AI Analysis: Job vacancies, payroll employees, and job vacancy rate by provinces and territories, monthly, unadjusted for seasonality

Executive Summary

Canada's job market experienced a dramatic post-COVID surge, with job vacancies peaking at over 1 million in May 2022 before cooling to 458,360 (2.6% vacancy rate) by February 2026. Across 14 regions tracked monthly from April 2015 to February 2026, the national average vacancy rate stands at 3.4%, with significant variation between large provinces like Ontario — which leads in absolute vacancies — and smaller territories like Yukon, which posts the highest vacancy rate at 4.69%. The 2021–2022 hiring boom represents the most structurally anomalous period in the dataset, sustained over multiple months rather than a single spike, followed by a steady normalization through 2023–2026.

Key Findings

• Job vacancies peaked at 1,037,195 in May 2022 — more than double pre-pandemic levels — before declining sharply to 458,360 by February 2026, reflecting a significant cooling of Canada's labour market.
• Canada's national average job vacancy rate is 3.43% over the full study period, with rates ranging from a low of 1.0% to a high of 11.0% across all regions and time periods.
• Ontario leads all provinces in absolute job vacancies with an average of 216,412 monthly vacancies, while Yukon posts the highest average job vacancy rate at 4.69%, illustrating the difference between market size and labour market tightness.
• Payroll employees grew steadily to 17,185,335 by February 2026, demonstrating resilient long-term employment growth despite the volatility in job vacancies over the same period.
• The 2021–2022 post-COVID surge was a prolonged structural shift rather than a single anomaly — no individual month exceeded the Z-score > 2.5 outlier threshold because elevated vacancies persisted across many consecutive months.
• Job Vacancy Rate is the most normally distributed of the three metrics (mean 3.38%, median 3.10%, standard deviation 1.30%), making it the most reliable measure for cross-regional comparisons regardless of province or territory size.
• Job Vacancies and Payroll Employees are both heavily right-skewed, with means far exceeding medians (85,451 vs. 13,520 for vacancies; 2.3M vs. 448,560 for payroll employees), driven by the inclusion of large national and Ontario-level totals alongside small territorial figures.