What are the median and average incomes in Canada? What is the typical income of someone in his or her 30s? How much do Canadians make relative to other countries? This page will answer those kinds of questions 🙂
Generic Median and Average Income Statistics
Notes:
- Data from the 2011 National Household Survey (NHS) show that more than 95% of the approximately 27.3 million Canadians aged 15 and over received some form of income in 2010, totaling $1.1 trillion.
- In 2010, Canadians paid 16.4% of their total income in income taxes, leaving 83.6% of total income as after-tax income. Overall, 63.7% of the population aged 15 and over reported income taxes.
- The highest income in Canada is found in the area around Fort McMurray, Alberta, where median family income is $186,782. Source
- Average: The sum of all the data divided by how many entries there are.
- Median: The middle mark in a series, where half the population has more, and the other half has less.
- More household income stats by major Canadian city here.
Women Made 85% as much as Men in Canada during 2010.
—————————————
Global Income
Top 20 Countries with the highest Average Income Per Person. Source: cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html
3 Decade Comparison of Income per Person in 7 Countries. Source via Google.
Income Inequality in Developed Nations. Source.
How the Average Income Level in a Country Relates to Its Other Measures of Well-Being. Source.
Notes:
- 42% of the global income goes to the top 10% of the world’s richest population. Meanwhile, 1% of the world’s income is shared by the poorest 10%.
- Countries with very high inequality are in South America and southern Africa. Low inequality exists mostly in Europe. Canada and the U.S. have medium income inequality.
—————————————
High-Level Income Statistics
- The top 10% of all earners in Canada made $80,400 or more in 2010. Source
- To be in the top 1% in Canada, you needed an income of $201,000. People in this group earn 11% of the total national income, but they pay about 21% of federal and provincial taxes. Most of them (92%) live in just 4 provinces: ON, AB, QC, BC (2010) Source
- The 0.1% richest Canadians make at least $685,000 (2010)
- The top 0.01% (1 in every 10,000) makes $2,570,000 or more (2010) Source
- To be in the top 10% in the United States, you need an income of $82,500 a year. (2010) Source
- To be in the top 1% in the US you need an income of $370,000 Source
- 6.6% of Americans had incomes exceeding $100,000 in 2010
- Stephen Harper makes $315,000 a year as prime minister.
- Barack Obama makes $400,000 as president.
—————————————
Income By Age
Average Canadian Income Per Person, by Age Group in 2008. Source.
—————-
American Earnings by Age Group.
—————-
Median Full-Time Gross Weekly Earnings in the UK during 2012. Source.
Further references and resources:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/who-are-canada-s-top-1-1.1703321
Quite informative !
Your number for average income per Canadian isn’t quite correct, at least, not as you represent it.
Your reference states that value as the ‘average wage for Canadian employees.’ So that means it is the average wage of someone working. That is actually a really big difference from ‘average income per person in Canada’ as the latter includes those on EI, pensioners, welfare etc as well as those on the other end of the spectrum that derive the largest portion of their income from business and investments and not wage.
That is especially big since your source for your median income specifically includes those at the top deriving the largest portion of their income from investments and self employment; as well as those at the bottom of the range who, according to the article, derive 2/3 of their income from government transfers.
I would imagine that this disparity in the number of people the sample is taken from (and the spectrum of incomes) artificially inflates the difference between median and average income.
Addendum to my previous post:
I’d suggest getting your figures (for both median and average income) from CANSIM table 202-0407 – not only would they both be based on the same people but they would both be in the same calendar year (2014) instead of 4 years apart which may make a difference.
Alternatively, CANSIM table 206-0052 would also give you those figures for 2014 but it excludes persons under 16. I didn’t check your US and other sources, so I can’t comment on which would be a better table to use for comparison among nations.
Hi Robert. Thank you for the suggestions. I have updated the table with new information from CANSIM Table 206-0052 and other new sources from Statistics Canada. I left out data from table 202-0407 because I couldn’t find any 2014 figures in it. I used tables 111-0008 and 111-0009 instead to retrieve the median income data.