How Pay Transparency Laws Rolled Out Across Canada by Province: PEI, British Columbia and Ontario

There is no single national rule on whether a Canadian job ad has to show a salary. Any pay transparency laws canada by province playbook you build has to go province by province, because the requirement arrived in three separate waves, four years apart, each one slightly stricter than the last.

PEI pay transparency 2022: the quiet first mover

Prince Edward Island went first, and with the least fanfare. From June 2022, publicly advertised job postings in PEI had to state the expected pay or an expected pay range. There was no cap on how wide that range could be and little national coverage of the change — but it set the template every later province would follow: put a number, or a band, in the ad itself.

BC Pay Transparency Act 2023: wider adoption, still no cap

British Columbia’s Pay Transparency Act took effect on 1 November 2023, requiring wage or salary information on publicly advertised postings, with the figure expected to reflect the employer’s genuine expectation of pay at the time of posting. Like PEI, BC set no explicit cap on how wide a range could be. What BC does have is evidence the law actually changes behaviour: by the end of 2025, 85% of BC job postings included salary information, compared with roughly 52% elsewhere in Canada. That gap is the clearest proof available that a legislated requirement moves employer practice further than voluntary norms ever did.

Ontario pay range disclosure 2026 reference: the strictest version yet

Ontario’s rules, in force from 1 January 2026 under the Employment Standards Act, apply to employers with 25 or more employees and go further than either predecessor. They must disclose expected compensation or a range — and here Ontario adds something PEI and BC didn’t: the range cannot span more than $50,000, except for roles paying above $200,000 a year, where the cap doesn’t apply. Use this as your Ontario pay range disclosure 2026 reference point when comparing job ads: a posting offering “$60,000–$150,000” would not meet the Ontario standard, while “$60,000–$95,000” would.

Ontario’s January 2026 package didn’t stop at pay. The same rules require employers to disclose whether AI is used to screen, assess or select applicants, to state whether a posting is for a genuinely existing vacancy rather than a “ghost job,” to drop Canadian work-experience requirements from postings and application forms entirely, to notify interviewed candidates of an outcome within 45 days of the final interview, and to retain postings, application forms and interview records for three years. General recruitment campaigns not tied to a specific role, internal-only postings, and roles outside ESA jurisdiction are exempt.

What this means for reading Canadian job ads

For a South African reader comparing postings across provinces, the practical upshot is this: a BC or Ontario ad with no salary listed is likely non-compliant rather than simply old-fashioned, while an Ontario ad citing a suspiciously wide range may be for a role paying well over $200,000 or may not be complying with the cap at all. Elsewhere in Canada — outside PEI, BC and Ontario — no general job-posting pay-disclosure law has been confirmed as at mid-2026, so don’t assume the absence of a number on a posting from another province means anything is wrong; it may simply not be legally required there yet. If a specific province’s rules matter to your own job search, checking that province’s current employment standards office directly is the safer move than relying on a general summary.