A periodic, plain-language look at emergency-room waits in Canada, built from ER Compass's open archive and the official figures CIHI publishes. The live measures are current as of 2026-06-24; the annual figures are CIHI's most recent published year (2024-2025).
Across 41 hospitals where we track a live wait and CIHI publishes an official measure, the two move together: the ERs that post longer waits are generally the ones CIHI measured as slower (correlation 0.75, where 1.00 would be a perfect line-up). A posted wait is a real-time estimate and CIHI's figure is the annual 90th percentile, so this shows the two agree in direction, not a hospital-by-hospital accuracy score.
Across the provinces and territories that report to CIHI, emergency departments logged about 16.1 million visits in 2024-2025. Roughly 11% ended in a hospital admission, and the median admitted patient spent about 16 hours in the ER before moving to an inpatient bed (this is time in the emergency department, not the length of the hospital stay), with half waiting even longer. Ontario alone accounted for about 6.6 million of those visits; the longest admitted stays were in Prince Edward Island, a median of about 25.7 hours.
The most common reasons for an emergency visit are abdominal and pelvic pain, throat and chest pain, and respiratory infections. Pneumonia drives some of the longest stays: 9 in 10 pneumonia patients are in the ER up to about 20 hours, and more than a fifth are admitted.
Our live numbers are estimates; CIHI, Canada's national health-data agency, publishes what was actually measured. In 2024-2025, across the provinces it reports, 90% of emergency patients were seen by a physician within 3.2–8.9 hours, and 9 in 10 admitted patients spent up to 29–107 hours in the ER before moving to an inpatient bed (their time in the emergency department, not the hospital stay). Each hospital page shows its own official figure beside what it posts live, the estimate for right now, the official benchmark for the year.
“ER wait” does not mean the same thing everywhere: Ontario, Alberta and BC post the wait to be seen, Quebec posts stretcher occupancy, New Brunswick posts total length of stay, so we never blend them. The annual counts come from CIHI's NACRS, which covers the nine reporting provinces and territories, not all of Canada. Live posted waits are real-time estimates; CIHI's figures are measured after the fact.
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