AI Analysis: Actual hours worked at main job by industry, monthly, seasonally adjusted, last 5 months

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 14100289 tracks actual hours worked across 19 Canadian industries from January 1976 to March 2026, revealing that total hours worked nearly doubled over five decades — from 349,438 thousand hours to 676,781 thousand hours. The dataset's most dramatic anomaly is the COVID-19 pandemic shock, which caused a historically unprecedented 42.3% single-month collapse in Accommodation and Food Services in March 2020. Across industries, hours worked are highly right-skewed and strongly correlated, reflecting Canada's broad-based economic growth alongside concentrated vulnerability in specific sectors during crises.

Key Findings

• Total actual hours worked across all Canadian industries nearly doubled over 50 years, rising from 349,438 thousand hours in January 1976 to a peak of 683,904 thousand hours in January 2025, before a slight pullback to 676,781 thousand hours in March 2026.
• The distribution of hours worked is heavily right-skewed: the mean of 31,611.8 thousand hours is far above the median of 1,053.2 thousand hours, indicating a small number of large industries dominate total hours worked.
• The COVID-19 pandemic produced the single largest anomaly in the 50-year dataset — a 42.3% month-over-month drop in Accommodation and Food Services in March 2020 — with the top 10 largest monthly declines all concentrated in March–April 2020.
• No IQR-based statistical outliers were detected in the aggregate total-hours series, indicating the economy-wide trend is broadly smooth outside of the pandemic shock, which underscores how exceptional the COVID-19 disruption was.
• 19 NAICS industry categories are tracked across 76 unique time series and 603 monthly periods, with values ranging from as low as 134.5 thousand hours to as high as 683,904.0 thousand hours — a range of nearly 684 million hours.
• Many industry pairs show strong positive correlations in hours worked over time, suggesting broad co-movement across sectors of the Canadian economy, consistent with economy-wide labour market cycles.
• The dataset supports robust uncertainty quantification by including four statistic types — estimate, standard error of estimate, standard error of month-to-month change, and standard error of year-over-year change — across all 19 industries.