Does Fire Alarm Work Count Toward Your 309A Hours?

Last updated: September 2026

Quick answer

• Yes, fire alarm work counts, provided you are doing it for your registered sponsor under your Registered Training Agreement. Skilled Trades Ontario publishes no list of approved daily tasks, and no rule anywhere excludes fire alarm.
• The trade's own scope of practice covers wiring for "systems of alarm, communication, light, heat or power". Alarm is named in the definition of the trade.
• Fire alarm maps to Skill Set 9255, Install, Troubleshoot and Maintain Voice, Video, Sound, Phone and Data Communications and Signalling Systems, one of thirteen skill sets in the 309A training standard.
• The program totals 9,000 hours. Skilled Trades Ontario currently reports the split between on the job and in school two different ways, because a new curriculum is phasing in. Both add to 9,000.
• Completion is competency based as well as hours based: the hours benchmark, the in-school levels, and every mandatory skill signed by you and your trainer.
• The real risk of a long fire alarm posting is not lost hours. It is a thin logbook. Fire alarm will not sign off motor controls, drives or power distribution.
• On an existing, in-service system the Ontario Fire Code adds its own qualification requirement, and an apprentice normally works under its supervision exception.

What actually decides whether your time counts

The question gets asked as though there is a clerk somewhere auditing your days and ruling that Tuesday was electrical and Wednesday was not. That is not how the Ontario system works.

Your apprenticeship is a Registered Training Agreement between you, your sponsor and Skilled Trades Ontario. A sponsor, in their words:

A sponsor is the person that is responsible for making sure you receive all the training in your apprenticeship program. Some sponsors are individual employers (e.g., a contractor) or a group of employers (e.g., unions or non-union consortiums).

The hours you accumulate are the hours you work for that sponsor in the trade. Nobody reviews your week and rules on it. What gets reviewed at the end is your logbook, and the logbook is about skills.

So the honest answer has two halves. Does fire alarm time count as hours? Yes, if it is worked under your agreement. Does it advance you? Only as far as somebody signs the skills off.

What the 309A training standard actually says

The Apprenticeship Training Standard for Electrician, Construction and Maintenance (309A) is published free by Skilled Trades Ontario. It is the logbook. It contains thirteen skill sets, numbered 9245 to 9257:

9255 is your skill set when you are on fire alarm. A fire alarm system is a signalling system, and the title says signalling systems.

The standard also quotes the scope of practice for the trade:

Laying out, assembling, installing, repairing, maintaining, connecting or testing electrical fixtures, apparatus, control equipment and wiring for systems of alarm, communication, light, heat or power in buildings or other structures.

Read that again if you have been told fire alarm is not real electrical work. Alarm is the first word in the list, ahead of light, heat and power, in the definition of what a 309A does.

One honest limitation: we could read the contents, the scope, the sign-off instructions and the skill set titles from the published PDF, but it truncated before the detailed sub-skills under 9255 on page 129. We have not read the individual performance objectives under 9255 and will not guess at their wording. Download the standard and turn to page 129 if you need them.

Worth noting as well: the standard lists fire alarm certification under "Other Suggested or Required Certification(s) and Training". It is presented as an optional add-on to the trade, not a requirement of it. That distinction is the whole basis of what a 309A authorises versus what CFAA authorises.

What you are taught about fire alarm in school

Fire alarm is not an afterthought in the in-school curriculum either. It has its own reportable subject at Level 2, and under the new curriculum it grew.

The old curriculum's learning outcomes for 2.07 include:

2.07.1 Describe the principles of operation and installation requirements of single stage, two stage, initiation and supervisory circuits.

2.07.2 Describe the principles of operation and installation requirements for pull stations, detectors, flow switches, bells, speakers, addressable initiating devices and sprinkler supervisory devices.

2.07.7 List the ULC standard for the installation, inspection, testing and verification of Fire Alarm Systems.

The replacement subject 3375 covers the same ground with more time on it, including outcomes to "Describe the types, operation, applications and wiring methods of Fire Alarm Systems" and "Explain the requirements and procedures for maintaining fire alarm systems".

If you have spent eight months on fire alarm before Level 2, you will walk into that block already knowing it. The wiring rules behind it are in Section 32 of the Canadian Electrical Code, and the standards named in 2.07.7 are covered in the Canadian codes and standards guide.

The hours, and where the sources disagree

Ontario's 309A is a 9,000 hour program, roughly five years. That total is stable. How it splits is not, and two Skilled Trades Ontario pages currently say different things.

Both add to 9,000. The difference is the curriculum change. The old three-level curriculum was 240 plus 300 plus 300 in-school hours, or 840. The new one runs four levels at 270, 270, 270 and 240, or 1,050, and the extra classroom time comes out of the on-the-job side.

The trade page notes the new standards are phasing in across levels 1 to 4 between September 2024 and September 2026. Which numbers apply to you depends on when you started and which level you are entering. Ask your training delivery agent rather than trusting either page in isolation, including this one.

How hours and sign-offs are actually recorded

The training standard tells you directly:

Keep an accurate record of the hours you work.

That instruction is aimed at you, not at your employer. Nobody else is doing it for you.

The skills work like this:

You and your trainer sign-off each required skill to confirm that you have demonstrated competency in that skill.

Once every mandatory skill inside a skill set is signed, your sponsor signs the Skill Set Completion form in Appendix C confirming the whole set. At the end you submit the logbook and the Apprentice Completion Form to your local Service Delivery Office.

The completion test is the combination: the on-the-job hours benchmark identified in the logbook, the in-school levels, and competency in all mandatory skills. Hours alone do not finish an apprenticeship, and neither do sign-offs alone. When it is all done you receive a Certificate of Apprenticeship, which is what makes you eligible to write the Certificate of Qualification exam.

What happens when you change employers

Changing sponsors is normal and it does not wipe your record. Your logbook is your document and the signatures already in it stay in it. What you must do is tell Skilled Trades Ontario, and the fastest route is the STO Portal, where you enter your new sponsor's ID. If the new sponsor is not registered, they have to register first.

The training standard does not address whether a new trainer can rely on sign-offs given by a previous one. In practice trainers vary. Get signatures at the time rather than promising to catch up later, because a trainer who has moved to another contractor will not sign your book eighteen months after the fact.

The part nobody says out loud

If you have been parked on fire alarm for months, the fear is not really about hours. It is that everyone else on your intake is pulling teck, terminating panels and setting motors while you run 18 gauge and pull devices, and that you will finish five years with a certificate and a hole where the rest of the trade should be. Here is the honest read.

The hours are fine. They are trade hours under your agreement and nothing about fire alarm disqualifies them.

The logbook is the actual risk. Fire alarm work will populate 9255 and a fair amount of 9245, 9246, 9248 and 9249. It will not populate 9250, 9252 or 9253. Sitting quietly for eight months and hoping is how apprentices arrive at year four with three skill sets barely touched. That is a fixable problem, but only if you notice it now.

The work itself is worth more than you think. Fire alarm is one of the few areas where the knowledge stays scarce, because most electricians avoid it and the ones who understand verification, annunciation and interconnection are hard to replace. It shows up in what people earn, which is covered in fire alarm technician pay in Canada. An apprentice who can read a riser and a matrix at year three is not behind, they are carrying something most journeypersons do not have. There is a broader grounding in the work in the fire alarm guide for apprentices.

What an apprentice is allowed to do on a fire alarm system

This is where it stops being an apprenticeship question and becomes a legal one, and the answer differs depending on whether the system is new or in service.

New installation. The electrical work is trade work. Electrician, Construction and Maintenance is a compulsory trade, and Skilled Trades Ontario is explicit that to practise it legally you must hold a Registered Training Agreement, a Provisional Certificate of Qualification or a Certificate of Qualification. Your RTA is what makes your work lawful. The system itself is installed to CAN/ULC-S524 and verified to CAN/ULC-S537 under the Building Code.

Existing system in service. Different rule. Ontario Fire Code, Division C, Article 1.2.1.2 requires that a person performing annual tests or inspections, or repairing, replacing or altering fire alarm components, has completed a program or course acceptable to the Fire Marshal. Only CFAA and ECAO Certi-Fire currently qualify. Your 309A does not satisfy it, and neither does your RTA.

There is a supervision exception, and it is the one every apprentice should know. Article 1.2.1.2.(2) allows a person without the qualification to do the work if it is supervised by a qualified person, no more than two unqualified people are supervised at once, and the supervision is provided at the work site. Under Article 1.2.1.3 the responsibility for compliance shifts to the supervisor.

So when your foreman has CFAA and you are the second body on a device replacement, you are legal. Sent alone to swap a detector on a live system, you are not. The full breakdown is in who can legally work on fire alarms in Ontario.

What to do about it, starting this week

1. Open your logbook and read the thirteen skill set titles. Work out which ones your current work touches and which it does not.
2. Ask your sponsor to map the fire alarm work to 9255 and sign what is already demonstrated. Do not assume it happens automatically. It usually does not.
3. Name the gap out loud. "I am solid on signalling, I have nothing on motor controls" is a fair thing to say to a foreman, and most will rotate you if asked in year two rather than year four.
4. Keep your own hours record, as the standard tells you to, with dates, sites and a line on what you did. Two minutes a week, and it settles arguments later.
5. Keep a separate note of fire alarm specifics: panel makes, device types, verification you assisted with. If you later go for CFAA registration, the CFAA trainee logbook exists for exactly this, and CFAA recommends 1,500 hours of experience. It is not mandatory unless you fail the practical registration exam twice.

After the Certificate of Qualification

Your C of Q makes you an electrician. It does not make you a fire alarm technician, and Ontario has no such trade. The route is CFAA or Certi-Fire, and a licensed Canadian electrician can be assessed as exempt from three of CFAA's five courses, which takes a meaningful amount off the cost. That process is in CFAA exemptions for electricians, and the full path is in how to become a fire alarm technician in Ontario. Doing your apprenticeship on fire alarm and adding CFAA on top is one of the cleaner career shapes in this trade.

Other provinces

The trade is Red Seal, the standards are national, and the apprenticeship arithmetic is not.

Alberta's and BC's figures come from Alberta Tradesecrets and SkilledTradesBC. We have not verified Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec or Atlantic Canada hours and will not state them from memory. The provincial fire alarm qualification rules, a separate matter from apprenticeship hours, are in fire alarm in Alberta, fire alarm in British Columbia and the province by province comparison.

What remains unclear

• The sub-skills under 9255. We read the skill set titles, the scope and the sign-off procedure from the published training standard, but the document truncated before the detail pages. Read page 129 yourself before relying on any specific performance objective.
• Whether a fire alarm service company that is not an ESA-licensed electrical contractor can act as a registered 309A sponsor. We could not confirm this either way. If your employer does fire alarm only, that is the one question worth putting to Skilled Trades Ontario directly, because it decides whether your time is being recorded at all.
• Which hours split applies to your intake. Two Skilled Trades Ontario sources disagree, both official, and the answer depends on your start date and the curriculum phase-in.
• Whether a new trainer must re-verify skills signed by a previous one. The training standard does not address it.
• The scope of practice regulation itself. The wording quoted above comes from the Skilled Trades Ontario training standard. The underlying regulation on e-Laws would not load for us, so we cite the standard rather than the regulation.

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Fire Alarm Academy provides educational content only. It does not confer any certification, licence or credential, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or accredited by the Canadian Fire Alarm Association, the Electrical Contractors Association of Ontario, ULC Standards, UL Standards and Engagement, CSA Group, the Electrical Safety Authority, any authority having jurisdiction, or any manufacturer. Always work from the edition of any standard adopted by your authority having jurisdiction.