The 2026 COIRI Summary Report on Salaried Employees in Ontario covers wellness initiatives and EAPs in the same section, but the data shows a very different approach to each in terms of spend.
EAPs are treated as a benefit, plain and simple. They are contracted and typically priced per employee. They sit in the benefits budget alongside everything else. Wellness initiatives are different, however. While there are numerous options, wellness is treated as discretionary programming, and many of them are running on nothing.
This is an important distinction to note before you benchmark either one.
Wellness Initiatives with no Dedicated Budget are the Norm
86% of participating Ontario employers have wellness initiatives in place. Only 35.1% indicated having a budget specifically allocated for them.
The difference is evident in what companies are offering in terms of wellness. The top items are communication-related, one-time purchases, and low-unit-cost items. Many of the bottom items all carry a recurring per-employee cost.
Our data indicates 81.7% of employers in our group are promoting EAP programmes; standing desks are offered by 79.6%; wellness content is included in newsletters by 57%; lunch and learns are offered by 54.8%; and healthy snacks are offered by 45.2%.
Initiatives carrying a recurring per-employee cost sit far lower. For example, on-site yoga or fitness classes are offered by only 11.8%. Green space or living walls are offered by 10.8%. Subsidized health-related wearables are offered by 9.7%, and company retreats by only 8.6%.
Most workplace wellness programming in Ontario is built out of communication, furniture, and food. What is important to understand here is that when an employer says it has a wellness programme, it can mean many things with greatly varying costs and impacts. So comparing yourself against that 86% doesn’t tell you that much.
Among the minority who do fund wellness, the amounts vary widely. Roughly a third allocate $50 or less per employee per year, another third spend over $250 per employee per year, and the remaining third spread throughout the gap between. What the data tells us is that there is no predictable standard benchmark for wellness programmes, which is worth knowing before you propose one.
EAPs: Widely Offered and Funded
Access to counselling or an EAP is almost universal, offered by 92.5% of employers in our group, with 77.6% contracting to an external provider.
Looking at EAP costs, about half of our employers allocate $50 or less per employee per year, with the largest single band at $26 to $50. Just over 21% spend more than $200. EAPs are treated as a benefits line item and budgeted for accordingly; unlike many of the wellness options, they are not discretionary programming.
The employer contribution is close to standard: 94.7% cover all or part of the counselling cost. What is not standard is access to it during working hours. Only 22.1% of employers grant time off to attend appointments. So roughly only one in five employers has made it structurally easier for an employee to get to an appointment.
Employee use of an EAP is low. Canadian estimates vary widely depending on how they are counted, but commonly cited averages indicate they’re utilized by under 15% of employees. Further, Canadian HR Reporter noted in 2023 that roughly 40% of Canadian workers didn’t know what an EAP is. So most employers are paying for a benefit that the majority of their staff will not use in a given year, and many don’t know the benefit exists.
That is not necessarily a failure. If the EAP is doing its job as an early, low-barrier touchpoint, you’d expect most employees not to need it in any given year. 15% is not obviously wrong for that. But mental health is a leading driver of disability claims, and the EAP is the cheapest early intervention available on that pathway. At $26 to $50 per employee, the spend is small against the cost of even a single long-term disability claim.
What to do With This
Benchmark the two separately. Comparing your EAP spend against peers is a straightforward exercise because the service is priced. Comparing wellness initiatives is not, because the 86% includes employers doing a newsletter column and employers running funded programmes.
If you are in the 86% of companies offering wellness initiatives but don’t actually have a budget for it, it’s worth taking it to leadership.
On the EAP, focus on access rather than procurement. Most employers already pay for the service. Reminders that the EAP exists are just the beginning. What employees really need is to know what is actually covered, whether they can reach it without going through HR, what their employer will see, and whether they will have time to get to the appointment.
For more information, COIRI’s Clarity platform gives Ontario employers access to current benchmark data covering hundreds of benefits, workplace practices and employer policies, alongside detailed wage and salary information. You can sign up for a free trial in less than a minute and no credit card is required.