Canadian ER wait times & closures, in one place

ERstat continuously tracks emergency-room wait times, closures and service disruptions across every Canadian province, from official health-authority sources. No government or agency publishes this as one national record. If you are a journalist, researcher or student, this is the canonical place to read the current numbers and to access and cite the underlying data.

Canadian ERs by the numbers

Live national snapshot, as of September 5, 2026, refreshed through the day. Every figure here is drawn from what health authorities themselves publish. Quote them freely with a link to ERstat.

857emergency rooms tracked, across 13 provinces and territories
233currently posting a live wait time
4h 11mmedian posted ER wait right now, across the 226 ERs reporting
117of those ERs are posting a wait over four hours
34ERs on an unplanned closure or disruption, across 7 provinces

The closure count excludes 40 ERs currently on a scheduled reduction (routine overnight or reduced-hours service). Those are posted operating hours, not disruptions. Both scheduled and unplanned events are flagged separately in the full dataset below.

Ready to quote: “As of September 5, 2026, 34 Canadian emergency rooms were closed or on an unplanned service disruption, and among the 226 ERs posting a live wait time the median was 4h 11m, with 117 posting waits over four hours (ERstat).”

How accurate is the ERstat number?

A hospital posts the wait right now. That is not the wait you will face, because you still have to get there. ERstat publishes a forecast of the wait at the time you would actually arrive.

Both numbers can be checked the same way. Wait until that time arrives, then compare each one against what the hospital itself posted at that moment. The hospital's own reading is the yardstick, not ours. Everything below is scored that way, and it updates every night.

Scored against what hospitals later posted

If you arrive inERstat is off byThe posted number is off byERstat is closer
1 hour24 min26 min52% of the time
2 hours the number we publish33 min41 min58% of the time
3 hours37 min53 min62% of the time

Based on 128,905 forecasts across 198 hospitals that publish a live wait, made between 2026-08-28 and 2026-09-04.

What “off by” means here

It is the typical miss: half the forecasts land closer than that figure and half land further. We use the middle miss rather than the average so that a handful of chaotic nights cannot flatter the result.

The average miss is always the larger number, because a small share of forecasts are badly wrong. We publish it too, since quoting only the typical miss would understate how far the worst ones run.

If you arrive inERstat, average missPosted number, average miss
1 hour41 min38 min
2 hours50 min58 min
3 hours55 min72 min

One hour ahead is the honest exception. Our typical miss beats the posted number there, but our average miss is worse, which means our occasional bad forecast is worse than theirs. The further ahead you look, the more the posted number goes stale and the further ahead ERstat gets. That is the whole point of forecasting rather than repeating.

By province, two hours ahead

ProvinceERsERstatPostedERstat closer
Quebec6943 min53 min58%
Ontario5124 min31 min59%
Alberta2832 min42 min62%
New Brunswick1843 min38 min45% (posted number wins)
British Columbia1219 min30 min64%
Nova Scotia924 min33 min64%
Manitoba746 min60 min63%
Prince Edward Island453 min60 min54%

Only provinces with enough live-publishing ERs to score appear here. Where we lose, we say so. New Brunswick publishes total visit length rather than time to a clinician, so its posted numbers describe a different quantity from the one our model was built to forecast, and we do not yet beat it there.

The longer test

The table above covers the forecasts we have actually published, which is a short window so far. To check the method over a longer stretch, the model is also retrained each night on older data and tested on months it has never seen.

If you arrive inERstat is off byThe posted number is off byERstat is closer
1 hour20 min24 min56% of the time
2 hours28 min39 min61% of the time
3 hours33 min51 min64% of the time

Held-out test over 2026-06-07 to 2026-09-04, 128,949 scored predictions. The model never saw these hours during training.

What this does not prove

Ready to quote: “Forecasting the wait two hours ahead, ERstat was typically off by 33 min against what hospitals themselves later posted, compared with 41 min for the hospitals' own current posted figure, and was the closer of the two 58% of the time across 128,905 forecasts (ERstat).”

What the open data covers

Free for non-commercial use under CC BY-NC 4.0 with attribution to erstat.ca. Full event-level history, wait-time time series and bulk export are available under a commercial licence.

How to access it

ChannelFormatBest for
Wait times CSV (direct)CSVOne-click download, current per-hospital waits
Closures CSV (direct)CSVOne-click download, current closures
JSON API (free key)JSONApps, dashboards, live analysis
GitHub archiveCSVResearch, coursework, spreadsheets
Zenodo — wait times (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21940685)CSVWait-time trends, academic citation
Zenodo — closures (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21853002)CSVClosures record, academic citation
Embeddable widget (no key)HTMLNewsrooms & community sites
Commercial licenceJSON / bulkHistory, time series, commercial products

How to cite this data

In news copy, a visible link is all we ask: “according to data from ERstat. For academic work, each dataset has its own DOI:

APA

ERstat. (2026). Canadian emergency-room wait times [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21940685
ERstat. (2026). Canadian ER closures and service disruptions [Data set]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21853002

MLA

"Canadian Emergency-Room Wait Times." ERstat, 2026, erstat.ca/data. Accessed 2026-09-05.

BibTeX

@misc{erstat_waits,
  author = {{ERstat}},
  title  = {Canadian Emergency-Room Wait Times},
  year   = {2026},
  doi    = {10.5281/zenodo.21940685},
  url    = {https://erstat.ca/data},
  note   = {Accessed 2026-09-05}
}

Each DOI resolves to the latest archived version on Zenodo; every monthly snapshot is preserved as its own citable version.

Methodology in brief

Wait times and statuses come from official health-authority feeds and hospital announcements, normalized into one national schema and refreshed continuously. Live wait figures reflect what each ER is publicly posting at the moment of the snapshot; they describe posted waits, not a modelled patient-experienced wait. Closures are marked scheduled (routine, posted operating hours) or unplanned. Coverage began in February 2026. For per-province detail on which health systems publish live waits, and which do not, see the transparency page.