The teacher employment letter, and why most get rejected

A teacher employment letter needs your position, employment status, QECO category and grid step, annual base salary, and start date. Boards frequently issue letters missing category and step, which forces the lender to guess at your income and delays the file. Request the letter with those fields named, rather than accepting a generic one.

Nothing holds up a teacher's mortgage more often than a weak employment letter. It is not a hard document to get right, but the standard template a board's HR office sends out is usually built for landlords and general credit checks, not for a lender underwriting a mortgage.

What a lender is actually reading it for

The lender needs to answer one question: what annual income can I rely on. For a teacher that answer lives in two fields, your category and your step, because those two together place you on a published grid. A letter that says only 'employed as a teacher' forces an underwriter to either request a new letter or use the lowest defensible figure.

Request these fields by name

• Full legal name and position title
• Employment status stated plainly: permanent, probationary, long-term occasional or daily occasional
• QECO category, written as A1 to A4 for elementary or Group 1 to 4 for secondary, matching how your board labels it
• Grid step
• Annual base salary as an annual number, not an hourly or per-diem rate
• Start date, plus prior continuous service if you transferred boards
• Whether a probationary period applies and when it ends
• Contact name, title and direct number for verification

Extra lines that matter in specific cases

• On leave: the letter must state a specific return-to-work date, not 'expected to return'.
• LTO or contract: the assignment end date, and any signed go-forward assignment.
• Daily occasional: confirmation you are on the board's occasional roster and the date you joined it.
• Recently promoted or recategorised: the effective date of the new category, so the higher salary is used.

Common failures

• Category and step missing entirely. Most common by a distance.
• Per-diem rate given instead of annual salary, which understates a long-term occasional's income.
• The letter is undated, or older than the lender's window, usually 30 to 60 days.
• It arrives as an unsigned scan with no verification contact.
• Status described as 'contract' when the teacher is actually permanent, which is a wording problem that changes how the file is underwritten.

Common questions