What you need to know about EPRS statements

If you are an Alberta employer, you should have received your Employer Premium Rate Statement sometime in December or possibly late November (if you didn’t, you might want to check the Workers’ Compensation Board online portal and/or your email). If you’re new to the process, here’s a quick recap on how it works: 

Every year from the end of November to mid-December, WCB Alberta sends out its premium rate statements. This document tells all employers in Alberta who have a registered WCB account how much they will pay for WCB coverage the next year. Depending on your company’s track record with injuries and claims, combined with your industry’s overall injury rates, the increase to your premium rates could be significant, or you could be given a discount on your previous rate.

In the WCB’s 2026 Premium Rates Highlight sheet, it says that the board is several years into a multi-year plan to realign annual employer premiums with the cost of each year’s workplace illnesses and injuries, and that this plan continues in 2026. “As we enter year four of our plan, a small increase to the average rate keeps us on track to align employer premiums and claim costs as planned,” the board explains. For 2026, the average premium rate includes a 5-cent discount on the rate that would be required to cover the full costs of 2026 injuries. The average collected rate in 2026 will be $1.46 per $100 of assessable earnings compared to the required rate of $1.51. The rate of $1.46 reflects a 3.5% increase over 2025.

Your Employer Premium Rate Statement details your specific premium rate, based on your industry (which is recorded on the statement with an NAICS code) and your company’s claims history or experience rating), and the total shows how much your company will pay for each $100 worth of insurable earnings for the upcoming year. Key elements of the statement include your classification, your industry’s base rate, any experience adjustments that you qualify for, and your projected rates.

Classifications

As we’ve explained in our previous blog posts on this topic, employers are categorized into Industry Classifications depending on the business they conduct. Industry Classifications are then consolidated into different Rate Groups determined by employers with similar business activities and claims experience, and each Rate Group has a rate established from statistical information, collected from the industries in that group.

An employer’s own claims experience is then used to calculate their Rate Adjustment. This is the area where employers can have the most impact. If an employer has better than average claims experience compared to employers of similar size (based on their insurable earnings), they will receive a discount; if an employer’s claims experience record is higher than the Industry Average, they are levied a surcharge. It’s important to check your EPRS to see whether you’ve been assessed properly and whether your claims costs are accurate (we can help with this).

Experience Rating Plans

There are two Experience Rating Plans, one for small employers and one for large employers. Participation in each plan is determined by how much industry-rated premiums an employer pays over a 3 year period. Small employers are defined as paying less than $15,000 in a 3 year period, while large employers pay $15,000 or more.

— Small: The ERP for small employers depends on the number of time loss claims an employer has experienced in a 5-year period. If they have no time loss claims, they are awarded a 5% discount. If they have between 1 and 4 time loss claims in that 5-year period, their premium is based on the Industry Rate. If they have 5 or more claims in the 5-year period, they will be levied a 5% surcharge. Clearly, the better an employer’s claims record, the less they will pay in premiums.

— Large: The ERP for large employers is a little more complicated. It is calculated by determining an employer’s Experience Ratio and then multiplying it by their Participation Factor and their Eligibility Factor. The Experience Ratio is the percentage an employer’s claim costs are above or below the industry average, and this ratio is limited to a maximum percentage based on the pricing program an employer is involved in.

Participation Factor

The Participation Factor limits the maximum percentage of discount or surcharge that can be applied and protects employers from excessive changes in premium rates, as well as ensuring that rate adjustments are based on credible statistical information. For every $4,000 of industry-rated premiums that an employer under the standard program pays over a 3-year period, they are awarded 1% participation up to a maximum of 50%.

The Eligibility Factor, meanwhile, refers to the number of years that an employer’s account has been open during the 3-year experience period used to collect claims costs information. If an employer has only been operating for one year out of the 3-year experience period, the factor used is ⅓; if they have been operating for two out of the 3 years, the factor would be ⅔ and if they have been operational for all 3 years, a factor of 1 would be used.

Poor Performance Surcharge

In addition to these calculations, large employers can be assessed a Poor Performance Surcharge. This is added to the EPRS/Assessment only if the company’s experience rating costs are consistently more than 80% higher than the industry average over a five-year period. The PPS is capped at a maximum of 200%, and is used as an incentive for employers to take immediate action to improve health and safety management efforts and reduce work-related injuries.

Incentive programs

As we’ve explained in the past, in addition to the regular discounts from the board, there are a number of incentive programs that employers can take advantage of to reduce the amount of premiums they pay, specifically Partnership for Injury Reduction (PIR) and the Certificate of Recognition (COR) plan.

For further information or explanation of WCB Premiums, WCB pricing programs and/or WCB claims management, you can connect with us on Facebook , Twitter , or LinkedIn. Or contact us directly at [email protected] or at 1-844-377-9545.