The federal government’s target to clear every public service pay transaction older than one year came and went in March. Five months later, Public Services and Procurement Canada’s own published data shows 69,000 of them still outstanding.
The figure comes from the department’s monthly Public Service Pay Centre dataset, posted on the Open Government Portal, which carries data up to and including Aug. 26, 2026. It shows 198,000 transactions ready to be processed for the 49 departments and agencies the Pay Centre serves, of which 69,000 have been waiting more than a year. That is roughly 35 per cent of the entire inventory.
The March 2026 target was set by the department in early 2023. The Office of the Auditor General, in a report tabled March 23, 2026, found that Public Services and Procurement Canada had made “limited progress” against it. As of Sept. 30, 2025, the auditor general counted 233,653 transactions in the backlog, of which 155,217 were more than a year old, affecting 133,619 employees. The department’s own dashboard still states the standing objective: “Our goal is to process transactions within service standards 95 per cent of the time and have no transactions older than one year.”
What has drawn less attention is a change in April 2025 to what the department counts, and a difference in how that change has been explained in two separate public documents.
Supporting documentation published alongside the dataset says that as of April 23, 2025, the total number of transactions ready to be processed “no longer include financial transactions sent to home departments for processing and closure.” It puts the volume at 25,000 transactions and says this “explains the large decrease observed for April 2025 data.” The explanation is framed entirely in terms of the headline inventory figure.
A question period note prepared for Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound, dated Dec. 1, 2025 and proactively disclosed under the Access to Information Act, describes the same change in more specific terms. It says the total “no longer includes the four financial transaction types repatriated by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) in fall 2018 (at their request),” and that the 25,000 transactions “explains the large decrease observed this month in the total volume of transactions ready to be processed, along with transactions received over 1 year ago.”
That last clause matters, because the over-one-year count is the metric the government set a deadline against. The public-facing documentation does not mention any effect on it. The minister’s briefing note does.
The dataset is consistent with an effect. On March 26, 2025, the department reported 184,000 transactions more than a year old. On April 23, 2025, the month the change took effect, it reported 161,000. The 23,000 drop is the largest single-month decline in that figure in the published series since 2020. The month before it, the count fell by 10,000. The month after, by 8,000. Through 2026 the monthly declines have run between 4,000 and 7,000.
Public Services and Procurement Canada has not published a breakdown showing how much of that 23,000 reflects transactions removed from the count and how much reflects work actually completed. Without that breakdown, the question cannot be settled from the public record. A department response, or a disclosure of the underlying case management figures for March and April 2025, would resolve it.
The scale is not trivial. The over-one-year count peaked at 220,000 in December 2023. It now stands at 69,000, a reduction of 151,000. The single month in which the counting change took effect accounts for about 15 per cent of that total reduction.
The trajectory also bears on the larger project. Public Services and Procurement Canada is replacing Phoenix with Dayforce, and in January 2026, after the auditor general’s audit period closed, it compressed the schedule for moving departments onto the new system by about three years. All organizations are now expected to be on Dayforce by March 2031. The auditor general warned that if the backlog is not cleared before the transition, existing errors risk being carried into the new system and undermining it from the start.
At the pace recorded so far in 2026, the remaining 69,000 transactions would not reach zero until sometime in late 2027 or 2028. The department told the auditor general it has replaced the single March 2026 deadline with a set of three balanced priorities: clearing the backlog for the departments onboarding to Dayforce first, processing new transactions within service standards, and gradually working through the backlog for everyone else, starting with the oldest and most financially significant files. The Canadian Press reported that shift in March.
The auditor general’s report noted the consequence of that sequencing. Between April 1 and Sept. 30, 2025, the backlog at Shared Services Canada fell 61 per cent and the backlog at Public Services and Procurement Canada itself fell 44 per cent. For all other departments and agencies, it fell 21 per cent.
This story is developing. Canadanewsmedia.ca has not received a departmental response to questions about the April 2025 counting change, and will update this piece if one is provided.
