Medical devices, implants and hospital equipment. A small job market, and often a stepping stone to medicine or grad school.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed (P.Eng)
$104,000
Engineer-in-training
$58,000
Senior or manager
$171,000
Job Bank groups biomedical with other specialised engineers, so the national numbers look like the other disciplines. Entry-level device and research jobs often start well below that. Device companies in Toronto, Mississauga, Montreal and Vancouver pay the most. Hospitals pay a little less but add a pension. Research jobs pay the least.
$58,000 to $70,000
EIT (engineer-in-training), straight out of school
Be honest with yourself: there are fewer entry-level jobs than graduates. Many grads take a mechanical, quality or software job first and move into devices later.
$95,000 to $130,000
Licensed engineer, 5 to 10 years in
Regulatory affairs and quality managers at device companies, and senior clinical engineers at large hospitals, sit at the top of this range.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees, which is why the four year range is so wide: the low end is an in province public program, the high end a costlier school. On top of tuition sit the engineer in training registration, the professional practice exam and the first annual licence fee once you qualify. That licence fee then repeats every year for your whole career. If you carry on to a master's or to medicine, add two to four more years of tuition to these numbers.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. If you continue to medicine or a master's, add 2 to 4 more years of tuition on top.
Hospital pension
Clinical engineers in Ontario hospitals join the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, one of the best in the country.
Health and dental
Stock options
At device startups, in place of a pension.
Licence fees paid
Most employers cover your annual P.Eng (professional engineer) dues.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, then one of three doors: industry, medicine or grad school.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Physics, Chemistry and usually Biology. Marks in the high 80s to low 90s.
Accredited biomedical engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
A four-year Bachelor of Engineering or Applied Science at a school accredited by the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board. Mechanical or electrical engineering with a biomedical option is just as accepted by employers.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
Register with your provincial regulator and work under a licensed engineer at a device company or hospital.
Professional practice exam
During your EIT (engineer-in-training) years
A law and ethics exam, taken during your training years.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After 4 years
Apply with your experience record and references. Or skip it: a master's, PhD or medical school are the other common next steps.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required.
Chemistry
Required.
Biology
Required or strongly recommended for this discipline.
Only licensed professional engineers can use the title engineer or sign off on designs. Each province has a regulator: PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario), APEGA (the Alberta association) and EGBC (Engineers and Geoscientists BC) are the big three. Licences transfer between provinces. Medical devices are also regulated separately by Health Canada, which licenses every device sold in Canada, so much of the job is regulatory paperwork rather than stamped drawings.
Dedicated biomedical programs are newer and smaller than other disciplines:
Ontario
Waterloo, Toronto (engineering science, biomedical option), McMaster, Guelph, Toronto Metropolitan University, Carleton, Ottawa.
Quebec
McGill (bioengineering), Polytechnique Montréal.
West
UBC (University of British Columbia), Calgary.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Regulatory affairs
Getting devices approved by Health Canada and the FDA (the US drug and device regulator). Dull to some, but always in demand and well paid.
Quality systems
Knowing the medical device quality standard, ISO 13485 (the international quality standard for device makers), inside out.
Software and data skills
Imaging software, wearables and hospital systems. Most device growth is in software.
A master's degree
Common in this field. Many design and research roles expect one.
Co-op at a device company or hospital
The market is small, so contacts from co-op matter more than in other disciplines.
A high GPA
If medical school is the plan, engineering marks are harder to keep high than in life sciences. Plan for it.
Volunteering in a hospital
You learn how nurses and doctors actually use equipment.
SolidWorks and Python
Device design and data analysis.
A lot of biomedical engineering students plan on medical school. It can work: the degree is respected and the problem solving helps with the MCAT (medical school admission test). But admissions committees look mostly at GPA, and an engineering course load makes a high GPA harder. If medicine is the only goal, a life sciences degree is the safer route. If you want a real fallback career, engineering is.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
At a device company: testing a prototype, writing the design and risk documents Health Canada requires, and meetings with clinicians who will use the product. At a hospital: evaluating equipment before it is bought, investigating incidents, and planning replacements for an imaging suite. In research: lab experiments, data analysis and grant reports. Paperwork is a bigger share of the day than in most engineering jobs.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
John Hopps, an electrical engineer at the National Research Council in Ottawa, built the first external cardiac pacemaker in 1950. Wearable implanted versions came later, but the idea started here.
Health Canada sorts medical devices into Class I (a tongue depressor) up to Class IV (a heart valve). The higher the class, the more testing and paperwork a biomedical engineer has to produce before it can be sold.
Canada has a few hundred medical device companies, most of them tiny, clustered around Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. That is why so many biomedical grads end up in mechanical, software or quality jobs, or in medical school.
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.