Net Worth Percentile in Canada (2026): It Is a Housing Question

Every net worth percentile page in Canada publishes the same table and stops there. The table is worth having, so it is below. What follows it is the part those pages leave out, and it is the part that actually determines where you land.

What is the median net worth in Canada?

$519,700 for a Canadian family, as of the 2023 Survey of Financial Security, the most recent wealth survey Statistics Canada has run. Half of families are worth more than that, half less.

That number is a family figure, not a personal one. Statistics Canada measures the economic family, so a couple counts once. If you are comparing your own balance sheet to it while living with a partner, you are comparing the wrong two numbers.

What net worth puts you in the top 10% in Canada?

About $2.4 million. Here is the full ladder, in family net worth.

Thresholds between the points Statistics Canada publishes are interpolated, so treat them as close estimates rather than exact survey values.

One thing worth noticing in that ladder: the top 10% starts at roughly 4.6 times the median. In the United States the same threshold sits at about 10 times the median. The Canadian distribution is compressed by comparison, and the reason is largely that so much Canadian wealth is held in housing, which is widely distributed among owners, rather than in business equity, which is not.

How does net worth change by age in Canada?

Sharply, and this is the first correction most people need. The all-ages median compares a 29-year-old to a 62-year-old and calls the gap a failing.

Statistics Canada, Survey of Financial Security 2023, in constant 2023 dollars. Read against their release of 29 October 2024 on 27 August 2026.

A family under 35 sitting at $159,100 is at the median for its age while being well under half the national figure. Both statements are true at once, and only one of them is useful.

The number that actually decides your percentile

Statistics Canada published a second split in 2023 that gets far less attention than the age table, and it is the more important one.

Take families whose main earner is 55 to 64, so age is held constant, then sort them by two things only: whether they own their principal residence, and whether they have an employer pension.

The two ends of that table are 118 times apart. Run them against the national ladder and the top row sits around the 79th percentile while the bottom sits around the 11th. Same age. Sixty-eight percentile points.

The middle two rows are the more interesting comparison, because they isolate the two assets against each other. A home without a pension is worth $914,000 at the median. A pension without a home is worth $359,000. The house is doing roughly two and a half times the work of the pension.

That is the finding worth carrying away. Net worth percentile in Canada is not mainly a story about saving harder or picking better investments. For most families it is a story about whether they bought a house, when, and whether a workplace pension has been quietly accumulating alongside it.

Which province has the highest net worth in Canada?

British Columbia, at $773,500. New Brunswick is lowest at $286,200. The gap between them is 2.7 times.

Read that column carefully before drawing conclusions about how well anyone is doing. The provincial order tracks house prices far more closely than it tracks incomes. A family in Vancouver is not necessarily better off than one in Moncton in any sense they can spend, because the asset producing the difference is the house they live in and cannot sell without buying another one in the same market.

What is the median Canadian family actually made of?

Four assets and four debts account for almost all of it. These are median holdings among families who have each item, not averages across everyone.

The home is $500,000 against retirement assets of $161,800. Housing is carrying roughly three times what every registered account combined is carrying. Set against a $200,000 median mortgage, that is $300,000 of equity in a single illiquid asset, and it is the reason the provincial table looks the way it does.

It also explains why the Canadian distribution is compressed relative to the American one. When most of a country's wealth sits in owner-occupied housing, and roughly two-thirds of families own, wealth is spread more evenly than in a country where the top of the distribution is built on business and equity holdings.

Has Canadian net worth gone up since 2019?

Yes, and most dramatically for the young, though the percentage hides what actually happened.

Families with a main earner under 35 saw median net worth rise 179% between 2019 and 2023, reaching $159,100. That looks like a generation getting rich. It is a large percentage on a small base, and it splits hard by tenure: young homeowners reached $457,100 while young renters without a pension reached $44,000.

The same pattern, one layer down. Even inside the group that gained most, the gain went to the ones who had bought.

The part the net worth number hides: renewal

Net worth is a snapshot of a balance sheet. It says nothing about whether the payments behind it are affordable, and in 2023 that gap widened sharply.

Among the 39% of Canadian families holding a mortgage, median mortgage debt was $205,000 in 2023, down from $219,500 in 2019. That looks like deleveraging. Then look at the payments.

About one in five mortgage holders were on variable rates, at a median 5.7%. Their median monthly payment rose 35% between 2019 and 2023, to $2,020. For young families on variable rates it rose 82%, to $2,600. Meanwhile the median fixed rate was 3.0%, and 31% of fixed-rate mortgages were due for renewal by the end of 2024.

A family can move up the net worth percentile table on paper, because their house appreciated, while the cash cost of holding that house rises faster than their income. Both things are happening in this data at once, and only one of them shows up in a percentile.

What if you rent, or have no pension?

The honest answer is that you are working against a distribution built on two assets you do not hold, and no amount of budgeting closes a 118x gap on its own.

What it does change is which lever matters. For an owner with a pension, net worth largely accumulates whether or not they pay attention: the house appreciates and the pension accrues. For a renter without one, it only accumulates deliberately, through registered accounts. That makes the order you fund a TFSA, RRSP and FHSA a materially bigger decision for you than it is for them.

It is also worth being precise about what buying would actually require rather than treating it as a mood. Three calculators are the useful ones here: the net worth percentile calculator to place yourself against your own age band rather than the national figure, the mortgage affordability calculator for what a purchase demands at current rates, and the rent vs buy calculator for whether it is the better move at all in your city, since the provincial table shows how much that varies.

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