A $35-an-hour job and a $70,000 salary sound identical — at 37.5 hours a week they are within a rounding error before tax. But job offers are never just the headline number. Paid vacation, benefits, overtime rules, job security protections and even how the pay is taxed across the year can swing the real value by thousands. Here is how to compare two Canadian offers honestly.

Step 1: Put both offers on the same annual base

Annualize the hourly offer: rate × hours per week × paid weeks per year. The trap is “paid weeks.” A salaried job usually pays for 52 weeks including 2–4 weeks of vacation and statutory holidays. An hourly contract may pay only for weeks worked — at 48 paid weeks, $35/hour × 37.5 × 48 = $63,000, not $68,250. Our salary ↔ hourly converter lets you set the weeks explicitly; use it before anything else. Then compare after tax, not gross: the same $70,000 keeps different amounts by province, and two offers in different provinces (or a relocation) are only comparable net.

Step 2: Price the benefits package

A typical employer benefits package is worth roughly 10–20% of salary: employer CPP matching is mandatory and equal (worth up to $4,646 in 2026 — but hourly employees get this too, since CPP applies to employment income generally), so the real differentiators are: a workplace pension or RRSP match (often 3–6% of salary — turning down a 5% match on $70,000 is turning down $3,500), health and dental coverage (family coverage commonly replaces $2,000–$4,000 a year of private insurance or out-of-pocket costs), paid sick days, and life/disability insurance. An independent-contractor hourly rate, by contrast, must also cover both halves of CPP (an extra ~5.95% up to the maximums), no EI coverage for job loss, and your own downtime — experienced contractors price at 1.25–1.4× the employee hourly equivalent for exactly these reasons.

Step 3: Overtime, security and the fine print

Salaried does not automatically mean overtime-exempt: in most provinces, salaried employees are entitled to overtime (typically 1.5× after 44 hours a week in Ontario; rules vary) unless they fall into a specific exemption like managers or certain professionals. Hourly offers make overtime economics obvious and paid; salaried offers can quietly include 5 unpaid hours a week, cutting the effective rate by over 10%. Also weigh: termination protections and severance grow with salaried tenure; probationary periods reset when you switch; and bonuses, profit-sharing and raises are usually quoted on salary. Put a dollar estimate beside each line, however rough — a comparison with approximate numbers beats a vibe every time.

A worked comparison

Offer A: $70,000 salary, 3 weeks paid vacation, 5% RRSP match, family health benefits. Offer B: $38/hour hourly, paid only for hours worked, 2 weeks unpaid vacation, no benefits. Headline math says B “wins” ($38 × 37.5 × 52 = $74,100). Real math: B at 50 paid weeks = $71,250 gross; A adds $3,500 of RRSP match plus roughly $2,500 of benefits value, and both pay the same CPP/EI. After 2026 Ontario tax, A’s package is worth roughly $76,000 pre-tax-equivalent against B’s $71,250 — the “lower” offer wins by about $4,700 a year. Reverse the vacation and match assumptions and the answer flips, which is the point: the arithmetic, not the headline, decides.