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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

I heard that the taxes are quite high in Canada and so is the cost of living.

Can you shed some light on this?

I did the math for Toronto(which is more expensive than Montreal).

For a typical software engineer, taxes take away 25% of gross pay in Ontario while it's over 30% in California and New York. Cost of living is much less(by 30-40% if you rent) in Toronto compared to Cali/New York. Of course, you will also earn 40% less in USD. So it about evens out

From what I've experienced, this is rapidly becoming untrue - CoL in Toronto has become very high, friends are paying comparable to what I paid in NYC but salaries are definitely lower. They're paying in CAD what I paid in USD, but are earning 20-30% less. Food is also more expensive (particularly eating out), on the whole, than NYC.

Most new construction apartments are quite small, and the older, larger ones command a significant premium. You can move out of the downtown core (to North York, Scarborough, etc) but then you're committed to a long commute on the slow TTC or sitting in traffic on the 401.

MTL is much cheaper, but salaries also lag even further.

According to numbeo[1] which crowdsources data, groceries and restaurants are 20% cheaper(adjusted for currency) in Toronto, but of course the salary is more than 20% lower, which might explain your experience. The real kicker is the rent, while Toronto rent is definitely increasing, it is nowhere close to New York City levels, and most sources do say you have to pay 50% more for an equivalent apartment in NYC.

Also according to my calculations from the data on numbeo, the equivalent of (pre-tax) $135,000 USD in NYC is $110,000 CAD in Toronto. It is of course easier to get 135k in NYC than 110k in Toronto, but the difference isn't nearly as big as the CAD/USD differences and wage gap makes it seem. And if you can get a job in the Waterloo-Kitchenner area, CoL of course plummets. Freelancing for clients in the US or working remotely also has great advantages.

[1]https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...

How did you come up with 25%? My taxes are almost exactly 40%.

90-100k CAD comes to 27% here for Ontario: https://simpletax.ca/calculator

I'm talking about the average for the whole salary, not the marginal rate for the highest bracket. It looks like you have to earn $250,000 CAD to get a 40% average, but that's a very high salary by Canadian standards.

COL is higher than the US across the board, but coming from a big East-Coast US city the costs aren't crazy to me. That said I saw an article about how Vancouver is now the most affordable city in North America, so maybe my perception was skewed by NYC-DC prices. Taxes are a bit higher but nothing insane; I feel the pinch more at the grocery store buying produce.

The salaries in Canada, however, are just not up to par with the US. The CAD to USD currency rate is also not amazing (0.77 CAD to 1 USD last I looked).

I work remotely for an American company, but if I didn't it would be a huge pay cut for me.

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