Methodology

The “Sunshine List” is the annual disclosure required by the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996 (PSSDA): organizations that receive significant public funding from the Province of Ontario — as defined by the Act’s funding thresholds — must publicly name every employee who earned $100,000 or more in a calendar year, along with their position, salary paid, and taxable benefits. SunshineList republishes that disclosure in a searchable, comparable form. It adds no salary figure the government did not already publish.

Every record on this site comes from the disclosure files linked from the Government of Ontario’s official Public Sector Salary Disclosure page, one file per disclosure year. They are released under the Public Sector Salary Disclosure Act, 1996 — the licence instrument data.ontario.ca’s own dataset metadata names for every disclosure year in its open-data catalogue (1996–2020; the 2021–2025 files are published directly on ontario.ca under the same Act). We source every record from the Province’s published files; if an official file becomes unavailable, we fall back to an archived copy of that same file, and record which source was used for each year in the dataset’s provenance.

Each year’s file is ingested as-is, then repaired and resolved through a fixed pipeline:

• Mojibake repair. Some source files carry accented characters that were already corrupted into the Unicode replacement character (U+FFFD) before Ontario published them. Where the original character can be recovered unambiguously, we restore it.
• Identity layer. The same person can appear under slightly different name spellings, job title wording, or an employer that renamed or merged over 30 years of files. We group records into names, employers, and — where the evidence supports it — the same person across years. Automated grouping is evidence-only and conservative: two records for the same name at the same employer in the same year are always treated as different people and never merged with each other. The only inference we allow across such a year is a job title that is exact and unique on both sides of it — if one holds, we continue that one person’s run through the collision; everyone else’s run stops there. There is no chaining by salary rank or by name alone. Human review is applied to employer renames and job-title normalization, not to person identities, and every renamed or merged employer keeps its former names on record.
• Position normalization. Job titles are grouped from each employer’s own filed wording — including English/French bilingual forms — into a single position, so a title search isn’t defeated by spelling or word-order differences alone.
• Statistics. Per-year, per-employer, per-position, and per-sector aggregates (medians, percentiles, rankings) are computed from the resolved records.

SunshineList does not scrape other sites, social media, or any source outside the government’s own disclosure files to enrich a record. It carries no personal data beyond what the published disclosure itself already contains — a name, position, employer, salary paid, and taxable benefits.

• Correction: 2023 job titles. Ontario’s 2023 source file has always included job titles — a bug in this pipeline’s column mapping, not an omission by the Province, briefly caused every 2023 job title to be dropped here. This has since been fixed and the titles restored.
• Name spelling drift. The same person’s name is sometimes filed differently across years by different employers; our matching closes most of this gap but not all of it.
• Identity ambiguity. Two different people can share the same name at the same employer. Where the records cannot be confidently split or merged, we show them separately and say so, rather than guess.
• U+FFFD residuals. A small number of names carry a Unicode replacement character our mojibake repair could not confidently resolve to a specific letter.

The Government of Ontario publishes the disclosure annually, typically in late March, covering the prior calendar year. SunshineList re-runs its full pipeline against the new file shortly after each release.

Data as of: 1996–2025, last updated 2026-03-31.

We cannot change a figure in the underlying government disclosure, but we do fix errors in how this site processes, resolves, or displays that data. See the Contact page for how to request one.

Journalists and other reusers of this data should start at Press for citation guidance and per-employer-year CSV downloads.

SunshineList is published anonymously. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Government of Ontario, and republishes only what the government has already made public. Corrections go to corrections@sunshinelist.fyi; for press enquiries see Press.