Methodology

What the lists contain

Ontario's Sunshine List names every employee of a covered public employer paid $100,000 or more in a calendar year, with their employer, job title, salary paid and taxable benefits. Salary paid is what was paid in the year, so it can include retroactive pay, overtime, vacation payouts, severance or a partial year. We publish the figures exactly as the employer reported them.

The threshold

The $100,000 line was set in 1996 and has never been indexed to inflation. More people cross it every year simply because pay rises with prices, so growth in the count is not the same as growth in high pay. Compare medians and the same employer over time instead. By Statistics Canada’s consumer price index (table 18-10-0005-01), $100,000 in 1996 is $184,702 in 2025 dollars; 30,285 people were paid more than that in 2025.

Following people across years

The lists carry no identifier for a person. We join a record to the same person's record in an earlier year only when the match is clear:

Same name and employer, seen within the previous three years. If two people share a name at one employer, their job titles must tell them apart; if they do not, we do not guess.
A move between employers only when the name appears exactly once on both years' lists and the job title or sector is the same. Such a move is labelled on the person's page.

Initials and nicknames in brackets are ignored when comparing first names ("L. Michelle" and "Michelle L." match). Early lists abbreviate employers ("Toronto DSB", "Transit Comm."); those spellings are read as the full names. A wrong match is possible but rare; tell us at corrections and we fix it.

Job titles

Employers write titles differently. For job pages and medians we treat case, punctuation, a French second half and a short inverted form ("Teacher, Elementary") as the same title; each person's record still shows the title exactly as published. Medians for a job need at least five people; job pages need 15 people in the latest year.

Figures

Median: the middle salary. Half were paid more, half less.
Change: salary minus the same person's salary on the previous year's list.
Rank at the employer: position among that employer's people on the list that year.
Share paid less: of the people on that year's list (or in the same job), the share with a lower salary. Everyone on the list is above the threshold, so this compares people with each other, not with all workers.
Peer strips on person pages show the lowest, middle 80%, middle half, median and highest salary of the same job, or the same employer, that year. Positions are on a log scale, because pay is spread out at the top.
Same job, different employer: the median salary of a job at each employer with at least five (job pages) or ten (home page) people in it.

Updates

A new year is added on the day it is published. Every update is a recorded change: the source files, their checksums and the counts are in our history.