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Trade Playbook
Home building is the rare construction business with a real exam at the door (HCRA) and a seven-year warranty hanging over every house you build (Tarion). The questions are a developer's, not a tradesperson's: spec versus custom versus contract build, how the money and the risk actually work, and how Tarion claims can quietly eat a year's profit.
Where it starts
$80k–130k
Site super / builder's PM (employed)
Where it tops out
$250k–millions
Established builder / developer
Ontario figures for new home building, 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 |
|---|---|---|
| Site super / builder's PM (employed) | $80k–130k | Running other people's builds — the apprenticeship for building your own. |
| Small custom builder (1–3 homes/yr) | $100k–250k | Lumpy and capital-aware; you live on a few projects a year. |
| Production / spec builder | Higher, with real risk | You carry land, financing, and market exposure. |
| Established builder / developer | $250k–millions | Real capital, real risk — this is developer economics, not a salary. |
Two home builders with the same ticket can be twenty dollars an hour apart because they picked different work.
You buy the land, finance the build, and profit on the sale — fully exposed to the market between start and close.
Best for: Capitalized builders comfortable with market risk.
Every figure above is what home builders get paid. It is not what you charge once you run a home building 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 jobThe endgame is to scale into a production builder, become a developer (where the land wealth is), or sell the company. A builder with land, a brand, systems, and a pipeline is a valuable asset; a one-person custom builder has a high-stress, capital-intensive job. The wealthy ones almost always end up controlling land, not just swinging permits.
Wage data, union rate sheets, and the places home builders 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.
Carpenter Jobs in Ontario: Who Is Hiring Right NowAEC Stack handles incorporation, WSIB, insurance certificates, quoting, invoicing, and chasing the money, so a home building business runs like one with an office behind it.
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