Canadian research published in Scientific Reports estimates that 603,000 Canadian workers are exposed to radon above 100 Bq/m³. The occupations with the largest numbers of exposed workers are not miners. They are administrative assistants, general office support workers, receptionists, and elementary and kindergarten teachers.
Which raises an awkward question for any employer who has spent the last few years moving staff to hybrid or remote work: if your people are now spending part of the week in a building you have never seen, what do you actually know about the air they are breathing?
The short version. An employer can buy long-term radon test kits for staff to use at home, funded from a health, wellness or benefits budget. It costs less per employee than a flu clinic. Results go to the employee, never to the employer. It is a wellness benefit and it does not satisfy any workplace radon obligation — those apply to the buildings you occupy and are a separate exercise.
Why employers are doing this
Three things changed at roughly the same time.
The research got specific. For decades radon was framed as a miner's hazard. The 2022 Canadian study broke exposure down by occupation and industry, and the answer was office work, education, health care and public administration — not resource extraction. Resource workers are the most exposed by level; office workers are the most exposed by number. Details: 603,000 exposed workers, and who the federal limit reaches.
Work moved into homes. An employer can inspect, ventilate and test the buildings it controls. It has no visibility at all into the basements and lower-level rooms where a large share of Canadian remote work now happens — which is exactly where radon accumulates.
Radon became a workplace subject. On 30 January 2027 the federal exposure limit for federally regulated workplaces drops from 800 to 200 Bq/m³. Even employers who fall outside that regulation are now fielding the question from their own staff, because the topic is in the news. See which rules apply to your workplace.
Once an employer has looked at radon for its own premises, extending a test kit to employees at home is a small, cheap and genuinely useful next step — and unlike most wellness benefits, it produces a measurable result.
What the programme is
It is deliberately simple. You buy a block of long-term test kits. We do everything else.
| Step | What happens | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Order | You tell us how many staff and when you need it. One purchase order, one invoice. | You |
| 2. Distribute | Kits ship to your office in bulk, or direct to each employee's home — your choice. Bulk is usually the better option (see below). | Us |
| 3. Register | The employee scans the code on the kit and registers it in about a minute. | Employee |
| 4. Place | The employee places the detector in the lowest lived-in level, following Health Canada's placement guidance. Written instructions are in the box. | Employee |
| 5. Measure | The detector stays in place for at least 91 days — the minimum long-term measurement period Health Canada specifies. | — |
| 6. Return | The employee mails it back in the prepaid envelope included with the kit. | Employee |
| 7. Analyse | An accredited laboratory analyses the detector and issues the result. | Laboratory |
| 8. Report | The result goes to the employee. Only to the employee. | Us |
The employee's part is: open the box, scan, place it, forget about it, mail it back. No appointment, no technician in the house, no time off work.
What is actually in the kit
- A long-term alpha-track detector — a sealed, passive device with no batteries, no wiring and nothing to plug in. It sits on a shelf and records continuously.
- A prepaid, pre-addressed return mailer. Nothing to print, weigh or pay for at the post office.
- Plain-language placement instructions following Health Canada's guidance — which room, how high, how far from walls and vents, and what to avoid.
- A registration code linking the detector to the household so the result reaches the right person.
The managed part is the part that makes it work
Anyone can put a detector in a box. The difficulty with any bulk testing programme is that kits go out and never come back — and an employer who funds 200 tests and receives 60 results has bought very little.
- Our own online portal. Registration takes about a minute and the employee can check the status of their test at any point.
- Managed entirely by email and SMS. Register, place, and a prompt when the measurement window closes and it is time to mail the detector back. Nobody in your organisation chases anyone.
- Results delivered securely by email, to the employee, with the number set in Health Canada's context — what the guideline is, where their result sits against it, and what Health Canada recommends doing at that level and on what timeline.
- Next steps, not just a number. A lab certificate on its own tells a homeowner very little. The result arrives with plain-language guidance on what it means and what, if anything, to do.
A completion report for your records
Within twelve months of delivery we provide a completion figure for your group — how many kits were registered, returned and analysed, as a total.
No names, no addresses, no individual results. Just the number, so you can put a participation figure in front of whoever approved the budget and decide whether to run it again.
Why bulk shipping usually works better
Counter-intuitively, sending kits to one office address and letting people take one tends to produce better completion than shipping to every employee's door.
The reason is self-selection. An employee who walks over and picks up a kit has decided they want it, and people follow through on things they chose. A kit that arrives unrequested at the home of someone who was not paying attention when the programme was announced often stays in its box.
Direct-to-home shipping is the right answer for fully remote teams and for staff spread across provinces. For anyone with an office, we would generally suggest bulk — and it costs less.
Reminders are part of the service
The failure mode for any bulk kit programme is that detectors go out and never come back. We run the reminder sequence — register, place, and a prompt when the measurement period ends and it is time to mail it. You are not chasing anyone, and neither is your HR team.
The privacy architecture — this is the part that makes it work
The objection that kills most employer-funded health screening is simple: employees will not participate if they think the employer sees the result. It is a reasonable objection, and the programme is built so it cannot happen.
- Individual results go to the employee and to nobody else. Not to HR, not to the benefits administrator, not to the person who signed the purchase order.
- The employer never receives an employee's address unless the employee chooses direct-to-home shipping and provides it to us themselves.
- We handle personal information in accordance with PIPEDA, Canada's federal private-sector privacy law, and we collect only what is needed to ship a kit and return a result.
- Aggregate reporting is optional and de-identified, and only offered where the group is large enough that no individual can be identified. Most employers do not need it.
- Nothing is shared with a mitigation contractor. Employee results are never passed to a company that sells mitigation.
Tell your staff that plainly when you announce it. Participation rises when people believe it, and they will only believe it if it is true.
⚠ What this programme does not do
This matters enough to be blunt about.
It does not satisfy any workplace radon obligation. The federal limit taking effect on 30 January 2027 applies to the workplaces an employer operates — the buildings your people work in and you control. Testing employees' homes has no bearing on it whatsoever. If you are federally regulated, that is a separate exercise: start with the new federal limit and the compliance timeline.
It does not discharge a provincial general duty. Provincially regulated employers owe a duty to take reasonable precautions against recognised hazards in their own workplaces. A home test kit programme is not that. See workplace radon rules by province.
It does not resolve the question of duty of care for home-based workers. Whether, and how far, an employer's health and safety obligations extend into an employee's home is genuinely unsettled in Canada, and it varies by jurisdiction. We are not going to tell you it is settled, and anyone who does is guessing. If that question matters to your organisation, get advice on it. The programme stands on its own merits as a benefit either way.
It is not a medical or diagnostic service. We report a measured concentration against Health Canada's guideline. We do not assess anyone's health.
What it costs, and how to think about the budget
Pricing depends on volume, whether kits ship in bulk or direct to homes, and the timeline. It is quoted per kit, and there is no per-employee administration fee, no platform charge and no subscription.
For budgeting purposes the useful comparison is not other radon testing — it is other wellness benefits. A radon test is a one-time cost per household that gives a reliable picture of exposure to a Group 1 carcinogen in the building an employee spends most of their life in. Most wellness line items recur annually and produce no measurable result at all.
Why this sits in a health and benefits budget
Radon is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a Group 1 carcinogen — the same category as tobacco smoke and asbestos. Health Canada identifies it as the second leading cause of lung cancer in Canada, and the leading cause among people who have never smoked.
That places it squarely alongside the things wellness budgets already fund: cancer screening, smoking cessation, flu clinics. The difference is that a radon test is preventive rather than diagnostic — it identifies a hazard in the home before it does anything, at a point where fixing it is a straightforward, one-day job.
Three things make it unusually well-suited to a benefits line:
- It covers the household, not just the employee. A radon test protects everyone living in that home — partners, children, elderly parents. Very few benefits reach a whole family for one cost.
- It is one-time, not annual. A long-term test measures the average over at least three months of the heating season, which is the period that best represents a year of normal living. It is not a permanent verdict — levels shift with renovations, ventilation changes and energy retrofits, and Health Canada recommends retesting after any of those — but an unchanged house does not need retesting every year the way most wellness benefits recur.
- It produces a number. You can report participation, and every employee who tests has an actual result rather than a leaflet.
There is also a signal in it that is hard to send any other way. Most health benefits stop at the office door. Funding a radon test says the organisation is thinking about where its people live — which, for anyone working from home part of the week, is also where they work. It is specific, it is practical, and it plainly is not a token gesture.
Health Canada recommends retesting after major renovations, ventilation changes or an energy retrofit — not on a fixed annual cycle for an untested, unchanged home.
Get a quote
Email support@radontest.ca with:
- How many staff you would like to cover
- When you need kits in hand — and note that measurement should begin during the heating season for the most representative result
- Bulk to one address, or direct to employees' homes
- Which provinces your staff are in
- Anything else that matters — a works council to brief, a benefits platform to slot into, a specific budget cycle
We will come back with a per-kit price and a delivery schedule. If a smaller pilot makes more sense than covering everyone at once, say so — that is often the easier internal sell.
The staff communication pack, included
Announcing a health programme badly is how it gets ignored. Every order includes, at no extra cost:
- A short staff briefing on radon — what it is, why it matters, what the Canadian guideline is, written for people with no background in it and no reason to care yet. Plain language, no scare tactics, sourced to Health Canada.
- A one-page explanation of how the programme works — what employees receive, what they need to do, how long it takes, and the fact that results come to them and not to you. That last point drives participation more than anything else you can say.
- Suggested announcement wording you can drop into an email, an intranet post or a benefits bulletin.
Both documents are available in English and French.
Who we are, and why that should matter to you
You are asking a supplier to communicate directly with your employees and to handle their personal information. Reasonable questions follow.
- Detectors and analysis. We supply long-term alpha-track detectors listed under the Canadian National Radon Proficiency Program, analysed by a C-NRPP-certified, ISO 17025-accredited laboratory. That combination — a C-NRPP-listed device and a C-NRPP-certified lab — is what Health Canada advises Canadians to look for, and it is the only certification that applies to a test kit.
- Protocol. Placement, duration and reporting follow Health Canada's guidance for measuring radon in homes.
- Listed by Take Action on Radon, the national radon awareness programme funded by Health Canada and delivered by CARST and CAREX Canada, on its list of Canadian kit suppliers.
- Member of CARST, the Canadian Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists.
- We do not perform mitigation, and we do not sell results. We have no financial interest in what any employee's result says. We expect in future to offer certified mitigation professionals a flat monthly membership so that homeowners who want a contractor can find one — a fixed fee that does not vary with anyone's result, is not a commission, and is never a share of a mitigation job. We say so here because a company whose revenue rises when results come back high should not be the one measuring, and we intend to keep that true.
- Privacy. Personal information is handled in accordance with PIPEDA. Individual results are disclosed to the employee only.
Common questions
Does this count towards our workplace radon compliance?
No. Workplace obligations apply to the buildings you operate. Home testing for employees is a separate, voluntary benefit and has no bearing on the federal limit or any provincial duty.
Will we see individual employee results?
No. Results go to the employee only. Optional de-identified aggregate reporting is available for large groups where no individual could be identified.
What if an employee's result is high?
They receive their result alongside Health Canada's guidance on what the number means and what the recommended timelines for action are. What they do next is their decision as a homeowner or tenant, and it stays between them and whoever they choose to involve. We do not perform mitigation and we never pass results to contractors.
How long does it take?
Health Canada specifies a minimum of three months for a long-term measurement, ideally during the heating season. Realistically: kits out in the autumn, results in the spring.
What about renters?
Tenants can test the home they live in. Whether they need to tell the landlord first, and what the landlord's obligations are, depends on the province — see radon for renters.
Do we have to cover everyone?
No. Many employers start with staff who work from home most of the week, or with a single office, and extend it later.
Is there an option for employees who want to pay themselves?
Yes. A rate can be negotiated and offered as a voluntary purchase rather than a funded benefit. Ask when you request a quote.
Read next
603,000 Canadian workers are exposed to radon · Which rules apply to your workplace · A guide for workers and health and safety committees · Where to place a radon test kit · What to do if a result is above 200 Bq/m³
RadonTest.ca provides testing logistics and laboratory submission. We do not perform radon mitigation and we do not interpret health risk — Health Canada is the health authority on radon in Canada. This page describes a commercial service and publicly available guidance; it is not legal, health or benefits advice. Employers should take their own advice on privacy, benefits treatment and any duty-of-care question relating to home-based work.
Sources
Brobbey A, Rydz E, Fenton S, Demers PA, Ge CB, Peters CE. “Characterizing occupational radon exposure greater than 100 Bq/m³ in a highly exposed country.” Scientific Reports 2022;12:21323.
Health Canada, Guide for radon measurements in homes; Health Canada, Canadian radon guideline; PIPEDA, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; C-NRPP; Take Action on Radon; International Agency for Research on Cancer, Monograph Vol. 100D.