The same job pays differently depending on where you live
Median individual income varies substantially across Canada's ten provinces, and that variation is not random noise — it traces back to real, structural differences between provincial economies. Provinces differ in the mix of industries they run on: energy extraction, manufacturing, forestry, financial services, public administration and agriculture all pay differently on average, so a province weighted toward a higher-paying sector tends to show a higher median income before anything else about that province is taken into account. A province built around resource extraction and a province built around public administration and coastal services can post very different income figures for reasons that have little to do with how hard any individual in either province is working.
Cost of living, unionization rates, and the relative size of the public sector shift the picture further, and none of these factors is visible in a bare income figure on its own — the figure is an output of all of them combined, layered together into a single number. This is why a province-by-province ranking of income says more about that province's economic structure and labour market than it says about any individual worker's prospects within it, and why two provinces can trade places in the ranking at different ages, as industries that dominate early-career hiring give way to different ones by mid-career.
A province's rank against the other nine is also not fixed across a working life. A province can post a middling income figure for workers in their twenties and thirties and climb toward the top of the ranking for workers approaching retirement, or the reverse, depending on which industries and roles in that province reward tenure and seniority most heavily. Reading a single age band in isolation, without checking whether the same province holds a similar position at other ages, risks treating a temporary crossing point as a permanent economic ranking.
Why a gross income comparison misleads
Comparing provinces on gross, before-tax income alone leaves out one of the largest sources of real difference between them: provincial income tax. Each province sets its own tax brackets, rates and credits independently of both the federal schedule and every other province's schedule, so two people with identical gross income living in different provinces do not necessarily keep the same amount after tax. A province with a higher gross median income is not automatically the province where an equivalent worker keeps more of their paycheque once provincial tax is subtracted.
The federal figures cited elsewhere on this site — RRSP and TFSA contribution rules, CPP and OAS thresholds, the capital gains inclusion rate — apply identically no matter which province a filer lives in, because they are federal rules. The specific provincial brackets and rates that would be needed to complete a true province-by-province after-tax comparison sit outside what those federal figures cover, and this site does not attempt to reconstruct ten separate provincial tax schedules to fill that gap. A gross income figure by province is a real and useful starting point, but it is one piece of a larger picture, not the whole picture.
Housing costs change what income buys
Housing cost is the other major piece missing from a gross income comparison, and it can dwarf the income difference between provinces on its own. Two provinces with similar median incomes can have very different typical housing costs, and two provinces with different median incomes can have housing costs that move in the opposite direction from what the income gap alone would suggest — a lower-income province with comparatively cheap housing can leave a household with more discretionary income after shelter costs than a higher-income province where housing consumes a much larger share of the paycheque.
This dynamic connects directly to the net worth patterns covered in a separate guide on net worth by age: because principal-residence equity dominates a typical Canadian family's balance sheet, provinces with expensive housing markets tend to post higher net worth by age even where their income figures do not lead the country, precisely because appreciation in an expensive housing market adds far more to net worth over time than a modest income advantage does across the same number of years. A province can rank near the bottom on income and near the top on net worth, or the reverse, without any contradiction in the underlying data.
What this app shows by province
The province pages on this site show median and average individual income by age group, drawn from the 2021 Census, alongside median and average family net worth by age group from the Survey of Financial Security, for each of the ten provinces. Because these are two different data sources measured at two different levels — individual for income, family for net worth — the two figures on a single province page describe related but distinct pictures of that province, not two views of the same underlying number, a distinction covered in more depth in the guides to each measure individually.
A full province-by-province breakdown covering all ten provinces is available separately, along with dedicated pages for individual provinces, including Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario, each carrying its own age-by-age figures and a short note on how that province's income ranking and net worth ranking relate to one another across the five age bands the data covers.
Each province's page also links to a small set of other provinces chosen for having a broadly comparable economic profile or a broadly comparable position in the national ranking, rather than linking indiscriminately to all nine others. The intent is to make a province's figures easier to place in context against provinces facing a similar mix of industries or a similar position on the income and net worth tables, instead of leaving a reader to guess which comparisons are actually informative.
The gaps that matter more than province
Within a single province, at a single age, education alone produces a bigger income gap than the ten-province spread does at the same age and the same education level. In Ontario, workers aged 45 to 54 with a high school education report a median income of $45,687; workers of the same age with a college credential report $54,330; those with a bachelor's degree report $78,203; and those with a graduate degree report $93,685. That is a spread of $47,998 between the lowest and highest education level, within one province, at one age.
Compare that to the spread between provinces at the same age and the same education level. Among workers aged 45 to 54 holding a bachelor's degree, the lowest provincial median is New Brunswick at $67,188 and the highest is Alberta at $83,710 — a spread of $16,522. The education gap inside a single province is roughly three times the size of the gap between the lowest-earning and highest-earning province at the same age and credential. For a guide about income by province, that is worth stating directly: province is one of the weaker predictors of what a given worker earns, well behind education and, as the next figures show, age.
Age matters as much as education, and it interacts with province in a way that complicates any single headline figure. In Ontario, median income among workers holding a bachelor's degree runs from $34,800 among those 65 and older to $78,203 among those 45 to 54 — a spread of $43,403 within one province. The same age spread in Alberta runs from $36,000 to $83,710; in Nova Scotia, from $31,000 to $69,942. A province with an older population, or one where more of its working-age residents sit in an age band that historically earns less, will show a lower overall median even if workers of any single age in that province earn about the same as workers of that age elsewhere.
This is why a single headline figure for income by province partly measures a province's demographic mix — its distribution of ages — rather than what its workers are paid. Most published reporting on income by province states exactly that kind of headline figure, undifferentiated by age. The province pages on this site show income by age band specifically so a reader comparing two provinces is comparing like ages against like ages, rather than comparing a province with an older population to one with a younger population and mistaking the difference for a difference in pay.
None of this makes the industry differences, tax differences and housing-cost differences described earlier in this guide beside the point — they are real costs and real advantages that a headline income figure does not capture on its own. It means a provincial ranking answers a narrower question than "where do people earn the most": it answers what a province's income figure looks like once its educational mix and its age structure are both averaged into a single number, which is a different, and less informative, question than what two workers of the same age and the same credential earn in different places.