Study living things for a government, a university or a consulting firm. The degree is the easy part; the funding is the hard part.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$83,000
New graduate
$53,000
Senior or government scientist
$139,000
Job Bank's national median is $40 an hour, about $83,000 a year full time. That page pools biologists with other life scientists, so the top of the range is mostly people with a PhD and years of experience.
$50,000 to $58,000
Field or lab technician with a four-year biology degree
A lot of first jobs are seasonal contracts: a summer of fish counts, plant surveys or water sampling. Pay is decent for the months you work, but the year may not be full.
$130,000 and up
Senior research scientists, lab directors and government science managers
Job Bank's high wage is about $66.67 an hour, roughly $139,000 a year full time. Getting there almost always means a PhD plus a permanent government or university position.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The four year undergraduate degree is the only tuition in the normal case. The low end is an in province public university with field gear supplied by an employer, the high end a costlier university plus your own boots and kit. Graduate school in science is normally paid, not paid for: assistantships and scholarships usually cover tuition and add a small stipend. The hidden cost is the stretch of low income years, not a tuition bill.
Graduate school in science is normally paid, not paid for. The real cost is the years of low income while your friends are earning.
Federal government
Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. Good pay, a pension, slow hiring.
Provincial ministries
Fish, wildlife, forests, parks and water.
Environmental consulting
The biggest private employer. Steady work doing surveys and impact assessments for mines, pipelines and developments.
Universities
Research and teaching. Permanent professor jobs are rare and very competitive.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
One degree gets you in the door. A second one decides how far you go.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Biology, chemistry and math. Get outside: volunteer with a naturalist club, a stream team or a shelter.
Bachelor of Science in biology
4 years
Four years. Pick an honours stream with a research thesis if you can. Summer research assistant jobs matter more than your marks.
First jobs or graduate school
1 to 2 years
Either take field and lab technician contracts, or go straight into a funded master's degree.
Master's degree
2 years
Two years, usually paid through teaching and research assistantships. This is the point where you stop being a helper and start designing studies.
PhD, if you want to lead research
4 to 6 years
Four to six more years. Only worth it if you want to run your own research program.
Biology
Required for every biology degree.
Chemistry
Also required. Biology gets very chemical after first year.
Math and data
Modern biology is statistics. This surprises people.
English
Science is mostly writing: proposals, reports and papers.
Anyone can call themselves a biologist in most provinces. British Columbia and Alberta are the exceptions: certain work there, such as signing off on habitat assessments, is reserved for registered professionals. In British Columbia that is the Registered Professional Biologist (R.P.Bio) title from the College of Applied Biologists. In Alberta it is the Professional Biologist (P.Biol) designation from the Alberta Society of Professional Biologists. Both need a degree plus a few years of supervised experience.
British Columbia
University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, Simon Fraser University.
Prairies
University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Saskatchewan, University of Manitoba.
Ontario and Quebec
University of Guelph, University of Toronto, Queen's University, Trent University, McGill University, Universite Laval.
Atlantic Canada
Dalhousie University, Memorial University, University of New Brunswick, Acadia University.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Statistics and the R programming language
The single most useful add-on. Biologists who can analyse their own data are always in demand.
Mapping software
Geographic information systems turn field notes into maps that decision makers actually read.
Species identification
Being the person who can identify birds, plants or insects by sight gets you on survey crews.
Boat, first aid and off-road driving tickets
Cheap certificates that make you hireable for field seasons.
A funded summer research placement
Apply through your department in first and second year. Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada pay students to do real research.
A driver's licence
Field jobs assume you can drive a truck on gravel.
French
Opens federal science jobs and work in Quebec.
Environmental consulting firms hire far more biology graduates than universities do. The work is surveys, permits and impact reports for clients who are building something. It pays better and sooner than academia, the hours can be long in field season, and you spend more time writing reports than looking at animals. Many biologists spend their whole career there and never regret it.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
It splits into two seasons. In field season you are up before dawn, out in a truck or a boat, collecting samples or counting things until the light goes, then entering data at night. In office season you are at a desk for weeks: cleaning data, running statistics, writing reports and grant applications, and sitting in meetings about permits. People come for the field season and stay for the desk work, because the desk work is most of the year.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Canada holds roughly a fifth of the world's fresh water and more lakes than every other country combined. Freshwater biology here is not a niche, it is a national industry.
In 1921 Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated insulin at the University of Toronto. Banting was 32 and is still the youngest person to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Canada's boreal forest is the breeding ground for billions of North American songbirds each spring. Much of the continent's bird monitoring depends on biologists counting them here.
In British Columbia and Alberta, biology is a regulated profession with a registration body. In the rest of Canada anyone can print a business card that says biologist.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.