Toronto Has Lowest Median Income Among 15 Largest Canada, US Metro Areas

The CN Tower is seen in Toronto in a file photo. The Canadian Press/Colin Perkel

Toronto has the lowest median employment income among the 15 largest metropolitan areas in Canada and the United States, a recent study by think tank Fraser Institute shows.

The study, titled “Comparing Employment Income in Toronto and Selected American Metropolitan Areas” and conducted after several other recent studies by the think tank, found that a large “prosperity gap” exists between Ontario and nearby U.S. states.

“Workers in Toronto, our largest urban centre, are generally earning less employment income than people in the largest American metro areas,” said study co-author Ben Eisen, a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute, in a Feb. 15 news release.

The study compared the 2019 median employment income in Toronto with that of the 14 largest American metropolitan areas. Toronto’s median was $37,550, $2,030 less than the lowest-ranking U.S. metropolitan area, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach in Florida, which had a median of $39,580, according to the study, based on data sourced from Statistics Canada and the U.S. Census Bureau.

The gap widened to $32,765 when Toronto was compared with San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley in California, the highest-ranking U.S. metro area, with a median employment income of $70,315.

The calculation took into consideration wages, salaries, and commissions from paid and self-employment income before taxes, and government transfers, said the news release.

To qualify for inclusion in the study, Canadian metropolitan areas (CMAs) must have a population of at least 100,000 people with at least 50,000 residents in the core. Toronto was the only CMA large enough to qualify for it, the study noted.

In the United States, cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and Houston were selected as they contain “a large population nucleus together with adjacent communities with a high degree of economic and social integration with that core,” wrote the authors, citing the U.S. Census Bureau.

The study also measured growth in median employment earnings during the 2010s. “We also found that from 2010 to 2019, Toronto’s growth performance on this indicator was in the bottom half of the rankings,” it said.

Specifically, Toronto ranked 10th among the 15 metropolitan areas, with an annual median employment income growth rate of 0.4 percent.

“Employment incomes are generally higher in the biggest U.S. metropolitan areas than they are in Toronto, and the gap grew throughout the 2010s,” Mr. Eisen said.

The authors also explained why they chose 2019 as the “endpoint” for their study.

“We chose 2019 as the endpoint because it is the last year of comparable data in both Canada and the United States that is not distorted by the potentially short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and recession,” they wrote.