Ice surface albedo is a primary modulator of melt and runoff, yet our understanding of how reflectance varies over time across the Greenland Ice Sheet remains poor. These results show that interpolated MODIS Terra melt season albedo measurements can realistically approximate net annual glacier mass balance for Arctic glaciers and ice caps, without additional information about precipitation or temperature, and in the absence of a melt model. When the five glaciers' interpolated average albedo is correlated to their ensemble mass balance, an R² = 0.82 is achieved. The most negative net mass balance occurs at Grise Fiord Glacier, which is the smallest (. Overall, the interpolated average albedo method performs substantially better for the smallest glacier than the minimum or the raw average methods. In the interpolated average method, linear interpolation of the raw average albedo values to fill cloud gaps, then averaging them, improves the raw average correlations for all ice masses by ~5% (R² range 0.68–0.97). In the raw average method, averaging all albedo values within a glacier outline over the melt season improves the correlation to mass balance to a range of 0.61–0.95. For the minimum method, the whole glacier albedo is calculated from the average of the minimum melt season albedo of each grid cell, irrespective of the day on which they occurred, resulting in R² values between 0.20 and 0.87. These are evaluated in terms of a 53–71% reduction in observations due to cloud cover in the raw albedo time series. Three glacier albedo aggregation methods are tested for the melt season (June, July and August): minimum, raw average, and interpolated average. Here we report on the correlations between Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) Terra albedo measurements (Version 6) and net annual mass balance for five glaciers in the Canadian Arctic over the period 2002–2016. Mass balance measurements in the Canadian Arctic are limited, particularly for smaller glaciers, which introduces significant uncertainties in regional mass balance assessment.