Best payroll software for Canadian small businesses: CPP, EI, T4, ROE

Canadian payroll is a CRA problem first and a software problem second. If you have employees, you deduct income tax, CPP (and CPP2 when earnings pass the first ceiling), and EI, you remit on CRA’s schedule, you issue T4s, and you issue a Record of Employment when there is an interruption of earnings.

This page compares tools Canadian small businesses actually use: QuickBooks Payroll Canada, Wave Payroll, FreshBooks’ PaymentEvolution add-on, Xero plus a Canadian payroll app, and Wagepoint as a market option — not as a v1 affiliate target. Square Payroll is called out because US articles keep recommending it to Canadians by mistake.

Checked against public vendor and CRA pages, 29 August 2026.

2026 CRA figures you should see in the software

From CRA’s published tables (not from a vendor blog):

• CPP: 5.95% employee and employer on earnings between $3,500 and $74,600. Maximum $4,230.45 each ($8,460.90 if you are self-employed and paying both sides on the personal return). CPP rates.
• CPP2: 4% each on earnings from $74,600 to $85,000. Maximum $416 each. CPP2 rates.
• EI: employee 1.63% up to $68,900. Maximum employee $1,123.07; employer maximum $1,572.30 (1.4× the employee premium). EI rates.

T4 filing is a CRA information return. ROE is an ESDC / Service Canada document. Software should calculate insurable hours and earnings; you still need a process when someone is laid off or quits.

Who does what

QuickBooks Payroll Canada

If the books are already on QuickBooks Online Canada, adding Intuit’s Canadian payroll is the path of least journal-entry pain: wages, CPP, EI, and tax post into the same company file. Intuit has also used “Workforce” branding in 2026 product notes. The public payroll pricing page did not give a clean regular CAD table in our retrieval. Third-party sites disagree ($22–$60 vs $30/$55/$80 plus per-employee fees). I am not going to pick a number and call it official.

What you should verify on a sales call or in-app quote: base fee, per-employee fee, whether remittances are filed as your agent, T4 e-file, ROE, Quebec RL-1 if you will ever have a Quebec employee, and that 2026 CPP2 ceilings are in the calc.

Wave Payroll

Wave lists payroll as an add-on from $25/month on https://www.waveapps.com/pricing. Canadian help articles cover T4 previews, T4 XML for CRA internet file transfer, and CPP/EI accuracy checks. Wave is explicit that you file the T4s. That is an honest product boundary.

FreshBooks and Xero

FreshBooks Canada pricing lists PaymentEvolution Payroll as “talk to a consultant” on every plan. There is no public sticker. Treat it as a paired product, not a $20 toggle.

Xero’s Canadian plan card sells accounting. Payroll usage can appear as a separate charge in Xero’s own FAQ language, and Canadian employers typically run a specialist app. Wagepoint is the name that comes up; it is a Canadian payroll company. It is not a NorthOffice v1 affiliate recommendation.

Square Payroll — do not import the US article

Square POS in Canada is real. Square Payroll, as documented for the United States (Form 941/944, W-2, state tax), is not a Canadian CPP/EI engine. If you take cards with Square and hire staff, buy Canadian payroll separately.

What “good” looks like in a Canadian shop

1. 2026 CPP, CPP2, and EI tables load without a manual hack.
2. You know who remits — you or the vendor as agent — and on which CRA frequency.
3. T4s: who generates, who files, February deadline.
4. ROE: who creates it when hours stop.
5. The ledger matches the payroll run (or you enjoy reconciling).

Accounting context: accounting software and FreshBooks vs QuickBooks vs Xero. Trades crews with crews on the truck: Jobber plus payroll.