From Gross Offer to Take-Home Pay — What Actually Lands in Your Account

“But the offer letter said $90,000” — a newcomer says it three weeks into a new Ontario job, staring at a deposit that’s meaningfully smaller than a twelfth of that number, doing the maths and coming up confused. The offer wasn’t wrong. Going from a gross offer to take-home pay in Canada eats more than most South Africans expect, and the gap between a headline salary and a deposit is worth walking through in order, the way it actually hits your pay.

The day you sign: the gross number

$90,000 is what goes in the offer letter, the contract, and every conversation about the role. It is not what arrives in your bank account, and no single deduction explains the whole gap — it’s the accumulation of several, applied in sequence.

The first deduction, before tax even starts

CPP and EI come off first, and they’re federal, not provincial — identical wherever in Canada you work. CPP employee contributions run at 5.95% of earnings in 2026, capped at $4,230.45 for the year. EI runs at 1.63%, capped at $1,123.07. Together these are the closest Canadian equivalent to what a UIF deduction represents on an SA payslip, though the mechanics and rates aren’t directly comparable — the companion piece on reading a T4 with South African eyes goes further into that comparison if you want it.

Then two layers of income tax

Federal tax applies first — 14% up to $58,523, 20.5% from there to $117,045 for 2026 — then your province applies its own separate schedule on top. This is the layer with no real South African equivalent, and it’s covered properly in the companion piece on how Canada’s two tax layers work. The short version for this timeline: the same $90,000 nets differently depending on which province signed your offer.

The illustrative gross-to-net table for a $90,000 offer

These are the site’s own estimates, built from the published 2026 rates, for a single person with no dependants and no RRSP contributions — accurate to roughly ±1.5% and no replacement for running your own numbers on the CRA’s free Payroll Deductions Online Calculator.

The deduction line that isn’t on the payslip at all

Your employer matches your CPP contribution dollar-for-dollar and pays EI at 1.4 times your rate — real money spent on you that never shows as a deduction, because it’s the employer’s cost rather than yours. Beyond that, most Canadian jobs come with an extended health benefits plan covering dental, vision and prescription drugs that provincial healthcare doesn’t touch — genuinely part of your real compensation, and worth weighing alongside the salary number itself when comparing offers, even though it never appears as a line on any payslip.

The first deposit, finally

By the time CPP, EI, federal tax and provincial tax have all applied, a $90,000 Ontario offer lands closer to $5,600 a month than the roughly $7,500 a flat twelfth-of-gross calculation would suggest. There’s no hidden cost or trick in it — it’s the same shape any Canadian employee’s paycheque takes. Knowing the sequence before your first payslip arrives is the difference between budgeting accurately from day one and doing the same confused maths that friend did three weeks in.

Cape2Canada’s free What It Really Costs guide sets this take-home figure against the rest of a realistic Canadian budget.