Open Canada's national Job Bank on any day this year and the occupation you will see most often is cook.
In September 2026 employers posted 2,509 cook jobs on Job Bank, more than any other occupation, ahead of food counter attendants (1,736) and retail salespeople (1,686). Cooks have held the top spot every month since November 2025.
It is easy to read that as "Canada is short of cooks". The data does not support that reading. What it shows is a job that gets advertised a lot, for reasons that have more to do with pay and turnover than with a shortage of people who can cook.
Cooks are twice as common on Job Bank as in the job market
Job Bank is one website. Statistics Canada estimates every job vacancy in the country through its Job Vacancy and Wage Survey. The two can be compared directly, because both count vacancies.
| Cooks' share of vacancies | |
|---|---|
| Posted on Job Bank, September 2026 | 4.0% |
| All job vacancies in Canada, April–June 2026 (Statistics Canada) | 2.4% |
Statistics Canada counted 13,310 cook vacancies in April to June 2026, out of 548,400 vacancies in total. That is a real number, but it is not unusual, and it is a third below the 19,815 cook vacancies it counted in July to September 2023.
So the first answer to "why so many cook jobs?" is that Job Bank shows more of them than the job market does.
Why cooks crowd Job Bank
Statistics Canada asks employers how they fill each vacancy. Four answers separate cook jobs from the rest:
- More employers recruit through a government job site (28.0% against 21.3%). Job Bank is that site, so cook jobs are over-represented on it from the start. In the Job Bank data, 53% of cook postings were entered directly on Job Bank, against 42.5% of all postings; the rest arrive from partner job boards.
- Half of cook employers are constantly recruiting (48.7%, against 40.2% for all jobs). A business that is always hiring keeps a posting live or reposts it, and every repost counts again.
- Many of the jobs are part-time (36.4% against 25.6%). It takes more part-time hires to staff a kitchen than full-time ones.
- Most ask for no education (54.2% against 29.3%), so the pool of possible applicants is wide. These are not jobs going unfilled for lack of qualified people.
Most cook postings are also small. In September, 71% of them were for a single position, which is what you would expect from thousands of individual restaurants each replacing one cook.
The pay explains the churn
| Hourly pay | Cooks | All occupations |
|---|---|---|
| Average offered wage, April–June 2026 (Statistics Canada) | $19.55 | $28.55 |
| Median advertised wage on Job Bank, September 2026 | $19.00 | $22.00 |
Cook vacancies offer about $9 an hour less than the average vacancy. Low pay and part-time hours are the conditions under which people leave a job quickly, and a job people leave quickly is one employers advertise again and again. That is consistent with what Statistics Canada reports: half of cook employers say they are always recruiting.
It is not mainly foreign-worker advertising
The other common explanation is the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. Before an employer can apply for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to hire a foreign worker, it must advertise the job, and Job Bank is one of the required places. Cooks have been one of the program's largest occupations.
But approvals for cooks have fallen sharply, while cook postings on Job Bank went up:
From April–June 2025 to January–March 2026, cook positions on approved LMIAs fell from 1,847 to 545, down 70%. Meanwhile, from October 2025 to September 2026, cooks' share of Job Bank postings rose from 3.6% to 4.8%, and they became Job Bank's most-posted occupation. Some cook postings are still LMIA advertising, but they cannot be most of the story: the postings grew while approvals shrank.
Where the cook jobs are
Cooks make up the largest share of postings in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. September 2026, share of each province's Job Bank postings, for the provinces with at least 50 cook postings:
| Province | Cook postings | Share of postings |
|---|---|---|
| New Brunswick | 88 | 8.9% |
| Nova Scotia | 127 | 7.6% |
| Manitoba | 103 | 6.0% |
| British Columbia | 538 | 5.6% |
| Saskatchewan | 243 | 5.5% |
| Alberta | 319 | 5.2% |
| Ontario | 625 | 4.1% |
| Quebec | 393 | 3.5% |
By number, Ontario and British Columbia lead, with the Toronto region (261) and B.C.'s Lower Mainland (251) the two biggest local markets.
What this means if you are a cook planning to immigrate
The number of postings is not a measure of your chances, and it says nothing about points.
- Cooks are TEER 3, which keeps the occupation inside the skilled band (TEER 0 to 3) that Express Entry accepts.
- Cooks are not on IRCC's high-wage occupations list. From 3 November 2026, a job offer earns Express Entry points only in one of 186 high-wage occupations. A cook's job offer will earn none.
- Many postings are part-time. Most immigration programs count full-time work, or its equivalent in hours.
A cook who wants to use a Canadian job for immigration is usually looking at a provincial program, and the province's own grid decides. The provincial calculators score that.
What this data cannot tell you
Job Bank is not the whole job market. It carries what employers post there, plus feeds from partner boards, and it leans towards jobs whose employers have a reason to use a government site. Statistics Canada's survey is the measure of all vacancies, and its latest quarter is April to June 2026, so the two sources do not cover exactly the same months.
A posting is not a hire, and a vacancy is not proof of a shortage. Neither source measures how many cooks are looking for work.
Sources
- Job Bank postings: ESDC, Job Postings Advertised on Canada's National Job Bank, monthly files September 2025 to September 2026, read 2026-10-17. Cooks are NOC 2021 code 63200. Our count of August 2026 was checked against the figures this site already publishes from the same file, and matched exactly.
- Vacancies, wages and recruitment: Statistics Canada, Job Vacancy and Wage Survey, tables 14-10-0444 and 14-10-0443, Canada, latest quarter April to June 2026.
- LMIA approvals: ESDC, Temporary Foreign Worker Program LMIA statistics, table 7, 2025Q1 to 2026Q1.
Tell us if anything here is wrong.