Ontario’s general minimum wage rises to $17.95 an hour on Thursday, Oct. 1, a 35-cent bump that the province says will reach more than 700,000 workers. It is one of the highest provincial minimums in Canada, but an Ontario minimum wage worker in Toronto would still spend close to two-thirds of their pay on a typical one-bedroom apartment.
The increase, announced by the province on April 1, is tied to a 1.9 per cent rise in Ontario’s consumer price index, according to a summary of the government release by employment law firm Hicks Morley. The student minimum wage moves to $16.90 an hour and the homeworker rate to $19.70. For someone working 40 hours a week year-round, the change adds about $728 a year before tax, the province has said.
Ontario is not alone. Five provinces raise their rates on the same day, Canadian HR Reporter noted on Sept. 14: Manitoba goes to $16.40 from $16, Nova Scotia to $17 from $16.75, Prince Edward Island to $17.30 from $17 and Saskatchewan to $15.70 from $15.35. That leaves a gap of $2.25 an hour between Ontario and Saskatchewan, the lowest of the five, for the same shift of work.
The bigger question for workers is what the new rate actually buys. A full-time schedule of 40 hours a week at $17.95 works out to about $37,336 a year in gross pay (our calculation). The average unfurnished one-bedroom in Toronto rented for $1,973 a month in September, according to rental platform liv.rent’s Ontario rent report published Sept. 3. Over a year that comes to $23,676, or roughly 63 per cent of a full-time minimum wage income before any deductions.
The common affordability benchmark, used by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, is that housing should cost no more than 30 per cent of gross income. On a $17.95 wage, 30 per cent works out to about $933 a month, less than half the city’s average one-bedroom rent.
There is one piece of genuinely good news in the data. Rents are softening. Liv.rent found Toronto’s one-bedroom average was 3.73 per cent lower than in September 2025, and 16 of the 19 Ontario areas it tracked posted lower rents than a year earlier. Combined with a wage increase of about two per cent, that means the gap is narrowing slightly for some renters, though from a very wide starting point.
Advocates measure the shortfall another way. The Ontario Living Wage Network, which calculates what a worker needs to cover food, shelter, child care, transportation and other basic costs without savings, set the Greater Toronto Area living wage at $27.20 an hour in its 2025 report. Ottawa came in at $23.40 and Hamilton at $22.60. None of the network’s regions came in at or below the old $17.60 minimum.
“If you’re working that minimum wage job, you’re going to be short by $336 a week,” Craig Pickthorne, the network’s director of communications, told CP24 when the 2025 figures were released in November. Measured against the new $17.95 rate, the GTA gap shrinks to $9.25 an hour, or about $324 over a 35-hour week (our calculation). The network updates its figures each fall, so the target is likely to move again.
For younger workers in hourly retail and food service jobs, the practical takeaway is that indexing protects the minimum wage from falling behind inflation, but it does not close the distance to what it costs to live in Ontario’s big cities. That distance is mostly a housing problem, and it will not be solved by 35 cents.
Workers who believe they are being paid below the new rate after Oct. 1 can file a claim with the Ontario Ministry of Labour, Immigration, Training and Skills Development.
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Via Hicks Morley, with additional reporting from Canadian HR Reporter, liv.rent and CP24.
