How to Verify a Canadian Employment Letter: 5 Steps Agents Use Before Signing a Lease

An employment letter is supposed to be the simplest document to trust: an official letter on company letterhead, signed by HR, confirming that the applicant works where they say they work and earns what they say they earn. In practice, it's one of the easiest documents to fabricate.

Anyone with a word processor, a company logo downloaded from the internet, and basic formatting skills can produce a convincing employment letter in under an hour. Unlike pay stubs — which require fake math to hold together — an employment letter is just words on a page. There are no deduction calculations to get wrong. The only thing you can check is whether the company and the contact person actually exist.

Most landlords and leasing agents don't check either. Here's a five-step process that does.

Step 1: Look up the business in the Ontario Business Registry

Every business incorporated or registered to operate in Ontario has a public record in the Ontario Business Registry at ontario.ca/businessregistry. The search is free and takes under two minutes.

Enter the exact employer name from the letter and confirm:

• The company exists.If it doesn't appear, search for variations — trade names sometimes differ from legal names. If it genuinely doesn't exist, that is your answer.
• The company is active.A dissolved or cancelled company doesn't employ anyone. Verify the status is “Active” or “In good standing.”
• The company type is plausible. A letter claiming the applicant is a senior software engineer at a company registered as a sole proprietorship doing business in residential landscaping should prompt a follow-up question.

For federally incorporated companies, use Corporations Canada at ised-isde.canada.ca instead. For companies with CRA Business Numbers, you can verify an active GST/HST registration at the CRA website — a legitimate business with payroll typically has one.

Step 2: Call the company's main line — not the number on the letter

This is the most important step, and the one agents most often skip.

Look up the company's main phone number independently — through their website, Google, or the Ontario Business Registry. Do not call the phone number printed on the employment letter. That number may belong to an accomplice, a forwarding service, or the applicant themselves.

When you reach the company, ask to be transferred to HR or payroll. Say you're a leasing agent verifying employment for a rental application and ask two simple questions:

• Is [applicant name] currently employed here?
• Is their employment full-time?

You do not need to ask for the salary — most HR departments won't confirm that anyway. But employment status is standard to confirm, and a legitimate employer will have no hesitation doing so with the employee's consent on file.

If the main line number doesn't match the number on the letter, note it but don't immediately assume the worst — companies have multiple phone lines. What matters is what the HR representative tells you when you call.

Step 3: Verify the HR contact on LinkedIn and the company website

The letter should name a specific person: an HR manager, a director of people operations, a payroll administrator. Search for that person on LinkedIn. A real HR professional at a real company will have a LinkedIn profile consistent with their role.

If the named contact doesn't appear on LinkedIn at all — no profile, or a profile with no connection to the company — that is a meaningful signal. It doesn't prove anything on its own (some people aren't on LinkedIn), but combined with other inconsistencies it matters.

Also check the company website for an About or Team page. For smaller companies, the absence of the named signatory from any public-facing company material is worth noting.

Step 4: Cross-reference the salary against the pay stubs

The annual salary on the employment letter should be consistent with the gross income on the pay stubs. This sounds obvious, but the calculation requires a step most people skip.

Annualise the stub income: take the gross pay from one stub and multiply by the number of pay periods in a year (26 for bi-weekly, 24 for semi-monthly, 12 for monthly). Compare that number to the annual salary stated in the letter. They should be close — within a few percent to account for overtime, commissions, or bonuses not reflected in a single stub.

A significant gap in either direction is worth asking about. An employment letter claiming $85,000 per year while the pay stubs annualise to $62,000 is not a rounding error — it requires an explanation. Bonuses and commissions are real, but they should be described in the letter if they're responsible for a material difference.

Step 5: Check the PDF creation date and authoring software

Every PDF records metadata about when it was created and what software generated it. An employment letter produced in Microsoft Word or Google Docs by an HR professional should show a creation date close to the date on the letter — within a day or two.

Red flags in metadata:

• Creation date after the letter date. A letter dated March 15th with a PDF creation date of April 3rd was either delayed in sending (ask why) or created after the fact.
• Modification date newer than creation date. A letter edited after it was created may have had content changed. This is not always sinister — the applicant may have added a password, for example — but it warrants a question.
• Producer field showing a PDF editor. If the metadata shows the document was produced by Nitro PDF, Smallpdf, or Adobe Acrobat (rather than Microsoft Word or Google Docs), someone exported the original and re-generated it. That is a red flag, because legitimate employment letters are printed to PDF once, directly from the word processor.

To view PDF metadata on a Mac: open the file in Preview and go to Tools → Show Inspector. On Windows: open in Adobe Reader and go to File → Properties → Description tab.

What a verified letter gives you — and what it doesn't

A letter that passes all five of these checks is significantly more reliable than one that was accepted on face value. But it is still not a guarantee of current income. Employment letters confirm status at the date of writing. An applicant can be laid off the week after a letter is issued. A contractor engagement can end the day after the letter is signed.

That's why the employment letter should always be read alongside three months of bank statements — which show actual income deposits, not just claimed income — and why cross-document consistency matters. A letter from an employer whose payroll deposits don't appear in the bank account is a document that needs explaining, regardless of how well it passes a letterhead check.

The realistic time cost

Done properly, this process takes 15–25 minutes per employment letter. For a competitive listing with 20 applicants, that's up to eight hours of verification time just for the employment letters — before touching the pay stubs, bank statements, or ID. Most agents cannot do this for every application, which is exactly why automated integrity checks exist. They run the metadata check and cross-document consistency analysis in seconds, so you can reserve your manual verification time for the applications that actually flag something.