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While the Canadian census of 1681 has gaps and is not always easy to interpret, it remains among the best available sources for the study of populations in the Saint-Lawrence Valley during the 17th century. This paper uses the census in order to better understand the structure and extent of rural domestic labor. While relatively small in numbers among the general rural population, the rural domesticity that could be met in the Canadian countryside toward the end of the 17th century appears to have been already quite diversified in 1681. This workforce consisted of both men and women, adults and children, and worked for the local lords and a few notables as well as for lesser colonists. Its use was motivated less by the size or composition of the employer’s family than by the economic differences observed between households in terms of amounts of cultivated land and cattle. This means that as early as the second half of the 17th century, Canadian peasant society was already quite hierarchical.