Young grads’ full-time job rate slips to 69%, StatCan says

About 69 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 34 with a bachelor’s degree or higher were working in permanent, full-time jobs in 2025, down from a peak of 71 per cent in 2022, Statistics Canada said Wednesday.

The agency said the 2025 share was still above the pre-pandemic average of 65 per cent recorded from 2017 to 2019. The figures come from a new study in Insights on Canadian Society, released with The Daily, and cover non-students in the age group.

The slip of two percentage points is small, but it lands in a month when young workers are a focus of the job-market debate. Canada lost 68,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate rose to 6.5 per cent, as we reported. Our look at youth hiring across occupations found the weakest hiring in jobs least exposed to artificial intelligence.

A degree still comes with a clear pay advantage. Young university graduates earned an average of $39.18 an hour in 2025, Statistics Canada said. That compares with $34.71 for people with a trades certificate or diploma, $31.39 for those with a college or CEGEP credential, $28.77 for high school graduates and $26.97 for those without a high school diploma.

Using those published averages, graduates earned about 13 per cent more per hour than trades holders, 25 per cent more than college or CEGEP graduates, 36 per cent more than high school graduates and 45 per cent more than workers without a diploma. The gap is a comparison of averages, not a measure of what any one person would earn by getting a degree.

The share in permanent, full-time work tells a slightly different story by credential. Seventy-one per cent of young adults with a trades certificate or diploma held such jobs in 2025, a bit above the 69 per cent for degree holders. The shares were 56 per cent for high school graduates and 43 per cent for those without a high school diploma.

Wage growth after inflation has been thin. From 2019 to 2025, inflation-adjusted hourly wages for young degree holders rose 1.8 per cent among men and 2.5 per cent among women, Statistics Canada said. Spread over six years, that works out to well under half a per cent a year, by our calculation.

Gender gaps persist but have narrowed in some areas. In 2025, 72 per cent of men and 66 per cent of women in the group held permanent, full-time jobs, a six-point gap. Statistics Canada said the gap narrowed over the study period, largely because of gains among women, including women with young children.

Parenthood still matters for women’s work. Among female graduates with a child aged six or younger at home, 62 per cent worked permanent, full-time jobs, compared with 67 per cent of women without young children. The agency said it found no comparable difference among men. Women earned an average of $0.92 for every dollar earned by men, virtually unchanged from the average ratio seen since 1997.

Other job-quality measures barely moved. In 2025, 25 per cent of young women and 15 per cent of young men with a degree were covered by a collective agreement. Access to an employer-sponsored pension plan edged up since 2020 to 60 per cent for women and 56 per cent for men. About 14 per cent of women and 15 per cent of men were working in jobs that typically require no postsecondary education.

For a recent graduate, the numbers suggest a degree still raises the odds of steady, better-paid work compared with other credentials. They also show that the edge has not widened, and that real pay gains since 2019 have been modest.

These are annual averages for 2025 and do not capture this year’s weaker hiring. The Labour Force Survey figures for September, covered in our provincial unemployment guide, are the latest read on the broader market.

How we did this: we read Statistics Canada’s Oct. 28, 2026 release of the Insights on Canadian Society study, which uses annual Labour Force Survey data for non-students aged 25 to 34. The percentage premiums are our own calculations from the published average hourly wages. We have not seen the full study tables, and Statistics Canada did not publish margins of error in the release summary.

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