Income Percentiles in Nunavut: Where Your Income Ranks

In Nunavut, well-paid government, mining and professional jobs sit alongside communities where paid work is scarce and food and housing cost far more than in the south. A single median hides much of that. This page shows Nunavut’s income percentiles and six-figure share, the payroll jobs at the top of the range, what the median covers against Statistics Canada’s northern cost measure, and the territorial tax picture; the income percentiles overview explains how the tables are built.

Nunavut income percentile table

Source: Statistics Canada Table 98-10-0064, 2020 income year (2021 Census). Values are interpolated from published $5,000-wide income brackets, not exact published percentiles. StatCan’s own published median for the same population is $37,600, versus this table’s interpolated $35,200, a normal margin for bracket interpolation. A percentile shown as “$150,000+” falls in the open-ended “$150,000 and over” bracket: it is at least $150,000, and the table can’t place it more precisely.

Values are for all of Nunavut, for income earned in 2020; the Census publishes no separate percentile table for Iqaluit or the three regions.

Nunavut compared with Canada

Source: Statistics Canada Table 98-10-0064, 2020 income year (2021 Census), interpolated from published income brackets. The 99th percentile is the floor of the open-ended “$150,000 and over” bracket for both geographies, so no meaningful difference can be computed at that row.

Nunavut’s spread is the story here. Its 90th percentile, $134,700, was 3.8 times its median, against 2.6 times for Canada and 2.5 times in the Northwest Territories. At the bottom, the median was 10.7 times the 10th percentile of $3,300, a ratio wider than Canada’s 5.1. Both gaps come from the same mix: payroll jobs with high average pay, shown below, alongside many adults with little or no income.

Median and six-figure incomes in Nunavut

The median income of Nunavummiut with income was $41,050 in 2023, lower than the national $45,000, yet 23.7% reported $100,000 or more, above the Canadian share of 14.8%.

Where Nunavut’s paycheques come from

Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey wage tables, used on the province pages, don’t cover the territories. Its payroll survey does: in 2025, Nunavut employers reported 21,961 payroll jobs. Government administration accounted for 6,831 of them, 31% against 7% nationally. Mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction was the second-largest of the sectors the survey publishes for Nunavut, with 21% of payroll jobs against 1.2% across Canada. Retail and several smaller sectors are suppressed for Nunavut, so the published sectors don’t add up to the total.

Average weekly earnings across all Nunavut payroll jobs were $1,782.58, about $92,694 over 52 weeks and 37% above the Canadian average of $1,302.86. Job Bank’s median hourly wages for occupations found in most communities show the same premium:

Hourly wages, Job Bank 2023-2024 reference period; Job Bank publishes Nunavut as one region.

What the median covers in Nunavut

CMHC’s rental survey tables, the source of rents on the province pages, have no rows for Nunavut, so this page measures living costs with Statistics Canada’s northern Market Basket Measure, which prices food, shelter, clothing, transportation and other necessities for each region. For one person in Iqaluit the 2025 threshold works out to $52,404 a year, and in Kivalliq, the least costly Nunavut region, $44,407. Nunavut’s median after-tax income, counting residents with no income, was $38,200 in 2024, below even the Kivalliq line for a single adult. For comparison, the Canadian median after-tax income of $40,500 sits against a highest provincial single-adult threshold of $32,176 (Vancouver). The Nunavut thresholds are set for a two-adult, three-child reference family and scaled here to one person, and the income is for 2024 while the thresholds are for 2025, so read the comparison as a measure of scale. People not in an economic family (living alone or with non-relatives) had a much higher median after-tax income, $97,500.

Nunavut tax at the median and the northern residents deduction

A worker paid Nunavut’s median income of $39,700 in wages would owe about $2,652 in federal and $690 in territorial income tax for 2026 and keep $33,557 after CPP and EI, before any deductions. Nunavut’s basic personal amount of $19,659 is larger than the federal one, and its bottom rate is 4%.

If you lived in a prescribed northern zone, which includes all of Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, for at least six consecutive months, you can deduct a basic residency amount of $11.00 a day for 2025, plus an additional $11.00 a day if you kept and lived in a dwelling there and are the only person in it claiming the basic amount; the deduction can't exceed 20% of your net income. The zones and the full conditions are in the northern residents deductions guide.

For someone who lived alone in Nunavut all of 2025, the two daily amounts add up to $8,030. At the median income the 20% limit is $7,940, less than the full amount, so the limit trims the claim. A deduction of $7,940 lowers federal and territorial income tax at that income by about $1,429 a year. Residents of a prescribed zone can also deduct travel: up to two non-medical trips a year for each person in the family and any number of medical trips, each limited to the lowest of the taxable travel benefit from an employer (or a $1,200 standard amount per person a year), the trip's cost, and the lowest return airfare to the nearest designated city. Full details are on the northern residents deductions page.

Related pages

• Ranking a single income: the income percentile calculator covers Nunavut; for a family’s combined income, see the household income percentiles
• Northwest Territories income percentiles and Yukon income percentiles
• Tax brackets by province and territory
• Income by age; gender pay gap
• All income percentile pages