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Trade Playbook
Commercial construction isn't a trade you learn — it's a market you graduate into, and the questions are a contractor's, not an apprentice's: how to break in past the prequalification wall, why bonding and COR gate everything, tenant fit-outs versus ICI new construction, and how getting paid works when the client is a developer sitting on your holdback.
Where it starts
$80k–130k
Project manager / estimator (employed)
Where it tops out
$250k–millions
Established commercial GC
Ontario figures for commercial construction, from the first day on site to the top of the trade. Approximate, and worth checking against current collective agreement rates and job postings in your region.
| Stage | Pay | What is going on at this stage |
|---|---|---|
| Project manager / estimator (employed) | $80k–130k | Running commercial projects for someone else — the path to running your own. |
| Small commercial contractor / sub owner | $100k–250k | Volatile, and bonding capacity caps how much you can carry at once. |
| Established commercial GC | $250k–millions | Business income and developer-scale risk, not a salary. |
Two commercial contractors with the same ticket can be twenty dollars an hour apart because they picked different work.
Institutional, commercial, and industrial buildings — full prequalification, bonding, big tickets and slow draws.
Best for: Established firms with bonding and a track record.
Every figure above is what commercial contractors get paid. It is not what you charge once you run a commercial construction business. Your rate has to carry the hours you are not on the tools, the truck, the tools themselves, WSIB, insurance, the quote you wrote and lost, and the holdback sitting in someone else's account for 60 days. Contractors who set their rate off their old hourly wage are the ones who work every weekend and still cannot say whether the year was profitable.
The step from paid by the hour to paid by the jobScale into a larger GC, specialize as a commercial trade contractor on a niche, or sell. A commercial contractor with bonding capacity, a management team, a safety program, and a backlog is a genuinely valuable, sellable asset — the bonding and the systems are worth more than the tools.
Wage data, union rate sheets, and the places commercial contractors talk about money openly.
The rates above are the market. The live feed is the market this week: which builders and contractors just pulled a permit or won a contract in Ontario, what they are about to need, and who to call.
Construction Craft Worker and Labourer Jobs in Ontario: Who Is HiringAEC Stack handles incorporation, WSIB, insurance certificates, quoting, invoicing, and chasing the money, so a commercial construction business runs like one with an office behind it.
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