More than 100,000 federal bureaucrats took home more than $100,000 in salary alone last year.

That’s according to a government document obtained by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation through an access-to-information request, which reveals that 102,761 federal bureaucrats received a six-figure salary in 2022. 

All told, those bureaucrats cost taxpayers $13.4 billion.

“Taxpayers can’t afford more bureaucrats taking six-figure salaries,” said Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of the CTF. “The feds must take air out of the ballooning bureaucracy.”

There are now 33,754 more federal bureaucrats making six-figures annually than there were before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

And since 2015, the number of federal bureaucrats making $100,000 and up has spiked by 136 per cent. 

Through access-to-information requests, the CTF obtained the number of federal employees receiving more than $100,000 in annual salary between 2015 and 2022, which can be found here.

In August 2022, the CTF called on the federal government to implement an annual “sunshine list,” which would proactively disclose the number of employees earning six-figure salaries. 

Every provincial government, except Prince Edward Island and Quebec, provides their taxpayers with compensation disclosure lists.

“The federal government must be transparent with taxpayers about bureaucrat pay and that means publishing a sunshine list,” Terrazzano said. “We pay the bills and we deserve to know how many six-figure bureaucrats we’re paying for.”

The average compensation for each full-time federal employee is $125,300 when pay, pension, paid time off, shift premiums and other benefits are considered, according to the Parliamentary Budget Officer.

Meanwhile, data from Statistics Canada shows the average annual salary among all full-time workers in 2022 was about $64,000. 

On April 18, the Fraser Institute, an independent, non-partisan think tank, released a report showing that government employees receive “an 8.5 per cent wage premium, on average, over their private-sector counterparts.” 

The report also notes “the available data on non-wage benefits suggest that the government sector enjoys an advantage over the private sector,” in the form of pension coverage and paid time off, among other perks. 

“Enough is enough, taxpayers are tapped out,” Terrazzano said. “The bloated bureaucracy doesn’t deserve a penny more from taxpayers.”

More than 120,000 federal employees represented by the Public Service Alliance of Canada are currently on strike. They are joined by another 35,000 Canada Revenue Agency staff, represented by the Union of Taxation Employees, who have also walked off the job. 

PSAC is pushing for a compensation increase of up to 47 per cent across three years, including a slew of non-wage benefits. 

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat has estimated PSAC’s demands would cost taxpayers $9.3 billion over three years.

You can find the number of federal employees receiving a six-figure salary for each year between 2015 and 2022 here.