Our methodology

Every figure on this site is drawn from official public-sector salary disclosure published by Canadian provincial governments. We do not collect data ourselves, survey employees, or estimate compensation. The full list of releases we use — the legislation, threshold, and download for each province — is documented on the data sources page.

We ingest the official files exactly as each province publishes them — CSV, open-data feeds, spreadsheets, or scraped tables. Because every province uses its own column names, formats, and conventions, we normalize the records into a single shared schema: we standardize person names and employer names so the same organization reads consistently across years and provinces.

Records are then split by disclosure year, and we compute a single total compensation figure for each person as salary plus taxable benefits, mirroring how the provinces themselves report it.

Public disclosures list names but no unique identifiers, so two different people with the same name can appear in the same dataset. To keep them apart, we group records by name together with employer and disclosure year. Where a record matches consistently across years — the same name at the same employer — we build a salary history for that person so you can see how their compensation changed over time.

This approach is deliberately conservative: when a match is ambiguous, we keep records separate rather than risk merging two distinct people.

Year-over-year change is computed by comparing a person's total compensation across consecutive disclosure years. When the same person appears in two adjacent years, we report the difference — both as a dollar amount and a percentage — so you can see who received increases and how pay evolved within an organization over time.

Public disclosure is imperfect, and we are transparent about its limits:

• Taxable benefits are not always broken out separately from salary, so the split between the two can vary by province.
• Some employers are excluded by the legislation itself — coverage differs between core government, crown corporations, hospitals, and universities.
• Thresholds differ by province, so the bar for appearing on a list is not the same everywhere, and counts are not directly comparable across provinces.
• Placeholder rows with a $0 compensation value are filtered out, as they do not represent a real disclosed salary.

Because this data is publicly disclosed by government, we generally cannot remove accurate records. However, if you believe a figure is wrong or have a specific concern, you can request a correction or removal.