Income & Inequality

Incomes, wages, and the distribution of income

These charts track incomes and wages along with the Gini coefficient and relative poverty.

Where Canada stands

A scorecard of where Canada ranks among the peer group’s 17 economies on each measure (latest available year). Dots are ordered by rank, so further right is more favourable for Canada (lower-is-better measures are flipped accordingly). Canada is maroon, key comparators in colour; hover a dot for its value and rank.

Median after-tax income in Canada

Median after-tax income, in 2024 constant (inflation-adjusted) dollars. Use the dropdown to switch between all recipients, economic families, and unattached individuals. These are Statistics Canada’s income units, not per person: an economic family pools the income of related people in a household, so family income runs well above that of unattached individuals, with the combined figure in between. Read each as a typical income for that unit.

The rise around 2020 largely reflects temporary pandemic income supports (e.g. CERB) and shifts in market income and transfers. Read it as a one-off, not a durable gain in living standards.

Median household income by city

Median household total income by metropolitan area (2021 Census). For the full neighbourhood-level view (every census tract, where you can zoom right to your own street) open the dedicated map. This is kept on its own page so this one stays fast to load:

→ Median household income by neighbourhood (census-tract map)

Average annual wage

Average annual wages converted to US dollars at purchasing power parity and held in constant prices, so levels can be compared across countries and over time.

Latest average annual wage: ranked

Where wages are highest

Pay varies a lot across the country. This shows the average weekly wage of employees by province. It’s highest in Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia (where high-paying resource, finance, and tech work concentrates) and lowest in the Atlantic provinces. The national average is highlighted for reference.

Real household disposable income per capita

Real (inflation-adjusted) household disposable income per person, indexed to 2007 = 100 (the OECD’s basis, set on the eve of the global financial crisis). Disposable income is what households actually have to spend or save after taxes and transfers. This is a more direct gauge of household living standards than GDP per capita, which can rise without households feeling better off. Because it is indexed, the lines show growth since 2007 rather than dollar levels.

Growth in disposable income since 2007: ranked

Income inequality (Gini coefficient)

The Gini coefficient of disposable (after-tax, after-transfer) income runs from 0 (everyone has the same income) to 1 (one person has all of it). Lower values indicate a more even distribution. The OECD collects these figures on each country’s own survey cycle, so some report only every few years; the chart shows the countries that report regularly enough to trace a line.

Latest Gini coefficient: ranked

Redistribution: before and after taxes and transfers

The Gini coefficients above measure inequality of disposable income, i.e., what households have to spend after taxes and government transfers. Measuring inequality of market income instead — earnings from work and capital, before the government steps in — and comparing the two shows how much the tax-and-transfer system reduces inequality. For each country below, the orange dot is market-income inequality and the blue dot is disposable-income inequality. The line between them is the redistributive effect. Canada begins from relatively low inequality and narrows it further.

Income distribution over time

A single inequality number hides how income is actually shared. The chart below shows the average income of each tenth (decile) of Canadians, before tax and after tax, in constant 2024 dollars. Slide through the years to watch real incomes rise, with the top decile pulling furthest ahead; the gap between the two bars is what taxes and transfers take, and it widens sharply toward the top. (These are snapshots of each decile in a given year, not a fixed set of people. Incomes move across the ladder over a lifetime, as the life-cycle section below shows.)

The next chart shows the share of all income held by the top 10% and the bottom 40% of Canadians. Switch between market income (before taxes and transfers) and after-tax income: the market gap is wide and has widened since the 1970s, while the after-tax gap is far narrower. This offers a direct picture of how the tax-and-transfer system redistributes income.

Income, mobility and the life cycle

The charts above show how income is distributed in a given year, but a decile is a position, not a fixed group of people. Individuals move across the income ladder over their lives and careers: a graduate student earning $25,000 becomes a professional earning $100,000; a peak earner in their fifties later retires onto a pension. So a snapshot of the distribution is not a photograph of permanent economic winners and losers. Two patterns make this concrete.

Income tracks age. Median income rises steeply through early adulthood, peaks in the mid-forties to mid-fifties, and steps down in retirement. Much of the bottom of the income ladder is the young and the old, often the same people at a different life stage, not a permanent class.

Most low income is temporary. Following the same tax filers over eight years, most who experience low income are not there permanently.

Mobility is real but not unlimited, and it has its own debates. For example, how much a child’s eventual income depends on their parents’. Statistics Canada research using its Intergenerational Income Database finds the link is modest but has strengthened somewhat for Canadians born in the 1980s compared with the 1960s (implying slightly less mobility). That long-run question aside, the life-cycle and persistence patterns above are a reminder that the income distribution is a set of positions people move through, not a fixed ranking of people.

Relative poverty rate

The relative poverty rate is the share of people living on less than half of the national median disposable income. It measures low income relative to the national standard of living rather than an absolute threshold.

Low-income rate in Canada (LIM-AT)

Statistics Canada’s Low Income Measure, after tax (LIM-AT): the share of Canadians in households below half the median adjusted household income. This is the domestic counterpart to the OECD relative-poverty series above.

Who poverty affects most

The Market Basket Measure (MBM) is Canada’s official poverty line. This is an estimation of the income a family needs to afford a modest, specified basket of goods and services. About 11% of Canadians live below it, but the rate varies sharply by group. Some groups of Canadians face poverty rates well above the national average, while seniors are well below it. The national rate is highlighted for reference. (Latest year; figures for recent immigrants are for those aged 15 and over.)

Food insecurity

The share of people in households that experienced food insecurity in the past year. Food insecurity means people are worrying about running out of food, compromising on quality or quantity, or going without enough food. It is a direct measure of material hardship that income and poverty lines alone can miss.

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