What hiring an underwriter actually costs a Canadian brokerage.

Job Bank's wage report for the Mortgage Underwriter occupation lists a range in Ontario of roughly $23.00 to $66.46 per hour, with British Columbia running somewhat higher, at roughly $24.04 to $71.79 per hour. That's a wide spread — it reflects everything from an entry-level underwriting assistant to a senior underwriter with years of lender-side experience — and it varies by region, so it's worth checking the current figure for your specific province before budgeting against it.

Translate the higher end of that range to an annual, full-time figure and a brokerage is looking at a base salary well into six figures for an experienced hire — and that's before anything else is added on top.

The wage is the floor, not the total. A realistic loaded cost adds employer-side benefits and payroll contributions, access to underwriting or file-review software, initial training on your specific lender panel and programs, and a meaningful share of a manager's time spent overseeing a specialized role that most brokerage owners can't fully evaluate themselves without underwriting experience of their own.

None of that is unique to underwriting — it's the same math that applies to any specialized hire — but it matters more here because the skill is narrow enough that recruiting and retention carry real risk if the hire doesn't work out.

A dedicated underwriting hire is a fixed cost every month, whether the pipeline is full or thin. A brokerage with variable monthly volume — the normal state for most independent shops — pays that fixed salary in the slow months exactly the same as in the busy ones, which is the opposite of how a variable-cost model behaves.

This is the same dynamic covered from the processing side in The True Cost of an In-House Processing Team — underwriting support follows the identical logic, one skill level up, and the specialized nature of the role makes idle capacity even more expensive to carry.

As a rule of thumb: under roughly 15 files a month, a dedicated in-house underwriting hire rarely pencils out — there isn't enough steady volume to keep the cost justified against the wage data above. In the 15–40 file range, contract underwriting or a fulfillment partner's built-in review tends to fit better, since the cost scales with volume instead of sitting fixed. Above roughly 40 files a month, consistently, the math starts to turn — often alongside, not instead of, a fulfillment or AI layer handling first-pass review.

We walked the full three-model comparison — in-house hire, fulfillment partner, AI tool — with cost ranges by model in Outsourced Mortgage Underwriting in Canada.

Three alternatives convert the fixed cost of a hire into a variable one: contract underwriting (an independent contractor engaged per file or by retainer, covered in our companion piece on contract underwriting support), a fulfillment partner with underwriting-style review built into the broader service, and an AI underwriting tool a broker or agent runs themselves.

Treadstone runs the fulfillment version of this for Canadian brokerages, and is opening early access to Engage's AI mortgage underwriting — a tool built for brokers to underwrite-review files themselves, at a fraction of the cost of a dedicated hire, via an email waitlist.