Income Percentiles in PEI: Where Your Income Ranks in Prince Edward Island

Prince Edward Island is Canada’s smallest province, and its incomes come largely from government, health care, agriculture, fishing and tourism, several of them seasonal. The table below shows how Islanders’ incomes are spread. After it come the spread measured against the median, the share who report six figures, the farm and government jobs that set the Island apart, what the median buys in rent and housing, and PEI’s tax on it. The Prince Edward Island average income page gives the average and median, and the method behind the tables is set out in the income percentiles overview.

PEI 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 $38,800, versus this table’s interpolated $37,700, 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.

Seasonal work means many Islanders combine employment income with EI in the same year, which the Census total-income figures for 2020 include.

PEI and 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.

No province has its upper incomes packed as close to the middle as the Island does. An Islander at the 90th percentile had $83,900, just 2.23 times the $37,700 median; for Canada the multiple was 2.61, and the next-lowest province, New Brunswick, was at 2.31. Below the middle the pattern holds: the median was 3.93 times the 10th percentile of $9,600, a narrower spread than Canada’s 5.13. In dollars, the distance from the median to the 90th percentile was $46,200 here, against $63,500 for Canada.

Six-figure earners on the Island

In 2023, 8.9% of Islanders with income had $100,000 or more in total income, below the national 14.8%. With a population of 134,880 people with income, small changes in a few employers’ pay can move these shares. The Island also has the smallest gap between women’s and men’s incomes of any province. Women with income had a median of $39,280 on the same returns and men $46,590, so women’s median was 84% of men’s, against 77% for Canada. The gender pay gap page compares the provinces.

The higher thresholds involve few people in a province this size, so year-to-year changes there say little.

Farms, government and Island pay

Two industries employ a much larger share of Islanders than of Canadians generally, and they pay very differently. Agriculture employed 2.7% of PEI employees in the 2025 Labour Force Survey, about 4.2 times its national share, with a median weekly wage of $880, 15% below the Island’s all-industry median of $1,038. Public administration held 12.8% of jobs, 1.9 times the Canadian share, and its median of $1,481 a week was the second-highest of the Island’s industries; over 52 weeks that is about $77,006. Health care and social assistance was the largest employer, with a median of $1,154 a week. Job Bank’s median hourly wages for farm and government occupations:

Hourly wages for the 2023-2024 reference period; Job Bank reports PEI as a single region.

Rent and a home on an Island income

A two-bedroom apartment on the Island rented for $1,293 a month on average in CMHC’s October 2025 count. A year of that rent, $15,516, is 41% of PEI’s 2024 median after-tax income of $37,500 (residents with no income included); the same measure for Canada is 46%. For family units (economic families, plus people not living with relatives) the Island median after tax was $65,900, which the same rent would take 24% of. The vacancy rate was 2.1%, up from 0.8% in October 2024. See the Prince Edward Island rental market for rents by unit size.

The average home sold on PEI in August 2026 went for $420,819. Buying it with the minimum down payment and passing the stress test takes a household income of about $97,600, above the $75,000 that only 19.5% of Islanders with income reached on their 2023 returns. The PEI housing market page tracks prices and sales.

PEI tax on a median income

PEI’s first-bracket rate of 9.5%, the fourth-highest bottom rate among the provinces, stops at $33,928, the second-lowest first-bracket ceiling of the ten, so on the Island’s median income of $42,000, as the Canadian Income Survey measured it for 2024, the last $8,072 falls in the second bracket, taxed at 13.47%. Offsetting part of that, the provincial basic personal amount is $15,000, the largest in Atlantic Canada. For that median earned as wages in 2026, PEI tax comes to about $2,588 and federal tax $2,950, and the worker keeps $33,487 after CPP and EI. Every PEI bracket is on the PEI income tax page.

Related pages

• The income percentile calculator ranks one income on PEI and nationally; two-earner households compare better against the household income percentiles
• Newfoundland and Labrador income percentiles
• Nova Scotia income percentiles
• Average income in Prince Edward Island
• PEI income tax
• Cost of living by province
• Income by age; gender pay gap
• All income percentile pages