The industry-wide number is published monthly and is solid. The trade-by-trade table everyone wants is collected too — but not published in a form you can actually read.
Headline figure
$1,629.68
Average weekly earnings including overtime for all employees in Canadian construction, March 2026, seasonally adjusted — Statistics Canada, Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours, released 28 May 2026 (Table 14-10-0223-01).
What the data says
Statistics Canada measures earnings through the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours, published monthly. The March 2026 edition was released on 28 May 2026. One quirk worth knowing: the narrative release page does not mention construction earnings anywhere in its prose. The industry-by-industry dollar figures appear only in the companion earnings table that accompanies it. Both belong to the same release; the table is the one to cite.
| Reference month | Average weekly earnings | Change |
|---|---|---|
| February 2026 | $1,601.81 | — |
| March 2026 | $1,629.68 | +$27.87 (+1.7%) |
Source: Statistics Canada, Average weekly earnings (including overtime) for all employees — Seasonally adjusted, Table 1 accompanying the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours release of 28 May 2026, Table 14-10-0223-01. The percentage change is computed from the two published dollar figures.
This is the part most published wage guides get wrong, so it is worth being precise. Statistics Canada does run a series built specifically for trades: the Construction Union Wage Rate Index, released semi-annually on a 2015=100 basis. The January to June 2026 release, published 17 July 2026 confirms its scope covers 17 trades across 25 metropolitan areas.
The problem is practical. That release’s text carries no index values, no percentage changes and no dollar figures — the numbers sit in linked data tables that render only in a browser. So while the series exists and is authoritative, no specific per-trade rate can be quoted from the published release. Any article presenting a tidy “electrician versus plumber versus carpenter” wage table sourced to Statistics Canada is either reading a different product or filling the gaps itself. Rather than do that, this page gives the industry-wide figure that is genuinely published and names where the trades data lives for anyone who wants to query it directly.
It is also worth separating two things a “trade wage” can mean. A union wage rate is a negotiated schedule rate for a classification in a named city. Average weekly earnings is what employers actually paid, across union and non-union work, including overtime, averaged over everyone on the payroll. They answer different questions.
The $1,629.68 weekly figure is an average across the whole construction industry — labourers and project managers, first-year apprentices and thirty-year journeypersons, in every province. It is a good measure of how the industry’s payroll cost is moving over time and a poor guide to what any individual role pays. It is also a weekly figure in a seasonal industry, so multiplying it by 52 overstates what most construction employees earn in a year.
For a firm, the useful reading is directional. Earnings rising 1.7% in a single month is a payroll-cost signal that shows up in bids months later, which is why it belongs beside the building construction price indexes — Statistics Canada explicitly named the “constrained skilled trades workforce” as one of the drivers of rising construction prices in the same period.
For how many people this payroll covers and how it splits by firm size, see who actually works in Canadian construction. For the other side of the labour picture, injury rates in construction.
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