Burnout is one of the most discussed problems in Canadian workplaces and one of the least consistently measured. Most of what circulates is borrowed from American surveys, and most of what gets recommended in response is a communications campaign.

The Canadian data says something more specific. It points at plan design, not messaging — and for a tech company, it points at the one benefit almost everybody already has and almost nobody uses.

The number depends on who is asking

There is no single Canadian burnout figure, and it is worth knowing that before quoting one.

Mental Health Research Canada, surveying 5,008 employed adults, puts it at 39%, up from 35% in 2023. Robert Half Canada puts it at 62%, up from 47% the year before. Harris & Partners, drawing on more than 12,000 responses, finds 58% reporting emotional burnout. Telus Health’s index lands at 59%.

Asking whether someone is often or always burnt out sets a higher bar than asking whether they feel burned out at work, and the numbers move accordingly. What doesn’t move is the direction. Every one of these surveys is up on the year before.

The drivers hold steadier than the headline figures. Robert Half’s respondents put heavier workload from understaffing first at 40%, then feeling stuck in a career and low morale after restructuring, both at 27%. Read that list again with a funding-constrained Canadian tech company in mind. It is the same list.

What the surveys actually name

Underneath the headline percentages, every one of those surveys asked employees the same follow-up question: what is doing this to you?

What employees point to

• Understaffing. The top driver at 40% in the Robert Half survey, ahead of every other factor named. Fewer people are carrying the same roadmap, and the shortfall shows up as hours.
• Flat careers and post-restructuring morale. Both cited by 27%. After a round of cuts, the people who stayed absorb the departed workload while promotion tracks quietly stall.
• Workload rising without pay to match. Harris & Partners found 53% reporting precisely that, and 76% saying job or financial stress had harmed their mental health over the past year.
• Money. Telus Health’s index names money as the top stressor overall for 49% of employees, with high workloads the leading work-based cause at 30%. The two compound each other rather than sitting apart.

Where the money actually goes

The Canadian Standards Association put a number on the employer side this spring: Canadian employers carry more than $110 billion a year in costs tied to employee mental health, through lost productivity, disability leave and accommodations. That is the largest share of an estimated $180 billion national burden, a figure that has more than tripled since 2011. Presenteeism alone accounts for roughly $12 billion.

But the line in that report that should change how a plan sponsor thinks is the split. 86% of employer spending on employee mental health goes to reactive measures — disability claims, accommodations, compliance. 14%  goes to prevention and early intervention.

“This year’s findings underscore the urgent need for Canadian workplaces to move beyond awareness and into action.” 

— Michael Cooper, Vice President, Mental Health Research Canada

That imbalance is not an accident of budgeting. It is what happens when the only mental health spending that gets scrutinised is the spending that arrives as a claim.

MHRC’s costing runs in the same direction. Burnout costs between $5,500 and $28,500 per employee annually depending on the role, and organisations that work deliberately on prevention report a 27% burnout rate against 47% for those doing nothing — roughly $3,400 per employee in savings, or $1.7 million a year for a 500-person company.

Twenty points of burnout is not a rounding error, and it is not explained by industry or headcount. It is explained by whether the employer did anything deliberate.

Four in five employers offer it. One in six understands it.

Dialogue’s 2025 State of Workplace Well-being report, conducted with Leger, found that 80% of Canadian employers offer an EAP and only 16% of employees say they understand it well. A further 65% have never used their EAP for mental health support at all. Telus Health’s index found something adjacent and worse: 60% of employees either do not know whether their employer offers mental health benefits, or believe it does not.

That is not an adoption curve. That is a program most of a workforce has been paying attention past for years.

The barriers identified are worth reading closely, because none of them are about employees not caring: unclear benefit information, limited appointment options, and long wait times. Employees facing a well-being problem go to friends, family or an outside professional. The workplace benefit does not enter the decision.

And when it does, it performs. Among employees who actually used their EAP, satisfaction ran to 89% for family and relationship support, 86% for managing workload and deadlines, and 81% for mental health and substance use. The program is not failing on quality. It is failing on the distance between the employee and the front door.

Why the gap runs wider in tech

Three things make this sharper for a Canadian tech or gaming company than for the market at large.

1. Your team has never met an EAP: MHRC’s research on EAP access and use found only 33% of Canadians report having an EAP, and Canadians aged 35 to 55 are twice as likely to have access as those aged 18 to 34. A tech workforce is weighted toward exactly the cohort least likely to have encountered an EAP anywhere in their working life. Whatever familiarity exists in the broader labour market, you cannot assume your team arrived with it.

2. The use case nobody mentions: The highest-scoring EAP service in the Dialogue data, after family support, was help managing workload and deadlines — the closest thing in the report to a description of the tech and gaming work cycle, and the use case almost nobody in tech knows their EAP covers, because the program is introduced as a mental health line and filed away as one.

3. AI is now a burnout driver: One in six employees in the Robert Half survey named artificial intelligence as a factor in their burnout, citing pressure for higher output, job security concerns if new tools aren’t adopted, and fatigue from constantly learning new ones. In most sectors that is a minority experience. In tech it is the working week.

What actually moves the number

Here the Canadian data gets uncomfortable for the standard employer response.

MHRC found that time-based supports — paid time off, flexible schedules — outperform awareness campaigns, and that support from managers and co-workers has the strongest positive impact of anything measured. Telus Health’s index puts a number on the same idea: employees in supportive environments lost an average of 27 days a year to mental health challenges, against 55 days in unsupportive ones.

The catch is that time-based policy fails quietly if the workload underneath it doesn’t move. Among the 40% of Robert Half’s respondents who didn’t use all their time off, a third said they held back because of how much work would pile up while they were away. An unlimited vacation policy sitting on top of an understaffed team is not a benefit. It is a liability nobody is claiming.

None of this makes the EAP the wrong tool. It makes the EAP a plan design decision rather than a line item, which in practice comes down to a few specific things:

• Look at the EAP on its own terms. An EAP bundled into a carrier contract is usually there because it came with the plan, not because it was chosen. Carving it out and buying it separately is mechanically simple — no enrolment forms, just monthly headcount reporting — and it is the only way to compare access models, session counts and wait times against what your team will actually tolerate.
• Check the access model against your workforce, not the market. Session limits, intake wait times and whether care is virtual and same-day matter more for a distributed team of twenty-eight-year-olds than the brochure suggests. A program with a two-week intake queue is not a program a burnt-out employee will use.
• Communicate scope, not existence. Most employees who know the EAP exists still believe it is a crisis phone number. Financial counselling, legal support, and workload and deadline coaching are typically in there and rarely mentioned.
• Move some spending to the left of the claim. If 86% of the national spend is reactive, the question at your own renewal is what share of your mental health budget is doing anything before someone goes off on leave.

The accommodation piece most plans miss

There is a downstream version of this that shows up later and costs considerably more.

The Mental Health Commission of Canada notes that 10.4% of Canadians over 15 report a mental health-related disability, and that among employed Canadians with disabilities who needed a workplace accommodation, 35%  did not ask for one because of stigma. Fewer than half of employees with a mental health diagnosis disclose it at work at all.

The MHCC’s framing is that accommodations act as the bridge between an employee’s mental health needs and their ability to stay in the job, and that they work best implemented proactively rather than after performance has already slipped into presenteeism, absenteeism and, eventually, a disability claim. Most of the adjustments involved cost under $500 or nothing.

That is the same problem as the EAP gap, one stage further along. The support exists. The employee does not ask. The employer finds out at claim time — in the 86% column.

The bottom line

The generic burnout conversation will keep running on borrowed statistics and awareness weeks. The Canadian numbers point somewhere narrower: a 20-point spread between employers who design for prevention and employers who don’t, a benefit that four in five companies pay for and one in six employees understands, and a workforce demographic in tech that is least likely to have ever used one.

Those are plan design questions, and they are answerable ones. They are considerably cheaper to answer now than at renewal, when the claims experience has already answered them for you.