Wages, Skills, and Job Quality: What 2025 JFD Data Tells Us About Work in Durham
Wage and skill data from 2025 highlights both progress and ongoing challenges in Durham Region’s labour market. While wages continued to rise modestly, improvements in job quality remained uneven across sectors and occupations.
The average posted hourly wage increased to $27.85, with the median wage rising to $23.27. Wage growth was strongest in utilities and technical occupations, reflecting increased demand for specialized skills. Health professions, natural and applied sciences, and senior management roles continued to command the highest wages overall.
Despite these gains, many high-volume roles—particularly in retail, food services, and administrative support—remained lower-wage. This reinforces a persistent divide between job accessibility and job quality, with many jobs easy to enter but offering limited wage progression.
Skill requirements remained consistent across the year. Employers most frequently sought communication, customer service, management, interpersonal, and organizational skills, emphasizing transferable competencies over formal credentials. More than 80% of job postings did not specify education or experience requirements, which supports broad workforce access but increases reliance on on-the-job learning.
Strengthening pathways from accessible entry-level work into higher-skill, higher-wage roles remains a key opportunity for Durham’s workforce system.
These insights are drawn from the Durham Workforce Authority’s 2025 Annual Labour Market Insights Report, which provides a comprehensive overview of hiring activity, wages, skills demand, and jobseeker behaviour across Durham Region. Read the full report to explore the data in more detail.