Every March, Ontario drops its annual list of public servants earning over $100,000. This year’s release, expected in days, will be more revealing — and more contested — than ever.
It arrives like clockwork. Before the month of March is out, the Ontario government will publish its annual Public Sector Salary Disclosure – the document Ontarians have been calling the Sunshine List for nearly three decades. Employers who receive public funding submit their payroll data by early March, and the province typically releases the full list around March 23–25.
This year, all eyes will be watching for whether the record-breaking trend of recent years continues — and whether the long-simmering debate over the list’s relevance will finally boil over into action.
A Quick Recap: What the List Actually Is
The Sunshine List was born in 1996, a signature move of Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution. The Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act requires every publicly funded organization in Ontario — school boards, hospitals, municipalities, Crown corporations, universities — to disclose the name, position, salary, and taxable benefits of any employee earning $100,000 or more in a calendar year.
The goal was transparency. At the time, $100,000 was genuinely elite money. The first list had fewer than 4,000 names on it.
That was then.
Last Year Set a Record. This Year Might Top It.
When the 2024 Sunshine List dropped in late March 2025 (covering 2024 earnings), it revealed 377,666 names – a staggering 25% jump from the 300,680 who made the list the year prior. Combined, those salaries totalled more than $50 billion in public money.
Ontario Power Generation CEO Kenneth Hartwick led the pack with a salary north of $2 million. Six of the top 10 earners came from OPG alone, each collecting more than $800,000. Hospital executives, Metrolinx leadership, college presidents, and senior municipal administrators rounded out the upper echelon.
The biggest driver of growth, however, wasn’t executive pay. Treasury Board President Caroline Mulroney pointed to the education sector, noting that nearly half of the list’s year-over-year growth came from school boards — and that teachers accounted for 87% of that increase, driven by retroactive pay, salary adjustments, and outcomes from collective bargaining.
As the 2025 Sunshine List (covering 2025 earnings) is released, expect that growth trend to continue. Wage increases across Ontario’s public sector have been robust over the past two years, meaning more workers will cross the $100,000 threshold for the first time — not necessarily because they got rich, but because that threshold has never moved.
The $100,000 Problem
Here is the number that tends to get lost in the annual fanfare: $100,000 in 1996, when this law was written, is equivalent to roughly $185,000 in today’s dollars. The threshold has never been indexed to inflation. Not once in nearly 30 years.
What this means in practice is that a registered nurse working long shifts, a school principal managing a 700-student building, or a mid-level city planner in Toronto now appears on the same list as a Crown corporation CEO pulling in seven figures. Out of last year’s 377,000-plus names, only about 22,500 actually earned above that inflation-adjusted equivalent of $185,000.
Critics have been vocal. AMAPCEO, the union representing over 17,000 Ontario public service professionals, has argued for years that the list “was designed to make transparent the salaries of a few big fish – top earning executives,” not the vast majority of working professionals whose salaries have simply kept pace with the cost of living. The union has also raised safety concerns: in 2018, one of its members was tracked down and harassed by a stalker who used the Sunshine List to locate her.
Small-town mayors have joined the chorus. In communities where everyone knows everyone, disclosing the salary of the local fire chief or parks director feels, as one mayor put it, less like accountability and more like an invasion of privacy.
The government’s response has been consistent: no changes are planned. Maintaining the threshold, officials argue, allows for year-over-year comparisons and keeps the public informed about how tax dollars are spent.
What to Watch For This Release
A few questions worth keeping in mind when the 2025 list drops:
Will the education sector keep growing? Last year’s spike was largely attributed to retroactive payments and new collective agreements. If those were one-time bumps, we may see the education numbers stabilize. If salary adjustments are now baked into base pay, the list will grow again.
How will OPG and the energy sector look? Ontario Power Generation has dominated the top of the list for years, reflecting the capital-intensive, highly specialized nature of nuclear and hydro power. With Ontario’s energy needs growing and major infrastructure projects underway, executive compensation in this sector bears close watching.
Will any new names or employers make headlines? Each year produces a handful of surprising entries – a municipal staffer in an unexpected role, a college administrator whose pay raises eyebrows, or a public agency most people didn’t know existed. These outliers drive much of the public conversation.
Will the reform debate gain traction? With a provincial election in the rear-view mirror and a political environment focused on affordability, the optics of a list crowded with front-line workers rather than executive decision-makers may finally push Queen’s Park toward a meaningful conversation about updating the act.
Why People Keep Reading It
Despite all its flaws, the Sunshine List remains one of the most-clicked documents in Ontario every spring. Taxpayers read it for reassurance or outrage. Employees use it to benchmark their own compensation. Journalists mine it for outliers. HR professionals quietly use it as a salary guide. Researchers track wage trends across sectors.
There is something almost ritual about it – a moment when the usually opaque machinery of public-sector pay becomes, briefly, visible.
Whether that visibility serves the purpose it was designed for is another question entirely. Nearly 30 years in, the Sunshine List is less a spotlight on the highest earners and more a wide floodlight illuminating a massive and growing middle of Ontario’s public workforce.
The list is coming. The debate will follow. And then, until next March, we’ll all quietly forget about it – until the cycle starts again.
The 2025 Ontario Sunshine List is expected to be released by the end of March 2026, covering salaries earned during the 2025 calendar year.