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Employers who provide a qualifying short-term disability plan can apply to the Canada Employment Insurance Commission for a reduced Employment Insurance (EI) premium rate. The reduction lowers the employer’s share of EI. The employee’s share is unchanged. Record an approved reduction as a Tax Property on the business’s CRA remittance account. Nmbr then uses it on every pay stub that remits EI through that account.

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How the reduction is applied

Employer EI is the CRA’s employer premium rate applied to the employee’s insurable earnings for the period. A reduction replaces that rate with the employee rate times the lower multiplier the Commission granted. The employer’s annual maximum premium drops in the same proportion as the rate, so the employer keeps paying less once the employee’s insurable earnings reach the annual maximum. The employee’s premium and maximum are untouched. For a pay stub with $10,000.00 of insurable earnings, at 2026 federal rates: The employee’s premium is the same either way, so net pay does not change. Only the employer cost, and the amount remitted to the CRA, change. Because the premium comes from insurable earnings, multiplying the employee’s premium by the multiplier will not always reproduce it. See Employer EI Premiums. The Commission states the multiplier in its approval, which is why the Tax Property holds a multiplier rather than a percentage rate. It must be between 1 and 1.4, and the business needs that written approval before you set one. See the EI Premium Reduction Program for eligibility and how to apply.

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The tax property

The multiplier is held in the ca::ei_premium_reduction Tax Property. Its value is the multiplier stated in the Commission’s approval, a single number. The owner must be a remittance account whose account_provider is ca_cra. Any other owner is rejected on owner_id with EI Premium Reduction owner must be CRA account. Retrieve the template from the Tax Property Templates endpoint to confirm the format and validation: Request
Response

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Applying a reduction

Most businesses have one CRA remittance account, created as part of Tax Agency Configuration. Retrieve it with the Remittance Accounts endpoint, filtered to the business entity. You can set the multiplier when you create the account, or add it later.

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On a new account

Include the property in the tax_properties array on the Create a Remittance Account request. This array is only accepted on create.

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On an existing account

Send the CRA remittance account’s ID as owner_id to the Create a Tax Property endpoint.
effective_from is required. Set it to the first day the confirmed rate applies, which is January 1 for a rate granted for a calendar year.

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Which pay stubs use the reduction

Nmbr resolves a CRA remittance account for each work assignment from its remittance account enrollments, using the payroll’s pay_date. Work assignments enrolled in the account use that account’s multiplier. A work assignment with no CRA enrollment falls back to the business entity’s CRA account when the business entity has exactly one. If a business has more than one CRA account and the reduction applies to more than one, create a Tax Property on each account.

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Updating the rate

The Commission confirms a reduced rate for a calendar year, so the multiplier changes when a new rate is granted for the following year. allow_concurrent is false for this template, so an account holds one multiplier at a time. To move to a new rate, set effective_to on the current Tax Property to the last day the old rate applies, then create a new one with an effective_from after that date. A Tax Property cannot be ended before the pay_date of the most recent payroll that used it. The earliest_valid_effective_to attribute on the Tax Property gives you that floor. See Ending a Tax Property for the full rules. Once a payroll that used the property is approved, is_editable becomes false and only effective_to and note can be changed. Correcting a multiplier after that means ending the property and creating a replacement.

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Removing the reduction

Set effective_to on the Tax Property to the last day the reduced rate applies. Payrolls with a pay_date after that date use the standard 1.4 employer rate again.

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Verifying what was applied

Employee and employer EI for a pay stub are in the Statutory Withholding Line Items for the payroll. The employer amount carries the reduction; the employee amount does not. The ei-cpp-balance report has a CRA EI Premium Reduction column holding the multiplier in effect for the account, next to the employee and employer EI totals. For Quebec payrolls, use ei-qpp-qpip-balance.