Maximum EI Weekly Benefit 2027: What's Left After Tax

Starting in January 2027, Employment Insurance will never pay more than $749 a week. That is the ceiling, whatever your file looks like. But that $749 is a gross amount: tax comes off before the money reaches your account. Here is what is actually left, and why the gap between gross and net is smaller than on a regular paycheque.

Where the $749 ceiling comes from

EI does not replace your whole salary. It replaces a share of it: 55% of your average insurable weekly earnings, meaning the average of your best weeks of pay before the job loss.

That 55% does not apply to any salary at all. There is a limit on the annual earnings taken into account, called the maximum insurable earnings (MIE): above it, the salary no longer counts in the calculation. For 2027, the MIE is $70,800, up from $68,900 in 2026.

The weekly ceiling follows directly from those two figures: $70,800 × 55% ÷ 52 weeks, or about $749. That is exactly what the 2027 actuarial report states: "The maximum weekly benefit rate for 2027 is $749", up from $729 the year before.

Watch the word "maximum": it is a ceiling, not a typical amount. You only reach it if your previous salary was above $70,800 a year. Below that, your benefit is 55% of your own average, so it is lower.

EI benefits are taxable income

To the tax authorities, nothing separates a benefit from a salary: it is income, and it is taxed. The official page says so plainly — "EI benefits are taxable, no matter what type of benefits you receive" — and it adds that "federal and provincial or territorial taxes, where applicable, will be deducted from your payment".

So the tax bill does not wait for the spring: a share is taken as you go, on every payment.

What is not deducted, and why it matters

On a regular Quebec paycheque, five deductions come off in a row: federal tax, Quebec tax, the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) contribution, the EI premium and the Quebec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) premium.

On an EI benefit, only two of them remain: the two income taxes. The three social contributions do not apply.

The logic is simple. Those contributions are attached to work, not to income in general. The QPP, for instance, covers people who work in Quebec and earn income over $3,500 a year. The Canada Revenue Agency's payroll deductions guide for Quebec says the same thing on the federal side: "certain types of income, such as pension income, are not subject to QPP contributions and EI premiums".

There is a small irony in this: you pay the EI premium as long as you are working — the subject of our article on the 2027 EI premium — but you stop paying it the moment you start collecting the benefits.

What this means in practice: for the same gross amount, the gap between gross and net is smaller on a benefit than on a salary. To see the difference, compare it with what a salary of the same size leaves you in the Quebec take-home pay calculator, which does withhold all three contributions.

What is left out of $749 a week

Take the ceiling case: someone collecting $749 a week for the longest possible period. Regular benefits are paid from 14 weeks up to a maximum of 45 weeks, depending on the file. At 45 weeks, that comes to $33,705 gross for the year.

One caveat before the figures. The 2027 tax parameters have not been published yet: the Canada Revenue Agency is still on the 2026 brackets. The calculation below therefore uses the 2026 parameters, the latest known ones. Yearly indexation will shift them slightly — on the order of a hundred dollars less tax over the year, no more.

At this income level, you stay in the first tax bracket on both sides. Federally, it runs up to $58,523 and its rate is 14%. In Quebec, it stops at $54,345, with a rate of 14% as well.

Then comes a Quebec particularity: the abatement. Federal tax for Quebec residents is cut by 16.5% — a rebate that exists because Quebec runs some programs itself that Ottawa funds elsewhere.

If EI is your only income for the year

There is one case where the tax drops to zero. Every taxpayer is entitled to a basic personal amount: a first slice of income on which no tax is paid. For 2026 it is $16,452 federally and $18,952 in Quebec.

At $749 a week, it takes around twenty weeks of benefits to pass the lower of those two amounts. So if EI was your only income for the year and you collected it for around twenty weeks or less, the tax owing on those benefits is nil. Whatever tax was withheld from your payments comes back to you as a refund once your returns are filed.

Tax withheld is not your final tax

This is the part that catches most people out. The tax taken off a payment is calculated on that payment alone. Your real tax is calculated on the total of your income for the year, benefits and salary together.

The two rarely match. Two cases come up often:

• You worked part of the year before losing your job. The salary you already earned adds to the benefits. The total can cross into a higher tax bracket, and part of your benefits then ends up taxed more heavily than the withholding assumed. The result is a balance owing in the spring.
• EI was your only income, over few weeks. The opposite happens: too much tax was withheld, and you get a refund.

At the income level in our example, every extra dollar is taxed at about 25.7%. This is what is called the marginal rate: the rate that hits the next dollar earned, not the average across every dollar of the year. Side income during a spell of unemployment therefore costs a little more in tax than people expect — and it reduces the benefit itself, which our article on earnings while on EI explains.