A Private Chef in Canada Bills $150. Take-Home Is Less

A private chef in Canada can bill more for a single hour than a restaurant cook takes home in a full shift, and a 23-year-old from just north of Milton, Ont., is the proof. Bella DeBartolo charges between $95 and $150 an hour, about a year after she decided she wanted nothing to do with restaurant kitchens. The Globe and Mail told her story on Aug. 11.

Her clients are mostly professional athletes, two of them NHL players. She builds the menus, does the grocery run, and cooks roughly 90 per cent of what a client eats in a given week. Budgets run $3,500 to $4,000 a month, groceries included. She trained in Portugal and Spain, works as a certified nutritional practitioner, and found her first clients through Instagram and word of mouth.

The number that makes the story travel is the comparison. Chefs in this country average $23 an hour, or about $56,000 a year, according to 2025 federal data cited by the Globe. At the top of her range she bills close to six times that. All true — and yet the gap between what a self-employed cook invoices and what she actually keeps is where the useful part of this story lives.

Why Athletes Make an Ideal First Client

Pro athletes are close to a perfect customer: high income, strict nutritional targets, punishing travel schedules, and almost no time to cook. They also share a locker room, which turns one satisfied client into a referral pipeline that no advertising budget can buy. Globally, Grand View Research expects the personal chef market to reach about US$24.2 billion by 2030, growing roughly 6.5 per cent a year.

Why a Private Chef in Canada Out-Earns a Line Cook

It isn't skill. It's who signs the cheque. A restaurant buys your labour and keeps the margin on the plate, and its margin is thin. Canadian HR Reporter has noted that 36 per cent of operators are running at a loss or merely breaking even, with 91 per cent naming food costs as a pressure point and 87 per cent naming labour. Wages get squeezed from both ends. A household writing you a cheque directly cuts out the rent, the servers and the markup.

What $150 an Hour Actually Leaves You

Most people hiring a private chef in Canada pay a monthly figure, not a salary — and the chef pays for the food out of it before anything else. Groceries for an athlete eating five or six times a day are not a rounding error. Strip those out and the headline rate starts looking a lot more ordinary.

The Hours Nobody Pays For

Billable hours are the ones spent cooking. Menu planning, sourcing, driving between a client's house and three stores, portioning, invoicing, chasing late payments and answering texts about tomorrow's macros are not on the clock. A 20-hour billed week can easily be a 35-hour working week, which quietly cuts the effective rate by a third or more.

The Costs an Employer Used to Absorb

Self-employment moves the whole cost stack onto you. You pay both the employee and employer halves of CPP. There's no paid vacation, no sick day, no dental plan, and no EI safety net if a client drops you. Once revenue crosses $30,000 over four consecutive quarters, the CRA expects you to register for and charge GST/HST — a threshold you'd clear in a few hundred billable hours at these rates.

"I'm an entrepreneur at heart and absolutely adore having the freedom that comes with working for yourself," DeBartolo told the Globe and Mail.

What This Says About Restaurant Kitchens

Restaurants remain Canada's fourth-largest private-sector employer, with about 1.2 million workers, 40 per cent of them youth, according to Restaurants Canada — and hiring is up, with roughly 52,770 more young people employed in the first half of 2026 than a year earlier. But Job Bank still pegs the national median cook wage near $18 an hour. And Statistics Canada found cook vacancies posted one of the steepest year-over-year declines in the first quarter of 2026, with the overall vacancy rate flat at 2.8 per cent. Fewer empty jobs means less pressure to raise pay.

If You Want to Try This Yourself

Treat one Indeed figure with care: the $95,000-plus average base pay for private chefs came from just 39 reported salaries as of July. That's a signal, not a benchmark. Before you hand in your apron, sort out the boring parts.

• Confirm food-handling certification and liability insurance rules with your local public health unit — they vary by municipality.
• Bill shopping and travel time separately, or price it into the hourly rate.
• Keep every grocery receipt; it's a deductible cost, not income.
• Never let one client account for most of your revenue.

That last point is the one to watch. Athletes get traded, leave town in the off-season and change nutritionists. If you're building this, spend your first six months finding a second and third client rather than raising your rate on the first one — the rate is the easy part.