AI Analysis: Average hourly earnings for employees paid by the hour, by industry, monthly, unadjusted for seasonality

Executive Summary

Average hourly earnings for Canadian hourly-paid employees more than doubled over 25 years, rising from $16.30 in January 2001 to $32.72 in January 2026 — a 100.7% increase — across 423 NAICS industry classifications. The dataset of 211,823 records reveals a wide wage gap between sectors, with oil and gas extraction leading at $44.78/hr mean and accommodation and food services anchoring the bottom, against an overall mean of $22.17/hr. A small but notable 2.0% of records were flagged as outliers, including a peak of $232.12/hr in other pipeline transportation and a COVID-19-era anomaly driven by workforce composition shifts rather than true wage changes.

Key Findings

• Average hourly earnings across all Canadian industries grew by 100.7%, from $16.30/hr in January 2001 to $32.72/hr in January 2026, reflecting consistent wage growth over 25 years.
• Oil and gas extraction is the highest-paying industry with a mean hourly wage of $44.78 — approximately double the overall dataset mean of $22.17/hr.
• The middle 50% of all hourly earnings fall within a relatively narrow $8.87 IQR band, between $17.19 and $26.06/hr, while the full range spans $227.05 from $5.07 to $232.12/hr.
• Goods-producing industries consistently outpay service-producing industries throughout the entire 2001–2026 period, a structural gap visible across all time points.
• 'Including overtime' and 'Excluding overtime' earnings are nearly perfectly correlated at 0.9999, indicating that overtime premiums scale proportionally with base wages across all industries.
• 4,189 records (2.0% of the dataset) were flagged as statistical outliers using the IQR method, with high-earning anomalies concentrated in specialized resource and pipeline sectors.
• The COVID-19 period in 2020 produced anomalous spikes in aggregate average earnings, caused by compositional workforce shifts — particularly the disproportionate loss of lower-wage jobs — rather than actual wage increases.