Do Ontario Teachers Earn More Lifetime Income Than Most Ontario Engineers? We Crunched The Real Numbers
Last July, we hosted our annual neighbourhood barbecue, and the debate flared up halfway through the third round of burgers. My cousin Jake, a civil engineer with 11 years at a mid-sized GTA construction firm, was wiping mustard off his t-shirt and saying he was sick of seeing the viral take on local parent groups that Ontario teachers end up richer over a lifetime than most engineers. “Total garbage,” he said, nodding at my sister Lila, who’s a grade 10 math teacher with the Peel District School Board. “You guys complain about being underpaid, but now you’re claiming you make more than me?” Lila rolled her eyes, flipped a corn cob on the grill, and said none of us actually had the numbers to prove either way. My 17-year-old, who’s narrowing down his university program choices between engineering and education, leaned in. So we cleared off the deck table, pulled out our laptops, and spent the next hour digging into actual Ontario data to settle it.
Mosquitoes bit our ankles, my younger kid chased a squirrel through the rose bushes, and we ignored the pile of potato salad melting in the sun. We started with the easy stuff: working base salary, before benefits or pensions. For most Ontario public school teachers, you start around $52,000 right out of teachers college, and hit the top of the pay grid after 10 years if you have a post-graduate degree, which currently lands around $99,000, depending on the school board. The average salary for active teachers sits around $78,000 a year. For engineers, Statistics Canada pegs the median annual salary for engineers in Ontario at around $95,000. Entry-level starts around $68,000, that’s $16,000 higher than starting teacher pay. The top end for most rank-and-file engineers (not senior software leads at big tech firms in Waterloo) caps out around $120,000. So right off the bat, most engineers make more during working years in base salary.
Where the gap closes, fast, is when you add in benefits and pensions. Lila pulled up her latest pay stub: she contributes 11% of her pre-tax salary to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and the board contributes an extra 22% on top of her base salary. That’s 33% of her salary going into a guaranteed lifetime pension, indexed to inflation, that can’t be lost to market crashes. Most engineers, Jake included, have a defined contribution plan, not a guaranteed defined benefit. Jake contributes 5% of his salary, his employer matches 5%, so that’s 10% total going into his pension—less than a third of what goes into Lila’s. Add on everyday benefits: Lila pays $18 a month for full family health and dental. Jake pays $380 a month for his family plan, that comes straight out of his pay cheque. Lila gets 20 paid sick days a year that roll over, 10 paid professional development days, and paid parental leave that tops up her EI to full salary for a year. Jake gets 5 paid sick days a year, no roll over, and his parental leave only tops up to 70% salary for six months.
We ran the numbers for total lifetime compensation, including benefits and pension payouts, for a standard 30-year teaching career (most Ontario teachers can retire with full pension around 58) and a standard 35-year engineering career (most engineers retire around 65). The average Ontario teacher who retires after 30 years gets an annual pension of around $84,000, indexed for inflation, for life. For Jake, if he works 35 years and retires at 65, the median engineer’s total pension pot comes out to around $850,000. If he follows the standard 4% safe withdrawal rule to avoid running out of money, that’s $34,000 a year from his pension, plus average CPP of around $18,000, for a total of $52,000 a year in retirement. When we added all of it up—working salary, employer-paid benefits, employer pension contributions, retirement payouts—the total lifetime compensation for the average teacher came out to around $4.2 million. For the median engineer in Ontario, it came out to around $4.1 million. We stared at the screen for a minute, and Jake said, “Huh. I never added the employer pension part. I just look at my monthly take-home.”
As a parent of a kid picking a career, this wasn’t just a silly barbecue argument. It’s a question I get asked all the time by other parents whose teens are narrowing down university programs: should I push them to engineering for the money, or is teaching actually a better deal long term? The concrete step I tell other parents to take now is to stop fixating on starting salary or even mid-career take-home pay. When you’re comparing two paths, do this simple exercise: add 15 to 25 percent to the public sector base salary to account for employer pension contributions and subsidized benefits that never show up in your monthly pay cheque. Subtract 5 to 10 percent from the private sector base salary to cover out-of-pocket benefit costs and the fact that you’ll need to set aside more of your own pay for retirement. Also, add a line for layoff risk: most private sector engineers in Ontario can expect at least one 3-6 month layoff over their career, which means dipping into savings or pausing retirement contributions. Public school teachers almost never get laid off, so that’s a hidden value most people never count.
We never got a perfectly neat answer, anyway. If you’re a top-performing engineer at a big tech or major infrastructure firm, you’ll make far more over a lifetime than any teacher. If you’re a teacher with a post-graduate degree who sticks it out to retirement, you’ll almost certainly end up ahead of most rank-and-file engineers in Ontario. My 17-year-old still hasn’t made up his mind. He likes solving technical problems and working with his hands for engineering, but he also likes talking about math and helping kids figure out hard concepts for teaching. I don’t push him one way or the other. I just showed him the messy spreadsheet we put together that day on the deck, and told him to count everything, not just the starting salary number posted on university career pages. Some days he leans one way, some days the other. That’s okay, for now.
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