 24/7/365 technical and payroll processing support, software updates, and more
- this amount includes the contract with Oracle, valued at $8 million (taxes included), for a new pay system database, licenses, and support
- $81.9 million (11%) 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
- this amount includes the contract with PricewaterhouseCoopers, valued at $20 million (taxes included), for the provision of experts to provide project and program advisory services, with a focus on pay stabilization efforts, on an as-needed basis
- $64.2 million (8%) for business support and internal services, including program oversight, training, reporting to management and other departments, and more
- $47.2 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
- $22.7 million (3%) for the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat to pursue simplifying HR processes and procedures, as well as to support initiatives such as the new central data hub
- $355.6 million (46%) 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
Transformation
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Transformation (2024 to 2025)
These are final amounts for the 2024-2025 fiscal year.
- $69.9 million excluding taxes (63%) for Dayforce to continue supporting us in the expanded testing of more complex scenarios and configuring the system to our specific needs
- $40.4 million (37%) for PSPC to continue exploring a new modern HR and pay solution
- this includes expenses such as salaries for public servants, internal services, training, and more
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: Released 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
Spring
- Completed: Dayforce Feasibility Report was published on June 11, 2025
- Completed: Launched 8 new commitments as apart of the 2025-2026 progress tracker
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
- In progress: Deploy 3 new HR and pay best practices across departments, through the Unified Actions for Pay
Project spotlight
Each quarter, we put the spotlight on an element of work being done to improve HR and pay to better service employees.
GC pay and benefits – Social media presence
We launched the GC Employee Pay and Benefits Reddit account in early 2025.
We began increasing our social media presence a year ago with the launch of our GC Employee Pay and Benefits Facebook page. The account has since grown to more than 10,000 followers in French and English.
The new Reddit page is building on the success of the existing Facebook page. It proactively engages employees on a platform they already use.
PSPC is the only federal department to establish an official presence on Reddit, making this a forward-thinking and innovative step in government communications. The department decided to launch a Reddit presence after observing a large number of federal public servants using the platform to ask questions about their pay.
Our Reddit account provides an informal and accessible environment that allows employees to:
- easily access reliable pay and benefits information
- ask questions
- engage in discussions
We are rolling out the account in a phased approach. In the future, we will engage with users on relevant subreddits. We also plan to launch a dedicated Government of Canada subreddit. A subreddit is a community on Reddit focused on a specific topic, where users can post content and engage in discussions.
There are strong privacy safeguards and clear moderation guidelines in place. This initiative reinforces our commitment to modern, transparent, and employee-centered communication.
Status: In progress
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