Home › About
About Wage Atlas
What this is, where the numbers come from, and what they can't tell you.
What this is
Wage Atlas publishes what people in Canadian skilled trades earn, by occupation and by economic region, along with how those wages have moved over the past decade. The federal government publishes the underlying data every year but shows only the current year, and the large job boards don't break Canada into economic regions at all. This fills that gap.
It is free, carries no login, and will stay that way.
Where the data comes from
Every figure is drawn from Wages, published by Employment and Social Development Canada on the Government of Canada Open Government Portal, and used under the Open Government Licence – Canada. Nothing here is estimated, modelled or filled in by us — if a figure isn't in the federal release, the page doesn't show one.
The current data is the 2025 release, revised 2025-11-19. Fourteen annual releases going back to 2012 are used to build the trend charts.
Wage Atlas is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Government of Canada.
How to read the numbers
Wages are hourly and describe employees. The low figure is roughly the 10th percentile, the median the midpoint, and the high roughly the 90th percentile — so the median is what a typical worker earns, not an average dragged around by outliers.
Regions are Statistics Canada economic regions, not cities. "Calgary" covers the surrounding region, not the city limits.
The one thing worth knowing before you trust a trend
Canada reclassified its occupations in 2021. The National Occupational Classification was restructured, and codes before and after that change do not map cleanly onto one another — an occupation may have been split, merged, or redefined.
That means a wage trend spanning the change can be partly fictional. So a trend line here never crosses it. Charts draw the pre-2023 and post-2023 periods as separate segments with a labelled break, and a decade of history is shown only for occupations whose official title is identical on both sides of the change — verified against the data on every rebuild. Where that test fails, the page shows the shorter history instead of a longer, prettier, wrong one.
Limitations
- Employees only. Self-employed earnings are excluded, which matters in trades where owner-operators are common — a self-employed contractor's income is not here.
- Estimates, not a census. Figures come largely from the Labour Force Survey and small-area estimation, and carry sampling error. Treat small differences between regions as noise.
- Gaps are real gaps. Where a region or occupation has too few responses to publish, the federal release suppresses the figure and no page is generated.
- Wages, not total compensation. Overtime, benefits, pension and travel allowances are not included, and in unionised trades those are a large part of the package.
How it stays current
ESDC publishes a new release each November. A scheduled job re-downloads the source data monthly, rebuilds every page, and checks the result before publishing — so the site updates itself without anyone remembering to.
Who built it
Wage Atlas was built by Chris Nordrum, a developer in Calgary. Corrections are welcome; if a figure here disagrees with the federal source, the federal source is right and this is a bug.