Canada AI salaries at a glance.
National median base salary, annual, in CAD. Open the city pages below for per-city figures across all 10 cities.
| Role | Median (national) |
|---|---|
| AI Product Manager | CA$138,674 |
| Engineering Manager | CA$138,674 |
| Software Engineer | CA$117,499 |
| DevOps Engineer | CA$117,499 |
| AI Infrastructure Engineer | CA$117,499 |
| Backend Developer | CA$100,006 |
| Data Scientist | CA$95,992 |
| Data Engineer | CA$95,992 |
| Machine Learning Engineer | CA$95,992 |
| AI Engineer | CA$95,992 |
| ML Engineer | CA$95,992 |
| Prompt Engineer | CA$95,992 |
Sourcing.
Canada figures today come from ESDC Open Government wages alone. The reconciliation is designed for two sources at locked weights; the Statistics Canada Web Data Service is built but not yet ingested (it needs the NOC-to-vector bootstrap), so it carries no weight in the current numbers.
| Source | Status | Design weight |
|---|---|---|
| ESDC Open Government wage data (NOC 2021) | Live | 0.60 |
| Statistics Canada Web Data Service (LFS Table 14-10-0064-01) | Planned | 0.40 |
Design weights sum to 1.0 and activate as each source is ingested. Methodology paper.
10 cities. NOC 2021 coded.
Toronto.
Ontario · pop. 6.7M · ER 3530
Canada's largest tech hub. AI research density anchored by Vector Institute and University of Toronto; fintech and scale-ups concentrated downtown.
Montreal.
Quebec · pop. 4.4M · ER 2470
AI research capital of Canada. Mila and Yoshua Bengio's lab anchor a deep-learning cluster; lower cost-of-living than Toronto with competitive salaries.
Vancouver.
British Columbia · pop. 2.6M · ER 5930
West Coast Canadian tech hub. Strong AI engineering and gaming presence; remote-friendly culture pulls senior talent from US West Coast firms.
Ottawa.
Ontario · pop. 1.5M · ER 3510
Canada's capital and a federal-tech corridor. Strong cybersecurity and government-services presence; growing AI engineering footprint.
Calgary.
Alberta · pop. 1.5M · ER 4830
Alberta's largest city. Energy-sector tech anchored historically; growing AI engineering and fintech presence as the economy diversifies.
Waterloo.
Ontario · pop. 0.6M · ER 3540
Per-capita AI engineering density rivals Toronto. Anchored by University of Waterloo and an entrepreneurial alumni network spanning BlackBerry to OpenAI.
Edmonton.
Alberta · pop. 1.4M · ER 4860
Alberta's capital. AI research anchored by Amii (Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute) and University of Alberta; reinforcement learning research density.
Quebec City.
Quebec · pop. 0.8M · ER 2410
Quebec's capital. French-language tech market with growing AI engineering and government-services presence.
Halifax.
Nova Scotia · pop. 0.5M · ER 1210
Atlantic Canada's tech anchor. Mid-market software engineering with growing remote-first culture pulling talent from Toronto.
Winnipeg.
Manitoba · pop. 0.83M · ER 4710
Manitoba's capital. Diversified mid-market tech with software engineering, fintech, and growing AI tooling presence.
Open Gov today. StatCan by design.
ESDC's Open Government wages dataset publishes per-occupation wage estimates at the Economic Region (ER) level. Granular geography, no published cell-count sample size. That is the sole live Canada source today, so every Canada figure carries placeholder_only sample-size attribution.
The design adds Statistics Canada's Wage Data Service at weight 0.40 for provincial-level percentile depth, reconciled with ESDC's ER-level geography. That connector is built but not yet ingested (it needs the NOC-to-vector bootstrap), so it does not contribute to the current numbers.
Geographic granularity.
ESDC publishes at the Economic Region level, which often does not align with the Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) boundary that consumers expect. Toronto-CMA does not equal the Toronto ER. Vancouver-CMA does not equal the Mainland-Southwest ER. Orbyt's city slugs use the CMA-style names but resolve to the ER code via a published mapping table. The methodology paper documents which ER each Orbyt city resolves to so an auditor can verify the geographic assumption without guessing.
Canada data status.
Canada data is live for the seeded AI and engineering roles via ESDC Open Government wages (per-city, NOC 2021), served on the locked API contract through `?country=CA`. The Statistics Canada Web Data Service second source is on the roadmap (it needs the NOC-to-vector bootstrap); it activates without any API contract change.