Every couple of years Statistics Canada publishes a set of numbers that get turned into a hundred headlines, and Canadians read them the same way every time. As a scoreboard. Am I ahead? Am I behind?

It's the wrong question.

A benchmark is not a plan. You can sit exactly on the median net worth for your age band and still come up short at 84. You can sit well below it and be completely fine for forty years. The balance isn't what decides the outcome. What you spend, when you start your benefits, and how much tax you pay getting money out of your accounts: those decide it.

That said, the numbers are genuinely useful for context, and most of what circulates online is stale or unsourced. So here is every current Canadian benchmark worth knowing, each one carrying its source and reference year, followed by what it actually tells you about your own plan.

Median Net Worth by Age in Canada

The authoritative source is Statistics Canada's Survey of Financial Security, 2023 reference year, released October 29, 2024. That survey runs roughly every three years, so 2023 is the current cycle and these figures won't update until around 2027. Net worth here means total assets, including real estate and pension assets, minus total debt, grouped by the age of the major income earner in the family.

Across all Canadian families, the overall median net worth is $519,700 (Statistics Canada, Survey of Financial Security, 2023).

Why Median and Not Average

Statistics Canada reports the median at the age-band level rather than the average, and that choice matters. A median is the midpoint: half of families sit above it, half below. An average gets dragged upward by a small number of very large balances, which makes it a worse description of a typical household.

But the stronger argument for the median is what happens inside a single age band. Among families aged 55 to 64, Statistics Canada breaks net worth down by whether the family holds a principal residence and an employer pension:

Source: Statistics Canada, Survey of Financial Security, 2023 reference year.

That's a spread of more than one hundred times, inside a single ten-year age band, among people who are all roughly the same distance from retiring. Every one of those four groups reads the same headline number and draws a completely different conclusion.

It also shows you how little a net worth figure says about income. The $1,400,000 household holds most of that value in a house it still lives in and a pension it can't liquidate. The $359,000 pension-only household may well have more reliable monthly cash flow. Net worth and retirement income are two different questions.

Why the 65 and Over Number Is Lower

Median net worth peaks in the 55 to 64 band at $873,400, then falls to $738,900 once the major income earner is 65 or older. That isn't a data error.

It's drawdown. Retirees are converting accumulated savings into spending, which is exactly what those savings were built for. The 65 and over band also contains a higher share of one-person households, and a one-person balance sheet sits lower than a two-person one, which pulls the family-level median down further.

The useful question isn't whether your number is above or below the band. It's how fast that number should come down, and which account each year's spending comes out of. That's the sequencing question every Optiml plan answers year by year, because the order you draw from RRSP, TFSA, non-registered and pension income changes your lifetime tax bill without changing your lifestyle at all.

What Is the Average Retirement Income in Canada?

This one comes from Statistics Canada's Canadian Income Survey, 2023 reference year, and the headline figures split sharply by household type:

• Senior families (two or more people, with at least one member 65 or older): median after-tax income of $79,700, up 3.4% from 2022
• Unattached seniors (living alone): median after-tax income of $36,400, up 4.3% from 2022

Where that money comes from is just as revealing:

• Senior families: median market income of $52,100 and median government transfers of $36,200
• Unattached seniors: median market income of $16,500 and median government transfers of $22,900

For a senior living alone, government transfers are the larger share of total income. For senior families, market income leads but transfers still carry roughly a third of the load. CPP (Canada Pension Plan) and OAS (Old Age Security) aren't a rounding error in the typical Canadian retirement. They're structural.

By province, the same survey puts Alberta highest at $88,500 and Ontario at $78,600, with Nova Scotia at $62,900 and New Brunswick at $62,700 at the bottom. A $25,800 gap between the top and bottom province is real, but it's also partly a cost-of-living gap rather than a lifestyle gap.

The number that deserves the most attention is the one people skip: household structure moves retirement income more than almost anything else on this page. A senior family's median after-tax income is more than double an unattached senior's. If your plan assumes two incomes for its entire horizon, it's worth modelling the version where it doesn't.

The Average Retirement Age in Canada Is 65.4

From Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey, table 14-10-0060-01, 2025 reference year:

• All workers: 65.4 years, a record high
• Men: 66.2 years. Women: 64.5 years
• Public sector: 62.6 years
• Private sector: 66.0 years
• Self-employed: 68.4 years
• Twenty years ago the average was 61.6, so it has risen by nearly four years over two decades

The 5.8-year gap between public sector workers and the self-employed is the line worth sitting with. Both groups are made up of capable people who like their work and want to stop at some point. What separates them is mostly what's underneath: a defined benefit pension that starts paying on a fixed date versus a balance sheet you have to convert into income yourself.

Retirement age isn't a demographic fact you inherit. It's an output of your plan. Move your retirement date from 65 to 62 and you add three years of spending, remove three years of contributions, and shift every benefit decision downstream of it. Move it to 68 and the arithmetic reverses. Comparing those versions side by side, on your actual numbers, is a very different exercise from reading that the average is 65.4.

The Average Age of a First-Time Home Buyer in Canada Is About 36

From CMHC's 2025 Mortgage Consumer Survey, covering mortgages originated between June 2023 and January 2025:

• National average age of a first-time buyer: about 36
• 47% of first-time buyers are between 25 and 34, and the share over 35 is rising year over year
• Median household income of first-time buyers: about $105,000, up from a $60,000 to $90,000 range five years earlier
• 65% paid the maximum they could afford

One honest caveat on price. CMHC doesn't publish a purchase price specific to first-time buyers. For scale, CREA reports a national average home price of $668,219 in August 2026 (not seasonally adjusted, up 0.6% year over year), but that figure covers all buyers, not first-time buyers specifically. Treating the two as the same cohort would overstate what a first-time buyer typically pays.

Here's why this belongs on a retirement page. Buy your first home at 36 on a 25-year amortization and the mortgage runs to 61. That's four years before the average retirement age of 65.4, assuming you never move, never refinance and never extend. Most people do at least one of those.

So for a large share of Canadians, the last decade of mortgage payments and the first decade of serious retirement saving are happening at the same time, in the same budget. That's a sequencing problem, and it's solvable, but only if both are in the same model.

What Canadians Actually Collect from CPP and OAS

This is where benchmarks do the most damage, because the number people quote is the maximum and the number people receive is not.

• Maximum CPP retirement pension at 65: $1,507.65 per month (January 2026)
• Average CPP paid to new beneficiaries at 65: $877.01 per month (April 2026)

The average is 58% of the maximum. That gap is the single most important number on this page.

The reason is mechanical, not mysterious. The maximum assumes you contributed at the yearly maximum for most of your working life. Lower earning years, time out of the workforce, years spent working abroad, and self-employment years all change your contributory record. Most Canadians have at least one of those, which is why most Canadians land well under the maximum.

If your plan was built on $1,507.65 a month and your actual entitlement is closer to $877.01, that's roughly $7,500 a year of income the plan assumed and won't receive. Over a thirty-year retirement, indexed, the shortfall compounds into a genuinely different plan.

On the OAS side:

• Maximum OAS, ages 65 to 74: $751.97 per month (July to September 2026 quarter)
• Maximum OAS, ages 75 and over: $827.17 per month (same quarter)
• OAS recovery tax threshold: $95,323 for the 2026 income year

There's no published "average OAS received," and it would be misleading to invent one to mirror the CPP figure. OAS doesn't work the way CPP does. It's residency-based rather than contribution-based, so most people with at least 40 years of Canadian residence after age 18 receive the full amount. Fewer than 40 years gives you a prorated share of it.

The other thing that moves your OAS is income. Net income above the recovery tax threshold reduces the benefit at a rate of 15% of every dollar over the line, and the calculation runs on your prior year's income. That makes it a timing question as much as an income question, which is exactly the kind of thing Optiml's CPP & OAS Optimizer models: your benefit start ages and your withdrawal amounts get solved together, because changing one changes the other.

The Numbers at a Glance

These are household-level and benefit-level benchmarks. If you want account-level ones instead, we maintain a separate breakdown of average RRSP and TFSA balances by age.

The Bottom Line

Benchmarks are good for exactly one thing: context. They tell you roughly where a cohort sits at a point in time. They're worth knowing, and they're worth sourcing properly, which is why every figure above carries its year.

But look back at that 55 to 64 band. Same age, same country, same decade of decisions ahead, and a spread from $11,900 to $1,400,000. No single number was ever going to describe all of them, and no single number describes you.

What actually determines whether your money lasts is a sequence of decisions the averages can't see: what year you stop working, what you spend in the go-go years versus the quiet ones, which account funds each year, when CPP starts, when OAS starts, and what your tax bill looks like in every one of those years. Change any one of them and the answer moves.

More than 200,000 retirement plans have been run through Optiml. Every one of them is a full retirement horizon modelled year by year, every withdrawal, every benefit start age, every tax bill, out to the end of the plan. That's the level a real answer lives at, and it's a very different exercise from checking yourself against a median.

So use the benchmarks for what they're good for. Then go build the thing they can't give you.

The average Canadian is a statistic. You're a plan.