The median income for working Canadians is $49,351, according to data released Wednesday from Statistics Canada’s National Household Survey.
If you’re like me, you looked at that figure and compared your own salary to it (and maybe felt pretty good that you were doing better than average). But that figure is the median income for all Canadians working full-time: everyone from the high-school dropout flipping burgers to the particle physicist with the PhD.
What you really want to know is how your salary compares to people like you. So, using a detailed data table from StatsCan’s website, I built a little calculator that lets you see what the median income is for someone who shares your demographic characteristics.
In addition to letting you see whether you’re doing better or worse than average for someone like you, the graphic also lets you see — in pretty stark terms — how certain demographic characteristics impact income.
Not surprisingly, education makes a big difference to your pay, as does your age: we tend to make more money as we climb the career ladder. More depressingly, the graphic also illustrates that men make considerably more than women and whites tend to make more money than non-whites.
For example, for someone like me — a white male between 35 and 44 with a bachelor’s degree — the median income is $82,899, a heck of a lot higher than the overall median of $49,351. But if I was female instead of male, the median drops down to $70,225. I take almost as big a hit if I change my ethnicity to Chinese ($71,613).
Interestingly, the calculator also suggests that the benefits of higher education may grow as you age, or — alternatively — were more important in previous generations. For a white male ages 25-34, the income gap between high-school and university graduates is $19,000 ($41,000 vs. $60,000). By age 45-54, that gap has grown to $37,000 ($54,000 vs. $91,000).
Play around with the calculator and see how your income compares to the median income of folks like you.
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