In 2026, Canadian tech talent salaries rose an average of 3.5%, according to data from TAP Network and Marsh.
Sachi Kittur, the chief executive officer of TAP, doesn’t find this statistic very interesting.
“The headline isn’t that salaries moved 3.5%,” Kittur insists. “The more interesting story is what is happening underneath that number.”
AI-based skills have jumped ever higher up the ladder of hardest-to-recruit skills, the data from TAP shows, while tech turnover has dropped from 13% to just 7% over the past three years.
“Employees are moving less, AI capabilities are becoming harder to find, and organizations are being much more deliberate about where they invest in talent,” observes Kittur. “For People and Culture leaders, this changes the conversation.”
Moving forward, “It is no longer simply about what a job is worth today,” Kittur suggests: “We need to understand what work and capabilities will create value next, and whether our workforce is ready for that shift.”
For example, artificial intelligence climbed from 17% to 25% among the mostly hotly demanded skills, now ranking third behind sales at 38% and leadership at 44%.
“We are moving very quickly from a conversation about AI tools to a much bigger conversation about workforce capability,” Kittur believes. “The organizations that get this right will need to understand where human expertise becomes more valuable, where new capabilities need to be built, and where work itself needs to be redesigned.”
One thing AI hasn’t changed is the demand for hybrid and remote work. In 2026, more than 70% of tech organizations operate a hybrid model. Although perhaps it has: Three days in the office is now the most common setup—up from two days in 2025.
Regardless, in the age of AI, hybrid work is “increasingly part of broader workforce design, collaboration, and organizational effectiveness,” according to TAP.
Founded in 1992, The Tech and People Network positions itself as the definitive community for People and Culture professionals in Canada’s tech sector, with more than 1,000 members across hundreds of tech companies spanning myriad sectors.
TAP this year published its inaugural Talent Benchmarking Study which unveiled a new metric for measuring workforce performance: “Employee Lifetime Value.”
The idea is that eLTV can help provide the same rigour around talent decisions as traditionally more data-based capital investments.
With each year of participation, TAP says its dataset will deepen, enabling organizations to benchmark performance against peers and track how workforce decisions impact value creation over time.
