Looking for work? Here are the jobs with the most openings in Quebec in 2026
Many don't require a degree!
Nursing tops the list, but the demand reaches well beyond hospitals and clinics, into restaurants, retail floors, daycares and the open road.
Quebecers thinking of a career change, or just scrolling job boards more than they'd care to admit, have plenty of options right now.
New figures from the Institut de la statistique du Québec (ISQ) show roughly 28,600 positions sitting open across the 10 most in-demand occupations in the province as of the first quarter of 2026.
Those 10 jobs alone account for about 26% of every vacant position in Quebec, and the health and social services sector does much of the heavy lifting. Around 13,800 of the openings province-wide fall under that umbrella, or roughly 13% of all the roles waiting to be filled.
Nursing tops the list, but the demand reaches well beyond hospitals and clinics, into restaurants, retail floors, daycares and the open road.
Here are the 10 occupations with the most openings in Quebec in the first quarter of 2026, ranked by number of vacancies.
- Registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses: 4,922
- Food counter attendants, kitchen helpers and related support staff: 4,909
- Nurse aides, orderlies and patient service associates: 4,261
- Retail salespersons: 2,763
- Early childhood educators and assistants: 2,743
- Transport truck drivers: 2,211
- Social and community service workers: 1,882
- Administrative assistants: 1,722
- Store shelf stockers, clerks and order fillers: 1,635
- Cooks: 1,553
A few of these don't ask for a university degree, or in some cases, much formal schooling at all, especially the retail and food service jobs further down the list.
About the pay
Then there's the money. The average hourly wage being offered for these openings sits at $29.15. For anyone not keeping track, that's a fair bit below the $36.49 that Quebec workers earn on average. The gap isn't as stark as it first looks, though, since job postings tend to list entry-level rates while that broader average includes people with years of experience behind them.
Where you look matters too. Among Quebec's regions, Montreal came in near the top for average offered wages, above the provincewide number, so the same job can pay differently depending on where you end up taking it.
Which jobs are safe from AI
The ISQ also measured how exposed each of these jobs is to artificial intelligence. A little over half of the 10 are considered minimally exposed, among them nurse aides, truck drivers, shelf stockers and cooks, the kind of hands-on work that's hard to hand off to a machine.
Then you've got the jobs AI is poised to touch in a big way, but as a helper rather than a replacement. Nurses and early childhood educators are included in that category, since technology might change how they work without threatening whether they work.
The group to actually worry about is the last one: jobs directly in AI's path. Retail salespeople, social and community service workers, and administrative assistants are the names that come up there.
With tens of thousands of roles going unfilled across the province, Quebec employers are clearly still hiring, and plenty of that demand is in fields you can walk into without a degree.
This story was inspired by the article "Voici le top 10 des emplois avec le plus de postes à combler au Québec en 2026" which was originally published on Narcity.
