AI Analysis: Job vacancies, payroll employees, and job vacancy rate by industry sector, monthly, adjusted for seasonality

Executive Summary

Canada's labour market experienced a dramatic post-COVID surge, with job vacancies peaking at 988,430 in June 2022 before declining to 497,160 by February 2026, while payroll employment reached an all-time high of 17.46 million. The job vacancy rate has since cooled to 2.8%, signalling a normalization from the unprecedented 2021–2022 labour market tightness, though structural hiring pressures persist across key industries. Across the full 2015–2026 period, the average vacancy rate held at 3.27%, with significant variation by sector reflecting Canada's diverse industry landscape.

Key Findings

• Job vacancies peaked at 988,430 in June 2022 — the highest level in the dataset — then fell sharply to 497,160 by February 2026, roughly a 50% decline from peak.
• The job vacancy rate reached a high of 13.5% in some sectors during the post-pandemic recovery, compared to a long-run average of 3.27% and a current national rate of 2.8% as of February 2026.
• Payroll employment grew steadily throughout the period, reaching 17,460,010 in the latest month, reflecting sustained long-term expansion of Canada's workforce despite pandemic disruptions.
• 9 out of 125 monthly data points (~7%) were flagged as statistical outliers using Z-score detection, with anomalies concentrated around the COVID-19 drop in 2020 and the record-high vacancy surge in 2021–2022.
• Job vacancies are heavily right-skewed across industries, with a mean of 55,625 but a median of only 22,680, indicating that a small number of large sectors drive the majority of unfilled positions nationally.
• Payroll employee counts vary enormously across the 20 industry sub-sectors, ranging from approximately 95,335 in the smallest sectors to over 17.4 million in aggregate, highlighting the structural diversity of Canada's labour market.
• The pre-COVID period (2015–2019) was characterized by stable, low vacancy levels, making the 2021–2022 spike — driven by simultaneous demand recovery and labour supply constraints — historically unprecedented in this dataset.