User Guide — Canada Legal Salaries Dashboard
Overview
- This dashboard presents estimated annual salaries (10th percentile, median, mean, 90th percentile) for common legal roles across Canadian provinces.
- The figures are estimates assembled from multiple public salary aggregators/job boards to fill coverage gaps and validate regional differences. These estimates are intended for benchmarking and informational use only.
Primary data sources used
- PayScale (province / city salary pages used where available).
- Glassdoor (province-level ranges and supporting percentile context).
- Indeed (consulted where role or posting-level salary information was available).
- LinkedIn Jobs (used to confirm local hiring volumes and market activity for specific roles).
- Internal surveys used for city/distribution indexing files to map figures to provinces where necessary.
What the percentiles mean
- 10th percentile = lower end of typical pay for the role (entry-level / lower-paid incumbents)
- Median = typical (middle) salary
- Mean = arithmetic average
- 90th percentile = higher end pay (senior or top earners)
Methodology
- Direct pulls — where a role/province page existed on PayScale, Glassdoor or Indeed, published medians/means/percentiles were used directly.
- City → province proxies — when a provincial specialty page did not exist, the largest city in the province (e.g., Toronto, Montreal, Regina) was used as a conservative proxy; proxy usage is recorded in the source metadata.
- Role‑family proxies — for specialty sub‑roles with no direct data (e.g., some law‑clerk subtypes, notary support roles), a closely related job family (paralegal, legal assistant) was used and flagged as a proxy.
Limitations
- Many legal employers do not publish salaries in job postings; PayScale, Glassdoor and Indeed use user submissions and modelled estimates — sample sizes vary, and some role/province combinations have sparse data. Treat small-sample estimates cautiously.
- Small provinces, niche specialties, and some law‑clerk subtypes often have limited public data. Where credible direct data did not exist, cells left blank.
- Percentiles and means are presented to indicate distribution, but they are estimates — they should be treated as a benchmarking input, not a definitive market rate.
Filters & visualizations
- Filters: Use the dropdowns to select Location, Practice Area, Job Title. Click “Reset Filters” to clear selections.
- Visualizations: Compare salary averages by location and practice area and open the detailed salary table for selected roles.
- Percentile interpretation: Use the percentiles to understand entry/typical/high-end pay bands for the roles included.