Government pay vs. everyone else
How Ontario's public administration wages compare to every other industry, 2001 to 2025, using StatCan's survey of employers rather than the Sunshine List.
This page isn't built from Sunshine List data. The Sunshine List only discloses people earning $100,000 or more, so any "average" computed from it is heavily skewed upward. It's the wrong dataset for an apples-to-apples comparison. Instead, both lines below come from Statistics Canada's Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours, which covers every paycheque, not just the ones above the disclosure line.
One more caveat: StatCan's "public administration" is federal, provincial, and municipal government administration specifically. It does not include most of what actually drives the Sunshine List, hospitals, school boards, and universities, since StatCan's industry codes for health care and education mix public and private employers together and can't be split out. So this page compares government to industry broadly, it isn't a full public-sector-vs-private-sector picture.
The gap over time
Average annual earnings, Ontario, public administration vs. all industries combined. In 2025, the gap was $23,141.
Where government pay ranks
Average annual earnings by industry, Ontario, 2025. Public administration highlighted in red.
Source: Statistics Canada, table 14-10-0204-01, average weekly earnings by industry, Ontario, all employees including overtime. Figures shown are annualized (weekly x 52) and are averages, not medians, so they aren't directly comparable to the median figures used elsewhere on this site.