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

Executive Summary

Canada's labour market expanded steadily from April 2015 to February 2026, with payroll employees growing 15.6% to 17.46 million, while job vacancies surged dramatically during the post-pandemic period before normalizing to ~497,160 (a 2.8% vacancy rate) as of February 2026. The most defining event in the dataset is the 2021–2022 labour market tightening, when vacancies peaked at 988,430 in June 2022 — a statistically flagged outlier well above the IQR upper bound of 921,750. Across regions, vacancy rates cluster tightly around 3%, though smaller territories like Yukon consistently show the tightest labour markets relative to their workforce size.

Key Findings

• Canada's job vacancy rate held steady at 2.8% from the start to the end of the period (April 2015 – February 2026), despite dramatic swings in absolute vacancy counts in between.
• Job vacancies peaked at 988,430 in June 2022 — nearly double pre-pandemic levels — before declining sharply to ~497,160 by February 2026, marking the post-COVID surge as the dataset's most significant anomaly.
• Payroll employees grew from approximately 15.1 million to 17.46 million over the study period, representing a 15.6% increase across more than a decade of monthly data.
• Job Vacancies and Payroll Employees are very strongly correlated (r = 0.948), meaning larger regional labour markets consistently generate more vacancies in absolute terms, while the Job Vacancy Rate is nearly independent of employer size (r = 0.026).
• The Job Vacancy Rate is the most normally distributed of the three measures, with a mean of 3.39%, median of 3.10%, and a tight standard deviation of 1.20%, ranging from 1.1% to 9.6% across all regions and months.
• Yukon recorded the highest average job vacancy rate at 4.71%, reflecting the persistently tightest labour market relative to workforce size among all provinces and territories.
• Both job vacancies and payroll employees exhibit strong right-skew — medians (13,500 vacancies; 452,000 employees) are far below their means (85,680; 2.32 million) — driven by the outsized weight of large provinces like Ontario and Quebec versus small territories.