Salary growth in the Canadian tech sector continues to slow year-over-year in the face of persistent inflation.
“These findings suggest the tech sector is finding its equilibrium after years of rapid growth and adjustment.”
Canadian tech organizations reported median salary increases of just 3.5 percent year-over-year in 2025, according to Tap Network’s annual Tech Sector Salary and Total Rewards Survey. This is the second year in a row that salary growth has slowed. In 2024, Tap reported a median salary increase of 3.8 percent in Canada’s tech sector, which itself was a significant decline from the 2023 median increase of 7.5 percent.
While the increase beats out Canada’s overall inflation rate of 1.9 percent, it’s not keeping up as well in critical areas like groceries and shelter, which respectively inflated 3.5 percent and 2.6 percent year-over-year. However, the report did find one pocket of optimism: year-over-year turnover continued its decline from a peak of 13 percent three years ago, to 8 percent this year.
“These findings suggest the tech sector is finding its equilibrium after years of rapid growth and adjustment,” Tap Network CEO Stephanie Hollingshead said in a statement. “Organizations that succeed will be those that thoughtfully combine competitive compensation with meaningful benefits and flexible work arrangements.”
Going into 2026, Canadian tech organizations forecast an average head count growth of 13 percent, and salary increase budgets of 3.6 percent, according to the survey.
RELATED: Canada outpaced US in tech talent growth in 2024: CBRE report
Produced in partnership with Mercer, the Spring 2025 survey draws on data from startups, scaleups, and large multinational corporations across Canada’s tech subsectors, including software, artificial intelligence (AI), cleantech, hardware, visual effects, animation, video games, and interactive digital media.
The report found that FinTech and hardware sectors led the pack with significantly higher respective median salary increases at 5.8 percent and 5.0 percent. Additionally, despite some notable return-to-office orders, over 71 percent of companies have hybrid work arrangements. About 26 percent are fully remote, and just 2.6 percent work fully on-site.
The job data follows a report from recruitment platform Indeed, which found that Canadian tech hiring has plunged since the middle of 2022. However, Canada’s strong pool of AI expertise helped it record stronger tech talent growth than the United States in 2024, according to a CBRE report released this week. CBRE found that Canada’s tech industry accounted for three-quarters of the country’s job growth, growing about twice as fast as the total workforce overall.
Feature image courtesy Unsplash. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya.