Mining in Canada pays well but wage growth has sunk to near the bottom

Canada’s mining and oil and gas workers have the country’s highest average weekly earnings by a wide margin. They are also, this fall, among the worst-rewarded for staying loyal.

New payroll data from ADP Canada, drawn from the paycheques of roughly 1.6 million private-sector workers, show median gross pay growth for workers who stayed in their jobs in natural resources and mining was 4.1% year over year in October.

The rate of pay growth was unchanged from September and tied for eighth of the 10 sectors ADP tracks. It also came in below the national figure of 4.5% for job-stayers. Only “other services” (3.3%), which includes everyone from barbers to pastors, did worse.

The sector sharing eighth place with mining and the oil patch is information, the closest thing in the data to tech (but it also includes journalists). Tech may be feeling the first effects of growing AI use especially for junior positions, but finance, which also looks ripe for superintelligence disruption, fared much better, at 5%.

Statistics Canada’s payroll survey, which lags the ADP data by two months, puts average weekly earnings in mining, quarrying and oil and gas at $2,584 in August, against $1,355 across all industries and $531 in accommodation and food services. A 5.4% raise on $531 is about $29 a week and 4.1% on $2,584 is about $106.

StatCan also shows slower growth in average weekly earnings in the combined mining, quarrying and oil and gas sector – up only 0.8% year over year. The all-industry figure rose 3.7%.

Naturally volatile

ADP’s natural resources (mainly oil and gas and a few farmworkers and loggers) and mining category has been the most volatile pay sector in the country since January 2023. It is roughly four times as volatile as manufacturing as measured by the standard deviation of its monthly pay-growth readings. In July 2023, workers in the sector recorded gross pay growth of nearly 12%.

The sector held the top spot for eight straight months. By March 2026, the same series had sunk to 2.9%, the lowest of any sector, where it stayed for five months. Manufacturing’s range over that period is no more than 2.4 percentage points while mining’s swings and roundabouts come to 8.6 percentage points. A quick glance at NYMEX or COMEX will explain why.

Onus on bonus

Base pay – the hourly rate or salary, stripped of overtime, bonuses and commissions – for natural resources and mining job-stayers is growing at 3%. Growth is similar in every other sector: all 10 are at 3% or 3.1%. Canadian consumer prices rose about 10% over 2022 and 2023 combined.

Canada’s most recent inflation rate was 3.1% in October, but in September gasoline was 28% and airfares 19% more expensive than a year earlier. StatCan says alcohol, tobacco and cannabis are only 1.6% dearer.

It’s often boom and bust in mining and gross pay follows the up and down cycles. In October 2023, the sector’s gross pay growth (11%) outran its base pay growth (4.5%) by 6.5 percentage points, a gap between the two growth rates no other sector came close to. In October 2026, the gap is 1.1 percentage points, and it has turned negative three times in two years, most recently in March.

FIFO FOMO

Compounding ADP’s October median pay-growth readings from 2023 through 2026 produces an illustrative increase of about 27% for natural resources and mining, compared with 22% nationally. The sector leads the comparison, just ahead of financial activities and leisure and hospitality. These calculations combine annual snapshots; they do not measure the cumulative gains of individual workers.

Loyalty: for dogs

ADP doesn’t break out job-hopping by sector. Nationally, job-changers saw gross pay rise 10% in October against 4.5% for stayers, a gap of 5.9 percentage points using unrounded figures, the widest since February 2024 and more than three percentage points wider than a year ago, when switchers’ raises bottomed at 7.1%. Base pay tells the same story: 6% for changers, 3% for stayers.

If the market is paying job-changers 10%, the arithmetic of staying put looks like a grind, particularly for mid-career workers. Among job-stayers across the economy, those aged 35 to 54 saw gross pay rise 4.4% in October, close to the national figure. Those aged 55 and older got 2.9%. Only stayers under 25, at 11%, kept pace with switchers, and that is the usual early-career ramp.

There is good news. The combined mining and oil and gas sector has added jobs over the past year. StatCan’s payroll count for mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction rose 3.9% year over year in August to 226,600, the fastest growth of any of the 20 sectors it tracks, in an economy where overall payroll employment grew only 0.3%.