Six months after the federal government’s deadline to eliminate every public service pay transaction more than a year old, roughly 79,000 of them were still sitting in the queue, and the pace of clearing them had slowed by about half, according to figures published by Public Services and Procurement Canada itself.
The department set the target in early 2023: clear the backlog of all pay transactions a year old or older by March 2026. Auditor General Karen Hogan’s report Modernizing the Pay System, tabled March 23, 2026, records that target date and found the department had made “limited progress” toward it. That much was widely reported at the time, including by The Canadian Press and Global News, both of which noted the department’s own internal reporting had already signalled the deadline would be missed.
What has drawn less attention is what the government’s published numbers show now that the deadline has come and gone.
The Pay Centre dashboard that Public Services and Procurement Canada maintains states the department’s goal plainly: to process transactions within service standards 95 per cent of the time and “have no transactions older than one year.” For the period ending Feb. 25, 2026, the last dashboard update before the deadline, the department reported 98,000 transactions more than a year past their date of receipt, 45 per cent of a queue of 216,000. For the period ending June 17, 2026, that figure was 79,000, or 40 per cent of a queue of 198,000.
Set those against the audited figure in Hogan’s report. As of Sept. 30, 2025, the auditor general found 155,217 transactions older than one year, part of a total backlog of 233,653 affecting more than 133,000 employees.
The arithmetic, calculated by this outlet from those three published figures, points to a slowdown. Between the end of September 2025 and late February 2026, the number of transactions older than a year fell by about 57,000 over roughly five months, an average of some 11,700 a month. Between late February and mid-June 2026, it fell by 19,000 over roughly four months, an average of about 5,100 a month. The rate of clearing the oldest cases, in other words, dropped by more than half in the months on either side of the deadline. At the later pace, and assuming it held steady, which is not guaranteed, the remaining 79,000 would take until roughly late 2027 to clear.
The department has not hidden the change in approach. As The Canadian Press reported in March, Public Services and Procurement Canada shifted from a single goal of eliminating year-old transactions to balancing three priorities: clearing the backlog for the departments moving to the new Dayforce system first, processing new transactions within service standards, and gradually working through everyone else’s backlog starting with the oldest and most financially significant cases.
Hogan’s report shows what that triage looked like in practice. Between April 1 and Sept. 30, 2025, the backlog at Shared Services Canada fell 61 per cent and at Public Services and Procurement Canada 44 per cent, both first-wave Dayforce departments. Across all other departments and agencies, it fell 21 per cent.
There is also a discrepancy worth setting out precisely, because it shaped how the government’s progress was described on the day the audit landed. In his March 23 statement responding to the report, Public Services and Procurement Minister Joël Lightbound wrote that “the backlog now stands at approximately 98,000 cases and continues to decline.” That figure matches the department’s own dashboard exactly, but on the dashboard 98,000 is not the backlog. It is the count of transactions more than a year old, a subset of a queue that stood at 216,000 on the same date. The auditor general, using data from the department’s case management tool, defined the backlog as the full set of transactions outside service standards, which she put at 233,653 five months earlier. Global News noted at the time that the minister’s number appeared to rest on a narrower definition. The dashboard figure identifies which narrower definition it was.
The stakes attach to what happens next. In January 2026, after the audit period closed, the department shortened the Dayforce migration schedule by about three years, with all departments and agencies now expected to move by March 2031. Hogan warned that if the backlog is not cleared before that transition, existing errors risk carrying over into the new system and undermining it. Her report also found the Treasury Board Secretariat had made slow progress simplifying pay rules, a core lesson from Phoenix, leaving the department to build cloud extensions estimated to cost at least $4 million a year. The preliminary estimate for the new system exceeds $4.2 billion, and the auditor general found that figure does not include what it will cost to transition every department and agency onto it.
Two caveats belong on this reporting. The most recent over-one-year figure this outlet could independently verify covers the period ending June 17, 2026. The open government record for the dashboard dataset was last modified in mid-August 2026, and different government mirrors of the dashboard returned different vintages of the same data when checked, so a more current figure may exist that could not be confirmed here. Nothing in these records establishes that the department misstated its data. The gap is one of definition and of timing.
What would settle the picture is straightforward and public: the current over-one-year count and total queue from the Pay Centre dashboard, a departmental statement on whether the March 2026 target has been formally retired or merely deferred, and a revised cost estimate reflecting the compressed Dayforce schedule. Public Services and Procurement Canada was asked for none of these by this outlet, which relies on published records. This story will be updated as newer figures are released.
