Open Compensation Reports · July 11, 2026
Who marries whom in Canada?
An interactive analysis of 2021 Census of Population public-use microdata: 8.76 million weighted partnered workers, paired spouse to spouse within real Canadian households.
People tend to marry people they meet, and people meet at work, at school, and in the social circles their jobs sort them into. Statistics Canada's census microdata lets us measure the result: for every partnered worker in Canada, what does their spouse or common-law partner do for a living?
Pick an occupation group below. The chart shows the distribution of partners' occupations, computed from couples living in the same household in the 2021 Census.
Click an occupation on the left. Hover any ribbon for detail.
Partnered workers in health marry partners who work in…
Health includes registered nurses, physicians, pharmacists, dental hygienists, care aides.
- Trades & transport24.9%
- Health (same field)16.8%
- Sales & service13.1%
- Business & finance12.9%
- Sciences & engineering11.6%
- Education, law & government10.5%
- Manufacturing & utilities4.5%
- Agriculture & resources2.6%
- Art, culture & sport1.8%
- Senior management1.2%
16.9% of health workers' working partners are in the same broad occupation group. Ribbon thickness shows the share of partners; pink ribbons are women workers, blue are men (of the selected occupation). Hover a ribbon for the partner-gender breakdown.
Like marries like, mostly
Every occupation group partners with its own kind far more often than chance would predict. Workers in natural resources and agriculture are the most endogamous: 32.8% of their working partners are in the same broad group. Sales and service follows at 31.6%. The least: trades and transport at 9.4%, largely because that workforce is heavily male and its partners cluster in other groups.
Health occupations sit in the middle: 16.9% of health workers' partners also work in health, which is roughly five times the group's share of chance pairings you would expect if love ignored the org chart.
What this data can and cannot say
The public-use file groups jobs into ten broad National Occupational Classification categories, so it can say "health occupations marry trades workers" but not "nurses marry electricians." Finer pairings require Statistics Canada's research data centres. The famous American version of this analysis, Bloomberg's "Who Marries Whom," used US Census Bureau microdata with hundreds of detailed occupations; Canada's public file trades that granularity for privacy.
Method notes
Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census of Population Public Use Microdata File, hierarchical file (catalogue 98M0002X), used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence. Married spouses and common-law partners were paired within census families (85,056 couples in the sample; 43,643 with both partners reporting an occupation), and each partnered worker contributes their census weight, totalling 8.76 million weighted partnered workers. Percentages are the weighted distribution of partners' NOC 2021 broad occupation categories. This analysis does not imply any conclusions by Statistics Canada.
Curious where your own pay stands? See where you rank against Canada's public-sector disclosure lists.