ADP Canada will begin publishing monthly data that tracks how much individual Canadian workers’ pay changes from one year to the next, the payroll company said Wednesday.
The report, called ADP Canada Pay Insights, will publish its first release Thursday, Sept. 3. It will draw on payroll records from about 1.6 million Canadian workers. ADP says it pays one in five workers in the country.
“I don’t need to tell you that this is one of the most complex labour markets in human history,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist and head of ADP Research. “You have so many things going on, from geopolitics to demographic shifts to AI technology, and it’s all feeding through the labour market.”
What sets the report apart is that it follows the same workers over 12 months and compares each person’s pay with what they earned a year earlier, Richardson said. She said it is the only report that can match individual Canadian workers to themselves over that period.
Each worker is given an anonymized identifier that stays with them even if they leave an ADP client and later return, so the company can track pay across job changes without identifying anyone. Richardson said that approach removes what economists call cohort effects, because it compares a worker only with their own earlier pay rather than with different groups of workers.
The report will separate workers who stay in their jobs from those who switch, and calculate the pay gap between the two. That gap can widen or narrow with the labour market. In the United States, the difference between job stayers’ and job changers’ pay growth rose by as much as 9 per cent, though it has narrowed over the past two years, Richardson said.
What the report will measure
ADP Canada Pay Insights will report the median annual pay change and break the data down by province and territory. Richardson said it will not publish detailed figures for the Northwest Territories and other regions with small sample sizes.
The report will also group workers by age, sorting them into young adults 16 to 34, mid-career workers 35 to 54, and older workers 55 to 85. It will sort employers by size, from small businesses with fewer than 200 employees to medium firms of 200 to 500 and large employers with more than 500.
The data will be cut by major industry groups, including financial activities, construction and health care. Richardson said industries with the highest demand tend to see the most turnover, which drives the strongest pay growth among job changers.
The matched sample skews older and slightly more male than the overall workforce, Richardson said, because it tracks people with steady, year-over-year employment. A snapshot of all workers would show a younger and more female workforce, she said, since women and younger workers are more concentrated in higher-turnover industries.
“We’re not in the prediction business,” Richardson said, when asked whether the report could serve as an early predictor of other economic indicators. She said the data instead shows where the labour market is hottest by geography, industry and age group, and gives a view into what employers are doing now.
Richardson said the report is meant to complement government statistics and other private-sector data. ADP launched Pay Insights in the United States in 2022.
