ER Compass
live + archived ER waits
← All emergency rooms

The State of Canadian ER Waits

A continuously-updated picture of emergency department waits across Canada, built from official hospital and health-authority feeds. The live figures below are a snapshot as of 2026-06-24 14:23 UTC; the measured actuals are from CIHI's most recent published year.

Right now across Canada

207 / 729
ERs reporting live
7
provinces & territories reporting
8
ERs closed or on diversion
2h 25m
median posted wait to be seen
42
Québec ERs over capacity
Quieter (72) Busy (91) Very busy (44)

Share of reporting ERs at each level right now, combining posted waits and Québec stretcher occupancy on the one quieter-to-busiest scale the map also uses.

Why one number can't mean the same everywhere

“ER wait time” means different things across Canada. Ontario, Alberta and BC post the wait to be seen; Quebec posts stretcher occupancy; New Brunswick posts total length of stay. ER Compass labels every number with its source and what it measures, and keeps the full open archive.

Official wait to be seen, by province

CIHI's measured 90th-percentile time from arrival to a physician in 2024-2025, where a shorter bar means a shorter wait.

Quebec7.5 h
Alberta5.4 h
Ontario4.5 h
Yukon3.2 h

Province by province · Canada's emergency room report card →

Province / territoryERs trackedReporting nowLive medianCIHI: 9 in 10 seen withinCIHI: admitted ER stay
Quebec12598 (78%)100%7.5 h (D)51 h
New Brunswick2418 (75%)
Ontario17456 (32%)2h 11m4.5 h (B)44 h
Alberta10123 (23%)2h 49m5.4 h (C)37 h
British Columbia927 (8%)1h 51m5 h (B)65 h
Manitoba694 (6%)9h 22m8.5 h (F)54 h
Saskatchewan721 (1%)1h 16m4.2 h (B)39 h
Nova Scotia290 (0%)
Newfoundland and Labrador270 (0%)
Prince Edward Island60 (0%)8.9 h (F)107 h
Northwest Territories40 (0%)
Nunavut30 (0%)
Yukon30 (0%)3.2 h (A)29 h

What officially happened, the measured actuals · How accurate are these wait times? →

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 admitted patients spent 29–107 hours in the ER in total before reaching an inpatient bed. Each hospital page shows its own official figure beside what it posts live, the estimate for right now, the official benchmark for the year.

How this is built

ER Compass archives the wait and occupancy figures Canadian hospitals publish, and overwrite every ~15 minutes, across 7 provinces and territories. “Wait” isn't defined the same way everywhere (Ontario, Alberta and BC post the wait to be seen, Québec posts stretcher occupancy, New Brunswick posts total length of stay), so figures are never blended across those definitions. Our open archive began 2026-06-12; we publish the live snapshot and the official CIHI actuals, and make no year-over-year trend claims until the archive is long enough to support them.

Free to cite and reuse with attribution (CC-BY). See the national picture →

Put this on your site

A live snapshot of Canadian ER waits, free to embed with attribution. Copy the code:

Find the fastest ER near you →