2025 People & Culture Compensation Salary Guide

2025 People & Culture Compensation Salary Guide

In today’s competitive tech landscape, clear and current compensation benchmarks are key to attracting and retaining top talent. At Artemis, we regularly speak with People & Culture leaders across high-growth startups and scaleups, from Managers to VPs, and compensation is a constant theme.

Whether you’re hiring or assessing your own market value, this guide shares real-time salary insights from recent searches and candidate conversations to help you navigate today’s market with confidence.

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TL;DR 

• People & Culture leaders are more strategic than ever, driving scaling and organizational change.
• Hybrid is now the dominant work model, with fewer fully remote roles but little full-time return to office.
• These roles remain critical for organizational design, leadership alignment, and team resilience.

Compensation By Level

This data reflects total on Median target earnings (OTE), including base salary and performance-based bonus or variable compensation. All figures are in Canadian dollars. 

Understanding Compensation Structures

On Target Earnings (OTE) usually consists of a base salary plus a variable/ bonus component. Below you will find the breakdown of base and % of base salary as a bonus.

Remote Work

In 2025, we saw a noticeable shift toward hybrid setups for People & Culture professionals. This year, 62.9% reported working in hybrid roles, compared to 49% last year. Fully remote arrangements declined to 34.3%, while full-time in-office roles remain rare at just 2.9%. This trend reflects organizations’ renewed emphasis on in-person collaboration and visibility (particularly with leadership) while still prioritizing flexibility. The result is a continued balance that supports both cultural alignment and adaptability in fast-changing workplaces.

Where this People & Culture Data Comes From:

This snapshot reflects verified data gathered from a combination of recent searches and our proprietary salary survey.

• Based on 60 to 140 individual data points per level
• Sources include one-on-one candidate conversations and our invitation-only salary survey with more than 400 responses
• Respondents are current or recent marketing professionals at start-ups and scale-ups across Canada
• Many are gainfully employed and were referred to us as high-performing or high-potential candidates

Because of this, our figures may reflect the upper end of the market.

We do not include dollar values for equity due to the complexity of evaluating early-stage or private company stock.

Why We Share This!

Salary transparency supports better hiring, fairer compensation, and stronger negotiation on both sides of the table. That is why we created our Salary Snapshot Series.

We base this on the four Ts:

• Targeted to Canadian tech companies and candidates
• Timely with data from the past 12 months
• Trustworthy thanks to verified conversations and survey results
• Trim with clear insights and relevant context, without unnecessary noise

Feel free to share this snapshot with your network or explore our other Salary Snapshot reports on artemiscanada.com.