Methodology: where our pay figures come from

Data read: Wages file, 2025 edition (revised November 19, 2025); job postings, 6 months, February to August 2026.

Two public sources, and no other

The pay figures and job posting data on our occupation pages come from two open datasets that Employment and Social Development Canada publishes from Job Bank: Wages and Job Postings Advertised on Canada’s National Job Bank Website. Both are released under the Open Government Licence – Canada.

No figure comes from our own mandates, and none is typed in by hand: a script downloads the files and extracts the values, and the pages read that output when the site is built.

Pay: low, median and high

For each occupation in the National Occupational Classification (NOC 2021), the Wages file publishes a low, a median and a high wage, for Quebec as a whole and by economic region. We keep the five regions of Greater Montreal: Montérégie, Montréal, Laval, Lanaudière and Laurentides. Wages are hourly, except for occupations the file publishes as an annual salary; the page then shows “/yr”.

We read the 2023, 2024 and 2025 editions of the file. The most recent one supplies the tables; the others only feed the “Quebec median by file edition” line. The reference period, meaning the years the estimate rests on, varies from one occupation to the next: it is shown at the bottom of each page.

When a region has no figures of its own

Sometimes a region’s row repeats the Quebec figures exactly, and the file does not flag it. So we compare every regional row with the Quebec row. When all three values are identical, or missing, the region is treated as having no data of its own, and the table says so instead of presenting those figures as regional.

An automated check repeats that comparison before every release of the site: if a region were shown as having its own figures when they are Quebec’s, the site would not be published.

Pay offered in job postings

The second file lists, month by month, the job postings published on Job Bank. We read the six most recent months available in French (currently: 6 months, February to August 2026), and keep the postings in the five Greater Montreal regions that belong to the occupations on this site.

For each posting, the offered pay is the midpoint of the range shown, or the single figure when the posting gives only one. Only postings stated per hour count: the file does not give hours worked, and turning a weekly or annual salary into an hourly rate would mean inventing a factor.

The median of those wages is shown only from 10 hourly postings in the region; below that, the table gives only the count. The shares of postings that mention a night, evening or weekend shift are computed over all of Greater Montreal, and only from 10 postings.

An occupation is not a job title

One NOC occupation often groups several job titles: forklift operator, material handler and order picker fall under the same one, and another may bring together trades a plant keeps apart. When several job titles share an occupation, their pages show the same table and different text. Under each table, a note says what the occupation really measures and what it leaves out.

Limits

Job Bank is not the whole market: its postings lean toward some employers and some roles. Pay offered in a posting is not pay received. The Wages estimates cover a past period and are revised once a year. Read these figures as a benchmark to set or compare an offer, not as the pay of a specific job.

Updates and corrections

The figures change when we re-read the source files; the revision date and the months of postings read are shown on every page, and the modification date given to search engines is the date of the data, not the release date.

See a figure that does not match the source? Write to us at support@workforce-acquisition.com: we check it against the file and correct the page.