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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.