Pay Raise Calculator (2026)

The percentage on the letter and the percentage on the cheque

A raise from $60,000 to $66,000 in Ontario is 10% on paper and 8.2% in your account. Take-home goes from $47,340 to $51,199 — $3,859 of the $6,000, or about $148 more on each biweekly cheque. The $2,141 that didn't arrive is four separate charges: $1,162 of federal tax, $524 of Ontario tax, $357 of CPP and $98 of EI.

Nothing on that list is priced differently because it came from a raise. The salary underneath already used the basic personal amount and the 14% federal bracket, so the raise inherits whatever rate the salary finished on. That is the whole reason the share you keep moves so much from one person to the next: it is set by where the top of your income sits, and by which payroll charges have already hit their ceiling.

The same $6,000 raise at nine different salaries

Every row below is Ontario, 2026, a $6,000 raise, run through the calculator above.

Read down the third column and it isn't a slope. It drops from 74% to 64% between $50,000 and $60,000, where the second federal bracket and the second Ontario bracket both start. Then it climbs back to 70% by $85,000, which surprises people. What's happening is that the payroll charges fall away one at a time: EI stops at $68,900 of insurable earnings, CPP at 5.95% stops at $74,600, and the 4% second tier of CPP stops at $85,000. From there to a little under $100,000 a raise faces income tax and nothing else, and 70 cents on the dollar is the best rate on the table above $50,000.

The second drop is the Ontario surtax, which is charged on your Ontario tax rather than your income — 20% of basic Ontario tax over $5,818, and 36% on top of that over $7,446. In salary terms the first layer starts just under $100,000 and the second just under $117,000, which is also where the 26% federal bracket begins. A $6,000 raise from $117,045 keeps 58%.

The Ontario Health Premium is the one charge that steps rather than slopes. It sits at $600 until taxable income passes $72,000, then takes 25 cents of every dollar until it reaches $750, and stays there until $200,000, where the same thing happens again on the way to $900. That is why the $70,000 row and the $200,000 row each give up $150 of premium, and the rows between them give up none.

Same raise, other provinces

$60,000 to $66,000 keeps 64% in Ontario, 64% in Alberta, 66% in British Columbia and 57% in Quebec. Quebec's gap is three things stacking: QPP at 6.3% takes $378 where CPP takes $357, QPIP adds $26 and the reduced 1.30% federal EI adds $78, and Quebec's own tax takes $1,129 of the raise against Ontario's $524. The federal share is smaller there — $967 after the Quebec abatement — but not by enough to close the difference.

The year of the raise is shorter than the calculator's

The figures above compare two full years at two salaries. A raise that takes effect on 1 July puts half of that in the current year, and payroll does nothing to catch you up — from the first affected cheque it annualises the new pay and withholds at the new rate, and the earlier cheques stay as they were. If the raise is backdated and the difference is paid out as one amount, that amount is a non-periodic payment, and payroll withholds it the way it withholds a bonus.

You don't owe anyone a form. A TD1 records your personal tax credits, and the CRA asks for a new one only within 7 days of a change to your situation that could be expected to change those credits. A raise changes your income, not your credits, so the adjustment happens in the payroll system on its own.

One last thing to hold the raise against: the brackets move too. The federal amounts are indexed by 2.0% for 2026 and Ontario's by 1.9%. A 2% raise — $60,000 to $61,200 — nets $772, keeps the same 64% as the larger raise from the same salary, and roughly holds your place against the brackets rather than moving you up them.