Canada Salary, Paycheck & Pay Stub Calculator (2026)

How take-home pay is calculated in Canada

Your take-home pay (net pay) is what's left after mandatory deductions come off your gross salary. The calculator works out four deductions — federal income tax, provincial income tax, CPP, and EI — subtracts them from your gross, and shows the result at whatever pay frequency you choose. Because income tax is progressive and CPP/EI have annual ceilings, your net pay per cheque can vary a little through the year.

What each input means

• Gross salary — your total pay before any deductions.
• Province — sets your provincial tax rates; two people on the same salary keep different amounts depending on where they live.
• Pay frequency — how your annual net is split (annually, monthly, bi-weekly, weekly), so you see the figure that matches your actual cheque.
• RRSP contribution — an optional amount that comes off your taxable income, lowering the tax you pay.

What's deducted from a Canadian paycheque

Your gross salary isn't what lands in your bank account. Four deductions come off first: federal income tax, provincial income tax, CPP, and EI. This calculator estimates each for 2026 and shows your real take-home at the pay frequency you choose.

CPP and EI in 2026

CPP is 5.95% of pensionable earnings between $3,500 and $74,600, maxing out at $4,230.45 (plus a small CPP2 layer up to $85,000). EI is 1.63% of insurable earnings up to $68,900, capped at $1,123.07. Once you hit these maximums during the year, those deductions stop — so later paycheques can be slightly larger.

Lowering your tax with RRSP

Add an RRSP contribution above and watch your tax fall — every dollar contributed comes off your taxable income. Whether RRSP or TFSA suits you better depends on your bracket; see our comparison.

Worked example

Suppose someone earns $70,000 gross in a year. As an illustration, income tax (federal plus provincial) might take roughly $12,000–$14,000 depending on the province, CPP takes close to its annual maximum, and EI takes a few hundred dollars. Netting those out leaves take-home pay in the region of $52,000–$54,000 — spread across the year, that's a little over $4,300 a month. These figures are a rounded illustration only; enter your own salary and province above for a proper estimate.

When do CPP and EI stop coming off your pay?

They stop the moment you hit the annual maximum, not at the end of the year — and from that payday onward every remaining cheque is bigger. In 2026 the ceilings are $4,646.45 of CPP (including CPP2) and $1,123.07 of EI. Once your year-to-date contributions reach those figures your employer stops deducting them, and only income tax comes off.

Where you land depends entirely on salary:

• Around $68,900 or less — you never reach the EI maximum, so both deductions run all year and your cheque stays level.
• Roughly $70,000 to $85,000 — EI usually finishes late in the year, CPP does not. You get a small step up for the last cheque or two.
• Well into six figures — both finish partway through. On $120,000 paid semi-monthly, EI stops after stub 14 and CPP after stub 17, and every cheque from then on is $370.82 larger.

This is why the "monthly take-home" figure most calculators show is a number you may never actually receive — it is your annual total divided by twelve, averaging away a step change worth hundreds of dollars a cheque. The table above shows every pay date individually, with the stubs where CPP or EI has finished highlighted in green and a ✓ against the year-to-date column that has maxed out, so you can see the exact payday your deposit changes.

Everything resets on 1 January. Your first cheque of the new year is back to the smaller amount, which catches people out every single January.

Why is my paycheque bigger in December?

Almost always because CPP, EI or both have reached their annual maximum, so those deductions have stopped for the year. Nothing about your salary or tax has changed — you have simply finished paying two of the four things that come off your gross. If you changed employer partway through the year the opposite can happen: a new employer restarts your CPP and EI counters from zero, so you can end up over-contributing across two jobs and reclaiming the excess when you file.

Ontario Health Premium 2026: how much you pay

Ontario is the province where a generic calculator is most likely to be wrong, because two charges sit outside the ordinary bracket arithmetic. The Ontario Health Premium is the bigger of the two. Every Ontario resident with taxable income above $20,000 pays it. It is collected through the income tax system rather than as a separate bill, so it never appears as its own line on your pay stub — it is simply part of the provincial tax withheld. It rises in steps rather than as a percentage:

Taxable income	Health premium	Effect on monthly take-home
Up to $20,000	$0	—
$25,000 – $36,000	$300	−$25.00
$38,500 – $48,000	$450	−$37.50
$48,600 – $72,000	$600	−$50.00
$72,600 – $200,000	$750	−$62.50
Over $200,600	$900	−$75.00

The steps matter more than the amounts. Because the premium jumps at a threshold rather than phasing in smoothly, a raise that carries you from $72,000 to $73,000 adds $150 of premium on top of the ordinary tax on that $1,000. It is one of the few places in Canadian payroll where a small raise is worth noticeably less than it looks.

The Ontario surtax — a tax charged on your tax

Unusually, this is a tax on your tax rather than on your income. Once your basic Ontario tax passes the first threshold an extra 20% is charged on the excess, and past a second threshold that rises to 36%. It is why Ontario's headline top rate understates what higher earners actually pay, and why comparing provinces on published rate tables alone is misleading.

Both are included in the calculator above when you select Ontario. If you have compared our figure against another tool and ours is lower, the health premium is the usual reason — many calculators omit it entirely.

This and the CRA payroll calculator are not the same tool

If you came looking for the Canada Revenue Agency payroll calculator — the Payroll Deductions Online Calculator, usually shortened to PDOC — it is a different thing from this page, and for some jobs it is the right one. It is worth knowing which you need.

PDOC is built for employers. Its job is to produce the exact deduction amounts a business must withhold and remit for a given pay period, including commission and pension payments and a CPP and EI verification mode. If you run payroll, that is the tool, and it is authoritative because the CRA publishes it.

This calculator is built for the person being paid. It answers a different question: what lands in your account, how the year adds up, and why the figure changes when CPP or EI reach their ceilings. It shows the reasoning rather than just the number.

Which calculator answers your question

If you want to…	Use
Work out what to withhold and remit as an employer	The CRA’s PDOC
Confirm an exact deduction for one pay period	The CRA’s PDOC
See what your own pay actually comes to	This page
Understand why a deduction changed mid-year	This page
Compare take-home pay across provinces	This page
Calculate Quebec provincial deductions	Neither — Revenu Québec’s WebRAS

Quebec is the sharp edge. PDOC does not do Quebec provincial deductions at all, because Quebec runs its own income tax, its own pension plan (QPP) and its own parental insurance (QPIP). The CRA directs Quebec employers to WebRAS from Revenu Québec instead. Our Quebec figures are an estimate for the same reason, and we say so wherever they appear.

One thing the CRA is explicit about and worth repeating: a calculator result is not an earnings statement. It omits information your province’s employment standards require on a real pay stub. If you are checking a stub you have been given, see how to check your Canadian pay stub is right.

The CRA’s tool is at canada.ca — Payroll Deductions Online Calculator. We are not affiliated with the Canada Revenue Agency.

Take-home pay by province and territory

Three provinces have their own page, because each has something the others do not: Ontario charges a health premium and a surtax on provincial tax, British Columbia dropped MSP premiums in 2020, and Alberta has by far the highest basic personal amount in Canada.

Federal tax is identical wherever you live in Canada. Everything on top of it is not — which is why the same $80,000 salary produces a visibly different deposit in Halifax than it does in Calgary. Choose your province in the calculator above and the provincial rates, brackets and credits change with it.

Three things vary from one province to the next:

• Provincial tax rates and brackets. Each province sets its own, and the income levels where the rates step up differ too, so two provinces with similar headline rates can still tax the same salary differently.
• Provincial credits and surtaxes. Some provinces apply a surtax on higher incomes, others have their own credits that reduce what you owe. These rarely make headlines but they move the final figure.
• Which plan takes your pension contribution. This is the one people miss — see Quebec below.

Quebec works differently

If you work in Quebec, your paycheque is not simply "Ontario with different rates". Three genuine differences apply:

• You contribute to the Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) rather than the CPP.
• You also pay QPIP premiums, funding Quebec's parental insurance plan, which employees elsewhere in Canada do not pay.
• Quebec collects its own provincial income tax directly, so you file a separate provincial return alongside your federal one.

The practical effect is that a Quebec paycheque has deduction lines a paycheque from another province simply does not have. If you are comparing an offer in Montreal against one in Toronto, compare net pay rather than gross — the gross figures are not describing the same thing.

If you searched for a city

Canadian payroll deductions are set provincially, not municipally — there is no separate Toronto or Vancouver income tax. So a "Toronto salary calculator" is really an Ontario calculation, a "Montreal salary calculator" is a Quebec one, and Ottawa, Hamilton and Windsor are all simply Ontario. Pick the province and your city is covered.

What genuinely differs between cities is the cost of living, not the deductions — which is exactly why net pay is the number worth comparing when you are weighing a move.

Alberta: the simplest province to calculate

Alberta has no provincial surtax and no health premium, which makes it the cleanest take-home calculation in the country — federal tax, provincial tax, CPP and EI, and nothing else bolted on. It also has the highest basic personal amount of any province at $22,769, so more of your first dollars are untaxed than anywhere else in Canada.

That does not automatically make it the highest take-home pay, which is the assumption most people make. At $90,000 an Albertan keeps about $67,509 — more than Ontario, but less than British Columbia's $68,193, because BC's lower opening rates outweigh Alberta's larger exemption at that income. Alberta's advantage is real but it is concentrated at lower incomes and at the very top, where the absence of a surtax matters most.

The territories are the genuine outlier: Nunavut produces the highest take-home pay at every salary level we tested, on a 4% opening rate. If you are comparing offers, run each province through the calculator above rather than relying on which one has the reputation for low taxes, or see take-home pay in all thirteen provinces side by side for $60,000 to $120,000.

How your pay frequency changes each cheque

Your annual take-home pay does not change with how often you are paid — but the size and number of your deposits certainly does, and the arithmetic surprises people more often than it should.

Pay frequency	Cheques per year	Typical pattern
Weekly	52	Every Friday
Bi-weekly	26	Every second Friday
Semi-monthly	24	15th and last day of the month
Monthly	12	Once a month

Bi-weekly and semi-monthly are not the same thing, and confusing them is the most common budgeting error in this whole area. Bi-weekly gives you 26 cheques; semi-monthly gives you 24. That means a bi-weekly cheque is smaller than a semi-monthly one on the same salary — but you get two extra cheques a year.

It also produces the phenomenon people notice and cannot explain: on a bi-weekly schedule, two months each year contain three paydays. Nothing has increased; the calendar has simply caught up. Budgeting as though every month has two paydays, and treating the third as a windfall for savings or debt, works better than the reverse.

Switch the frequency in the calculator above to see your own figure per cheque rather than per year.

Turning an hourly wage into a salary

If you are paid hourly, convert to an annual figure first and the calculator does the rest. The standard arithmetic is hourly rate × hours per week × 52. At 40 hours a week, a useful shortcut is that your hourly rate roughly doubles into thousands per year — $25 an hour is approximately $52,000.

Two cautions. Overtime is usually paid at a premium rate and is not captured by a flat multiplication, so treat the result as a baseline rather than a ceiling. And if your hours genuinely vary week to week, run the calculator on a conservative estimate rather than your best week — the deductions on a good month do not carry over to a quiet one.

Newcomers: "in-hand salary" explained

If you have moved to Canada from India, the UK or elsewhere, the phrase you are probably reaching for is in-hand salary — and in Canada the equivalent term is take-home pay or net pay. They mean the same thing: what actually arrives in your bank account.

Two things commonly surprise people on a first Canadian paycheque:

• The gap is larger than expected. Between federal tax, provincial tax, CPP and EI, the difference between gross and net is frequently 25–35% depending on your income and province. A job advertised at $70,000 does not deposit $70,000.
• Your deductions change during the year. CPP and EI stop once you reach their annual maximums, so later cheques are larger than earlier ones. This is not a payroll error, and it resets each January.

If you arrived partway through a calendar year, your first year is also unusual: you may have only part-year Canadian income, which can affect credits and the tax actually owed when you file. A calculator assumes a full year, so treat a mid-year arrival estimate as approximate and check with an accountant for your first return.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Confusing gross and net. A "$70,000 job" pays noticeably less than $70,000 in the bank.
• Forgetting CPP/EI stop mid-year. Once you reach the annual maximums, those deductions end and later cheques grow.
• Ignoring the RRSP effect. Contributing lowers your taxable income and can meaningfully raise your refund.
• Assuming every province is the same. Provincial rates differ, so identical salaries can net different amounts.

Estimate only

This is a simplified estimate using the basic personal amount and standard CPP/EI rates. Your actual paycheque may differ with additional credits, benefits, pension adjustments or taxable benefits. Your employer's payroll or the CRA's PDOC gives the official figure.

Sources. Federal and provincial brackets, the basic personal amount, and CPP and EI rates and ceilings are published by the Canada Revenue Agency. Ontario figures include the Ontario Health Premium, which many free calculators omit.
CRA — federal and provincial income tax rates · CRA — CPP contribution rates and maximums · CRA — EI premium rates and maximums · Government of Ontario — Health Premium

Frequently asked questions

What is take-home pay in Canada?

Take-home pay, or net pay, is what remains after deductions are subtracted from your gross salary. In Canada these deductions include federal and provincial income tax, Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contributions, and Employment Insurance (EI) premiums. This calculator estimates your net pay after all of them.

What is deducted from a Canadian paycheck?

The standard deductions are federal income tax, provincial income tax, CPP contributions and EI premiums. Your employer may also deduct benefits or pension contributions. CPP and EI have annual maximums, so their impact changes through the year once you hit the ceiling.

What are CPP and EI?

CPP (Canada Pension Plan) is a mandatory contribution that funds your future retirement pension, and EI (Employment Insurance) funds temporary income support if you lose your job. Both are automatically deducted from most paycheques up to yearly maximum amounts set by the government.

Why does my province affect my take-home pay?

Because provincial income tax rates differ across Canada, two people with identical gross salaries can have different net pay depending on where they live. This calculator factors in your province so your estimate reflects your actual location.

What's the difference between gross and net pay?

Gross pay is your total salary before anything is taken off. Net pay — your take-home — is what remains after income tax, CPP and EI are deducted. The gap between the two is often 25–35% of gross, depending on your income and province.

Is take-home pay the same every paycheque?

Not always. CPP and EI stop once you reach their annual maximums, so paycheques later in the year can be slightly larger. One-off items like bonuses are also taxed in the period they're paid, which can change a single cheque.

How can I increase my take-home pay?

Contributing to an RRSP lowers your taxable income and the tax withheld. Claiming the credits and deductions you're entitled to can also help. This tool shows the RRSP effect instantly when you enter a contribution.

What is the take-home pay on a $100,000 salary in Canada?

It depends heavily on your province, but on a six-figure salary the combined federal tax, provincial tax, CPP and EI commonly absorb somewhere in the region of 30% or more, leaving take-home pay in the low-to-mid $70,000s in many provinces. Because provincial rates, brackets and surtaxes differ, the spread between the highest- and lowest-tax provinces at this income is thousands of dollars a year — enter $100,000 above and select your province for a figure specific to you.

How do I work out my monthly take-home pay?

Enter your annual gross salary, choose your province, then set the pay frequency to monthly. The calculator divides your annual net pay into twelve. If you are actually paid bi-weekly, monthly budgeting is slightly trickier — you receive 26 cheques a year, so two months contain three paydays rather than two.

What is the difference between bi-weekly and semi-monthly pay?

Bi-weekly means every two weeks, giving 26 cheques a year. Semi-monthly means twice a month, giving 24. On the same salary each bi-weekly cheque is therefore smaller, but you receive two more of them across the year. Your annual take-home pay is identical either way.

Is there a separate Toronto or Vancouver take-home pay calculator?

No, and you do not need one. Canadian payroll deductions are set federally and provincially — there is no municipal income tax — so a Toronto calculation is simply an Ontario one and a Vancouver calculation is British Columbia. Selecting your province covers your city.

How do I calculate take-home pay from an hourly wage?

Multiply your hourly rate by the hours you work in a typical week, then by 52, and enter that annual figure. Overtime is normally paid at a premium rate and is not captured by that multiplication, so treat the result as a baseline.

How do I see just my income tax?

To focus only on the federal and provincial income tax portion, use our Canada income tax calculator.

This calculator provides estimates for general information only and is not financial or tax advice. See our disclaimer.