Methodology

Per capita amounts

A per capita amount divides the amount for a fiscal year by Québec's population on 1 July of the year in which the fiscal year begins (Statistics Canada, table 17-10-0005-01). For fiscal year 2025-2026, this is the population on 1 July 2025.

Constant dollars

To compare years with one another, constant-dollar series remove the effect of inflation. They use Québec's consumer price index (Statistics Canada, table 18-10-0005-01), as an annual average for the year in which the fiscal year begins, brought to the latest available year.

Two views of spending, never to be added together

Consolidated expenditure (Public Accounts, Volume 1) covers the whole government, including the health and education networks and special funds.

The General Fund (Public Accounts, Volume 2) covers government departments. A large part of its spending consists of transfers to the networks, which also appear in consolidated expenditure. Adding the two would count those amounts twice.

Trend in the General Fund

The trend by portfolio adds up, for each fiscal year, the spending in the file “Dépenses et investissements du fonds général” of Volume 2 of the Public Accounts. The 2022 reorganization of departments changed the name and scope of several portfolios; only those whose name has not changed are compared from year to year.

Budget versus actual

The comparison sets the expenditure budget tabled in March against actual General Fund spending for the same fiscal year.

The expenditure budget includes a contingency fund at the Conseil du trésor (program 0160.05, about $17 billion in 2025-2026), which is redistributed to departments during the year. It is removed from the budget before the comparison; otherwise, every department would appear to spend more than planned.

Equalization and federal transfers

Equalization and health transfers are an expense for the federal government and revenue for the Government of Québec. The site shows them on both sides, without ever adding the revenue or spending of the two governments.

In the Public Accounts of Canada, two lines relate to pollution pricing: the proceeds collected (revenue) and their return (expenses). They are shown as published.

Net debt

Net debt is the difference between the government's liabilities and its financial assets. From 2015-2016 to 2024-2025, it is calculated from the open data file of Volume 1 of the Public Accounts; the calculation matches exactly the value published at 31 March 2025. The value at 31 March 2026 comes from the 2025-2026 Public Accounts.

Debt service consists mostly of interest. The counter on the Debt page spreads the fiscal year's debt service evenly over every second: it is an order of magnitude, not the actual pace of payments.

Net debt as a percentage of GDP

The ratio divides net debt at 31 March by Québec's nominal gross domestic product for the previous calendar year (Statistics Canada, table 36-10-0222-01), as the Ministère des Finances does. The ratio for the latest fiscal year awaits that year's GDP, published every November.

Tax receipt

The estimate is for a single person whose only income is employment income. It applies the year's tax brackets and basic personal amount, for Québec and federally, with no other credits or deductions.

Federally, the basic personal amount decreases between the fourth and fifth brackets, then the 16.5% Québec abatement applies to basic federal tax.

Employee contributions include the Québec Pension Plan (base and first additional contributions, then the second additional contribution), Employment Insurance at the Québec rate and the Québec Parental Insurance Plan, each with its ceiling.

QST and GST are estimated from household consumption by income quintile (Statistics Canada, table 11-10-0223-01), interpolated according to your income, then multiplied by a taxable share. Since the survey's spending already includes taxes, it is divided by 1.14975 before the rates are applied.

No official source publishes the taxable share of consumption by quintile. As an assumption, the calculation uses the shares estimated in a CIRANO study (report 2015RP-10, 2008 data). This is the most uncertain part of the estimate.

Municipal taxes are the average tax burden per dwelling in the selected municipality, across all types of dwelling. A single-family house generally pays more.

The result is an estimate for information only. It does not replace your income tax return, your notice of assessment or your tax bill.

Marginal rate

The tax receipt's marginal rate is the share of an additional $1,000 of income that would go to taxes and contributions. It excludes sales taxes, estimated from consumption averages, and municipal taxes.

School tax

The receipt estimates the school tax on a residence of average value in the chosen municipality: the school year's single rate, applied to the average standardized assessment of residences (financial profile of the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l'Habitation) minus the $25,000 exemption.

An actual residence may be worth more or less than the average; a tenant pays this tax indirectly, through rent.

Proportional allocation

Income tax goes into a common fund: it does not pay for any particular program. The receipt shows what your contribution would represent if it followed the structure of spending: Québec income tax and QST according to consolidated expenditure by portfolio, federal income tax and GST according to the main categories of federal expenses.

Municipalities

Municipal spending means the expenses of the municipal administration, including amortization. Debt means total net long-term debt of a local nature, excluding the agglomeration share.

Budget is compared with actual for taxes only: the expense budget excludes amortization while actual expenses include it, which makes the two incomparable.

Central municipalities of an agglomeration provide services to their neighbours; their spending per capita is therefore higher.

A municipality that has not yet filed its report for the year shows the most recent one available, with its year. The item codes of the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l'Habitation are checked in each edition before they are used.

When two municipalities share a name, the name of their MRC (or region), then their designation (town, parish, township…), tells them apart.

Municipal history

Each year of the history comes from that year's financial report (current format of the Ministère des Affaires municipales et de l'Habitation, since 2023). The year before comes from the “previous year” column of the 2023 report: revenue and expenses only.

Reports for 2022 and earlier are published in another format, without item names; they are not used, to avoid misreading them. An impossible negative amount (data entry error at the source) is left out.

Regions and RCMs

Totals for a region or a regional county municipality (RCM) add up the latest financial reports of its municipalities. Per capita amounts divide these totals by the population of only those municipalities that filed a report. The median taxes per dwelling is that of the territory's municipalities.

The RCMs' own budgets, metropolitan communities and intermunicipal boards are not included.

Maps

Region and RCM boundaries come from the Geographic and Administrative Database at 1:5,000,000 (Ministère des Ressources naturelles et des Forêts), simplified for display. The colours form five classes, each with the same number of territories (quintiles).

Cities outside an RCM are coloured by their own value; the Montréal, Québec and Longueuil agglomerations by their central city.

Similar municipalities

Each profile compares the municipality with the median of municipalities in the same population class (classes of the Ministère des Affaires municipales), within its administrative region when there are at least five, otherwise across Québec.

Infrastructure projects

The dashboard of projects of $20 million or more is published several times a year. Every edition published since May 2020 is kept, to trace the cost of each project.

The unit varies by edition: some give costs in dollars, others in millions of dollars. It is checked in each edition before conversion to dollars.

A project's cost increase is the difference between its cost in the latest edition and its first published cost. One edition that was malformed at the source (4 December 2024) is excluded from the history.

Cost increases, construction inflation removed

To separate the increase due to prices from the one that comes from the project itself, the first published cost is brought to the latest edition's dollars with Québec's non-residential building construction price index (Statistics Canada, table 18-10-0289-01, quarterly).

This index covers buildings. It is applied to every project, including roads and civil engineering works, for lack of an equivalent official index for Québec: it is an approximation.

IT projects

An IT project's overrun is the difference between its estimated cost and its authorized cost, two values published in the dashboard of the Ministère de la Cybersécurité et du Numérique. The ratings (green, yellow, red) are the department's.

Public contracts (SEAO)

Each month, the Secrétariat du Conseil du trésor publishes SEAO notices on Données Québec (OCDS international format). The site summarizes each month once, keeps the latest state of each contract and classifies contracts by award date, by fiscal year (1 April to 31 March).

Amount at award: value reported when awarded. Final amount: value reported at the end of the contract, when reported. Suppliers are grouped by Québec enterprise number (NEQ), otherwise by name. Only companies and organizations are named.

A municipal page shows the contracts of the buyer bearing the municipality's name (“Ville de …”, “Municipalité de …”); intermunicipal boards, RCMs and transit authorities are not counted there.

Comparing the provinces

The comparison uses Statistics Canada table 10-10-0024-01: expenses of provincial general governments by function (health, education and others), divided by the population on 1 July of the same year.

This scope is not that of Québec's Public Accounts: the health and education networks appear through the transfers they receive. The amounts therefore differ from those on other pages.

Health

The annual emergency room and surgery indicators, and their targets, come from the annual management report of the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux.

The latest number of surgery requests waiting for more than a year adds up the sixteen regions in the file “Chirurgies – Portrait de la liste d'attente”. A period in which a region is missing is not used, since the total would be understated.

Health spending by region

Spending per capita in a health region divides the spending of the region's facilities by its population on 1 July of the year in which the fiscal year begins (Statistics Canada, table 17-10-0157-01). Some facilities also serve patients from other regions, particularly in Montréal and Capitale-Nationale.

Total health spending across provinces

The Canadian Institute for Health Information estimates health spending from all sources: governments, private insurance and households. Its figures for the current year are forecasts. The territories, whose per capita spending exceeds $20,000, are left out of the comparison.

Public service

The workforce counts people, not full-time equivalents, as of 31 March. The average salary is an annual salary excluding overtime, premiums and allowances.

The estimated payroll multiplies the workforce by the average salary of each category, excluding benefits: it is an approximation. The number of people at each salary step is not published.

Health network staff

Each spring, the Ministère de la Santé et des Services sociaux publishes the number of people, jobs and full-time equivalents in the network, by category and by region, along with pay. The site reads its Excel file directly and picks up each new edition on its own.

Excluded by the department: physicians and other professionals paid by the RAMQ, independent labour, and staff of the department, community organizations and private non-subsidized institutions. The rate per 1,000 residents divides staff as of 31 March by the region's population on the previous 1 July.

Unit costs

Only figures from government sources are used. The year varies by indicator and is always shown. The Ministère de l'Éducation's total expenditure per student is published only up to 2017-2018.

The cost per university student is a calculation: the operating grant divided by funded full-time equivalent enrolment. It excludes tuition fees.

Collection and checks

Every day, the open sources are checked and only the files that have changed are processed again. Données Québec pages are read at the pace they request (one request every ten seconds).

Before anything is published, checks verify the columns and types of the files, the number of rows compared with the previous edition, and the published totals: sum of portfolios, sum of transfers, revenue and deficit, net debt. If a check fails, nothing is published and the site keeps the last valid data.

Figures that exist only in PDF form are entered by hand, with their page and dates, and the Sources and updates page shows the next expected edition.