Article

What a Canadian salary guide says once the tables are read correctly

Nov 5, 2026 6 min read

Listen to the audio story

The CFO who topped the chart, and why that was wrong · 2:15 · AI-written script, synthetic voices

Transcript

Ava: In one notebook, the best-paid job in Canada was a bilingual receptionist in Simcoe County. Senior range: sixty-three thousand to seven hundred thirteen thousand dollars.

Andrew: That's a very good receptionist job. Or a typo.

Ava: A typo, probably seventy-one point three in the original. And that's one of the bugs Antoine found when he re-read a 2023 Canadian salary guide, using text already extracted in a GitHub project called Salary.

Andrew: How big is the dataset?

Ava: Nineteen thousand three hundred eighty-seven rows with salary ranges, from a recruitment firm's guide, across fifty-six named regions. The extraction tagged every cell by heading level, so he could rebuild the tables.

Andrew: And what else was broken?

Ava: Finance and HR tables don't have entry, mid and senior columns. Some have one, three, five and ten years of experience, and others have company revenue. The scraper assumed three experience levels everywhere, so a chief financial officer at a thousand-million-dollar company showed up as a senior salary, topping the maximum chart. Also, industrial support jobs like pickers and drivers were quoted per hour, but mixed with annual salaries, which dragged every average down.

Andrew: So after cleaning, what does the guide say?

Ava: Technology pays the most, with a median mid-level figure of ninety-seven thousand two hundred, about fifteen thousand above engineering. Senior pay for the median job is about one point three times entry pay. And for the same job, Montréal, Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary land within about ten percent of each other for developers and architects.

Andrew: What about the province rankings?

Ava: He warns against them. Each region lists its own jobs, so a province median compares baskets, not salaries. Alberta came first and Prince Edward Island last, but that mostly reflects which jobs are listed.

Andrew: Any caveat on the numbers themselves?

Ava: Yes. They're a recruitment firm's quoted ranges, not observed pay. They say what the firm quotes, not what people earn.

Andrew: So read the tables correctly before you trust the chart.

Ava: That's the lesson. The full write-up has the charts and the list of fixes for the repository.

Grouped bar chart of mid-level pay for seven tech roles in Montréal, Greater Toronto, Greater Vancouver and Calgary

Table of contents

The Salary project set out to answer a simple question: how is a given job paid from one Canadian region to another? It extracts recruitment-firm salary guides from PDF, puts them in data frames and compares them in notebooks. The notebooks already contain charts. Several of them are wrong, and the reasons are more instructive than the charts themselves.

This article re-reads the 2023 guide from the text the repository already extracted, fixes what went wrong, and reports what the guide actually says.

1. Where the numbers come from

The 2023 guide (the README names Randstad) lists, for each of 56 named regions, tables of jobs with three salary ranges. The repository’s extraction step left a full text dump in sandbox/output/output.txt, one cell per token, each tagged with the heading level it came from:

<h1>calgary metropolitan region | <h3>business support & operations | <h5>entry | mid | senior |
<p>administrative assistant | 43.6 - 56.4 | 49.9 - 61.3 | 55.2 - 66.7 | ...

That tagging is enough to rebuild the tables: <h1> is the region, <h3> the job family, <h5> the column headers, <p> a job followed by its ranges, and a <h2> footer at the bottom of each page names the province. Amounts are thousands of dollars per year. Every figure below is the median of range midpoints, so “75.0 - 90.0” counts as 82.5.

2. Three things the extraction got wrong

Not every table is entry / mid / senior. Of 19,387 rows with salary ranges, 17,915 sit under the usual three experience levels. The finance and HR sections are different: 760 rows have four columns for 1, 3, 5 and 10 years of experience, and 677 rows have three columns for company revenue, 10 M$, 100 M$ and 1,000 M$. The scraper assumed three experience levels everywhere. So a chief financial officer at a 1,000 M$ company, top of range 594.1k, became a “senior” salary, and the CFO row tops the notebook’s maximum-salary chart.

Duplicates and typos. 3,607 rows repeat a job, region and province already seen; the analysis keeps the first occurrence. Three rows have impossible ranges. The most visible one is a bilingual receptionist in Simcoe County whose senior range reads “63.1 - 713.0”, probably 71.3 in the original. In the notebooks, that row is the highest salary in Canada.

Mixed units. The industrial support family (pickers, labourers, drivers, janitors) is quoted per hour: 97% of its mid-level midpoints are under 30. Mixed with annual salaries in thousands, they drag every average down and make “regional spread” rankings meaningless.

The comparison notebook adds two code bugs. The 2024 minimum and maximum lists take their senior value from the 2023 frame (df_sorted_2023), so the 713k outlier appears in both years. And in the 2024 data, the entry-level maximum has exactly the same mean (94.67) and standard deviation as the mid-level maximum, which points to an entry range built from the wrong numbers. The 2024 guide is also in French while 2023 is in English, so the two years cannot be joined by job title at all.

After dropping the three broken rows and the duplicates, 14,305 job-and-region rows remain: 13,063 annual rows covering 371 jobs in 57 regions (York Region exists in both Ontario and New Brunswick), and 1,242 hourly rows.

3. What the guide says

Levels move in fixed steps. The median midpoint is 66.2k at entry level, 75.9k at mid level and 86.8k at senior level. For the median job, senior pay is 1.30 times entry pay, and 80% of all rows fall between 1.22 and 1.36. That regularity is worth knowing before reading anything into a single job’s progression. Hourly industrial support work moves the same way, from $19.8 to $22.3 to $24.9 an hour.

Technology pays the most, by a clear margin.

Horizontal bar chart of median mid-level pay by job family — Median mid-level pay by job family, 2023 guide.

Technology roles have a median mid-level midpoint of 97.2k, about 15k above engineering (81.8k) and marketing (81.7k). Customer experience and business support are lowest, both at 54.8k.

Province rankings mostly reflect which jobs are listed.

Horizontal bar chart of median mid-level pay by province — Median mid-level pay by province, 2023 guide.

Alberta comes first at 85.2k and Prince Edward Island last at 70.3k, with Québec at 71.4k. But each region lists its own set of jobs, and Québec alone has 16 regions, most of them outside Montréal. A province median compares baskets, not salaries.

For the same job, big cities are close.

Grouped bar chart of mid-level pay for seven tech roles in four metro areas — Mid-level midpoints for seven tech roles in four metro areas, 2023 guide.

Holding the job fixed removes the basket problem. For developer and architect roles, Montréal, Greater Toronto, Greater Vancouver and Calgary are within about 10% of each other. A mid-level full stack developer is at 112.4k in Montréal and 120.2k in Greater Toronto; a cloud architect at 127.7k and 136.2k. DevOps (development) is highest in Montréal, at 110.0k. Support roles are where the cities part ways: a mid-level help desk analyst is at 61.6k in Montréal against 78.7k in Greater Toronto, a 22% gap.

Directors lead everywhere. Among jobs listed in at least 25 regions, the best-paid median midpoints are director of operations (190.4k), e-commerce director (159.7k), construction director (153.6k), manufacturing director (153.3k) and procurement director (152.3k). On the technology side, IT director (151.8k), technical lead (143.1k) and application architect (132.2k) lead.

4. Limits of this reading

These are a recruitment firm’s ranges, not observed pay. They say what the firm quotes, not what people earn.
Medians of midpoints ignore how wide each range is.
Province footers are taken as printed; one region, Fort St. John, sits on pages with an Alberta footer.
One Québec-only job, “head of workshop and assembly”, has a median midpoint of 249k across its 11 regions and is probably mis-extracted; the “at least 25 regions” ranking leaves it out.
The 2024 guide is not used here: its entry ranges are unreliable in the saved data and its titles are in French.

5. What to fix in the repository

The fixes are small. Keep the <h5> header with each row and only map it to entry / mid / senior when the header says so. Drop exact duplicates on job, region and province. Flag ranges whose high is below the low or more than three times it. Store a unit per job family. Then the comparison notebook’s charts become meaningful, and a 2023-to-2024 comparison needs a title mapping between the English and French guides.

The project note has the code walkthrough, the setup and the full list of limits: Salary: exploring Canadian salary guides and wage data.

References

antoinebou12. (November 5, 2026). Article manuscript and bundled media. [Article source] github.com.

References use this article’s publication date.