Someone Asked What A Middle-Class Income Is In Ontario & Apparently $140K Doesn’t Cut It
"We're just finally able to save a small amount of money."
Ontario Editor
The view of downtown Toronto from a busy highway. Right: A quiet residential street in Ontario.
Ingalin | Dreamstime, Anna Kraynova | Dreamstime
Dealing with the high cost of living is no joke, but a recent Reddit thread got plenty of people talking about a comfortable living wage in Ontario, and it might be the honesty you need.
Someone asked what it takes to have a middle-class life in Ontario, and tons of people weighed in, sharing everything from their own household incomes to how they took the step up from living paycheck to paycheck.
“I’m talking a home, 2-3 kids, a car or two, and enough money left over for a vacation a year or so?” asked the original post on the r/Ontario Reddit thread. “Is that too much to ask?”
Hundreds of responses generated some very real and very helpful perspectives on what it takes to get there and people who are still trying to find their way financially.
“My wife is an RN, and I’m an IT-02. We bring in over just over $140K, and that now puts us in a comfortable area of the middle class,” said one person in the comments, whose story got plenty of reaction. “We finally have a bank account moving up instead of down, which is a huge burden just gone from our lives.”
Their sentiment about a household income of 140K serving as somewhat of a baseline of middle-class in Ontario seemed to be a number that many other people in this thread agreed with.
“That $140,000 a year is only just barely middle-class lol,” someone else wrote.
Others debated how much your location factors into your cost of living, with one person sharing how they’ve attained this idea of middle-class living in Sudbury.
“I’m single, make 64k a year (just got a 6 dollar an hour raise today though!), own a house, brand new car…lol,” they wrote.
Of course, location is important. For instance, in a recent Narcity article comparing the cost of living across eight different Ontario cities, Sudbury was found to have the lowest cost of living for a single person and the highest average salary by far.
Others living alone elsewhere in Ontario seem to not be so lucky, like one person who said living on their 120K salary isn’t as comfortable as you might think.
“Should be more than enough for a really comfortable life but it’s just a few bucks shy of ‘thriving,’ lol,” they wrote.
The most popular comment in this thread was a blanket suggestion that to attain this idea of middle-class in Ontario, your household income needs to be “about 150-200K depending where you live.”
But, of course, some people may never get there.
According to Talent.com, the average salary in Ontario in 2023 is $41,925 or $22/hour, while the latest calculations on a living wage in Ontario range between $18.15 to $23.15/hour, depending on the region.
The minimum wage in Ontario is currently $15.50/hour, and another increase is expected to be announced in April, though it’s not clear how much it might go up.
