Do Ontario Teachers Make More Lifetime Earnings Than Most Engineers? What The Numbers Actually Show
The mosquito zapper hummed behind our picnic table last July, and I was flipping beef burgers when the question came up. My neighbour Mike, a civil engineer who’s worked on Toronto road projects for 18 years, was complaining about his firm cutting retiree health benefits and raising RRSP contribution requirements. My cousin Lila, a grade 10 math teacher at a public high school in Peel Region, nodded along, and someone at the table tossed out the line I’ve seen a hundred times in local Ontario parent Facebook groups: “At the end of the day, teachers end up making more over their whole lifetime than most engineers anyway, with that pension.” Mike snorted. Lila raised an eyebrow. Neither of them knew if it was actually true. I’ve got a 17-year-old narrowing down university programs for next fall, so I dug into the numbers after the BBQ, with both of them helping me sort through what counts and what doesn’t.
First, we laid out the base salary numbers everyone already knows. Entry-level teachers in Ontario public boards start around $53,000 right now, and top out at just over $96,000 after 10 years of experience for a high school teacher, with small annual increments. Most teachers hit that top of the scale and stay there for the rest of their career. Entry-level engineers in Ontario average around $62,000, and the median mid-career salary is around $98,000, according to 2023 Stats Canada data. So base salary is pretty close for most, with engineers pulling slightly ahead on annual pay during working years. But that’s where the similarities end.
The big gap opens up when you add pensions and benefits. Lila’s Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is a defined benefit plan, fully indexed to inflation, that pays her 60% of her final average salary for life once she hits 30 years of service, no matter how long she lives. She’ll also keep the same extended health and dental plan in retirement, paid for by the plan. Most private sector engineers in Ontario don’t get that. Mike has a defined contribution plan, where his firm matches 5% of his salary, and that’s it. If the market crashes right before he retires, his savings can drop overnight. He has no guaranteed annual payout for life, and his retiree health benefits just got cut, so he’ll have to buy private coverage once he stops working, which will cost him around $500 a month out of pocket right now—adjusted for inflation, that’ll be more than double that by the time he retires.
Then there are the less obvious factors that add up over time. Job stability is the biggest one. Mike has been laid off twice in his career: 6 months in 2008 after the housing crash, 3 months in 2020 when construction paused. He drained $18,000 from his RRSP to cover his mortgage during those stretches, which he estimates cost him over $120,000 in compound growth over 30 years. Lila has never been unemployed since she got her full-time contract in 2007. Even when the province cut teaching positions a few years back, she just transferred to a different school in the board.
There’s also the hidden perk of aligned time off. Lila has 2.5 months off in the summer, plus holidays, the same schedule her two kids had growing up. She never paid for full-time summer childcare, which would have cost her roughly $8,000 a year for 12 years of her kids’ childhood—that’s close to $100,000 in saved expenses, which counts as effectively adding to her bottom line. Most engineers work 260 days a year, so they have to cover that full cost of summer care if both parents work.
We crunched the numbers for the median earner in both fields, working 30 years, then 25 years of retirement. Adding up salary, pension payouts, the estimated value of benefits, and even the hidden childcare savings, the total lifetime for a median teacher came out to around $4.6 million. For the median engineer, it came out to around $4.1 million. Of course, that’s just the median. If you’re a software engineer at a big tech firm in Kitchener-Waterloo or Toronto making $180k+ a year, you’ll pull way ahead of most teachers, no question. But that’s not most engineers. Stats Canada says only 15% of engineers in Ontario make over $150k a year. Most work at small construction firms, municipal public works, or manufacturing, and their salaries stay in the median range.
For parents like me helping teens sort through career options, this exercise changed how we talk about picking majors. We didn’t stop at just looking at the starting salary posted on the university website. We did three concrete things that anyone can copy: First, we looked up median earnings for the field in Ontario, not just the top 10% that gets all the press. It’s easy to see a viral post about a 25-year-old making $200k and think that’s standard, but it’s not. Second, we added up the value of benefits, not just base pay. For any career, we asked: Is the pension guaranteed? Do you get health benefits in retirement? How much paid leave do you get, and how much will that save you on things like childcare? Third, we factored in the likelihood of unemployment over a career. Long stretches without pay hit lifetime earnings harder than most people realize when they’re 18.
Right now, my son has applications in for both mechanical engineering and a concurrent education math program. He’s still deciding what he enjoys more, and we’re not pushing him one way or the other. The old assumption that engineering is automatically the higher-paying, more secure choice didn’t hold up when we actually added all the numbers up. It turns out that for most people in Ontario, the idea that teachers come out ahead over a lifetime isn’t just a talking point. It’s actually true, for the vast majority of both teachers and engineers. We’ll see what he picks, but whatever he chooses, he’s going in knowing what the whole picture actually looks like, not just the part that gets talked about at backyard BBQs.
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