Turn raw materials into fuel, medicine, food and plastics at industrial scale. Best paid in Alberta, and tied to the oil price.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Counsellors: send it to a student from your own email in one click.
The median pay is about $108,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $57,000 at the lower end to about $160,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$37,000 to $70,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a licence or registration before you can work.
Limited demand nationally, from government outlook data. Demand varies by region, so check your area.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Median
$108,000
Lower end
$57,000
Upper end
$160,000
Job Bank's national median is $51.92 an hour, about $108,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower and upper ends are Job Bank's low and high wages for everyone in the group, $27.45 and $76.92 an hour. You start as an EIT (engineer-in-training) straight out of school.
$64.90 an hour
The median in Alberta, the highest in Canada
Newfoundland and Labrador ($56.50) is next, Ontario sits at $51.28, Quebec at $44.31 and Manitoba lowest at $40.32. The catch: when oil prices crash, so do the Alberta jobs.
Roughly, all in
$37,000 to $70,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees, and a four year degree is the minimum, so the low end is four years at the cheapest provincial rate plus the professional practice exam and the first year of licence fees. The high end is four years at the most expensive schools plus several years of registration dues as an engineer in training before the licence arrives. The licence itself is a few hundred dollars a year once you have it. Co operative work terms are the offset that is easy to miss, because paid placements can cover much of the tuition.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. Paid co-op terms can cover a large share of it.
Bonuses and share plans
Standard at oil and gas companies, and larger in good years.
Pension
Defined-benefit at government, utilities and some older manufacturers. Matched savings elsewhere.
Rotation schedules
Site jobs often run two weeks on, one week off, with flights and camp paid.
Health and dental
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, supervised experience, exam, licence.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Chemistry and Physics are required. Entry ranges from about 70% at some schools to the low 90s at McGill.
Accredited chemical 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. Expect thermodynamics, reactor design and a lot of process calculations.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years (2 in Quebec)
Register with your provincial regulator and work under a licensed engineer. Log your experience.
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 (2 in Quebec)
Apply with your experience record and references. Now you can sign off on process designs and take legal responsibility for them.
Chemistry
Required, and the one subject you will never stop using.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required.
Biology
Helpful if you want pharma, food or biotech.
Only licensed professional engineers can use the title engineer or sign off on designs. Each province has a regulator: APEGA (the Alberta association), PEO (Professional Engineers Ontario) and EGBC (Engineers and Geoscientists BC) are the big three. Licences transfer between provinces easily, which matters here because chemical engineers often move to Alberta for work and back again when the oil price falls.
Fewer schools than mechanical or electrical. The strong ones:
Ontario
Waterloo, Toronto, McMaster, Queen's, Western, Ottawa.
Quebec
McGill, Polytechnique Montréal, Laval, Sherbrooke.
West
Alberta and Calgary (closest to the energy jobs), UBC (University of British Columbia), Saskatchewan.
Atlantic
Dalhousie, New Brunswick.
Quebec students reach university after a 2 year CEGEP (public college) diploma, so the degree takes about 4 years, and the licence comes from the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, the Quebec order of engineers) through its own program and exam.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Take Secondary V math in the Technical and Scientific or the Science sequence, plus Secondary V chemistry and physics. All three are required for the Science DEC (Diploma of College Studies).
Science DEC at a CEGEP
2 years
The 2 year Science program (200.B1). In English at Dawson and the other English colleges. Engineering schools look for its calculus, physics and chemistry courses and your R score (the Quebec college ranking mark).
Bachelor's in chemical engineering
4 to 5 years
120 credits. In French at Polytechnique Montréal, Laval and Sherbrooke. In English at McGill and Concordia. About 4 years, or about 5 with Sherbrooke's co-op terms.
Become a CPI (candidate to the engineering profession)
Before or right after graduating
Apply to the order once you have 60 university credits or your degree, $180. Joining the program costs $520 plus tax, half price within 6 months of graduating.
24 months of supervised work, then the exam
At least 2 years, at most 5
Work under an engineer you declare to the order. Paid internships done after 60 credits can count. Add 25 to 30 hours of online training ($345) and a multiple choice exam ($285, 60% to pass).
Show French, get the permit
End of the program
A Quebec high school diploma counts, even from an English school. Otherwise you pass the 3 hour exam of the Office québécois de la langue française (the Quebec French language office), which costs nothing. Then the order issues your permit.
McGill University, in English
One of McGill's most competitive engineering programs. Arrive with all or nearly all the CEGEP (public college) prerequisites done.
Concordia University, in English
Chemical Engineering, at least 120 credits.
Université Laval, in French
120 credits over 4 years, with one required paid internship of 12 to 15 weeks and up to three more. An environmental engineering concentration is offered.
Université de Sherbrooke, in French
Co-op only: 5 paid internships, about 20 months of work, over about 5 years.
Starting from a lab DEC (Diploma of College Studies)
Sherbrooke also admits graduates of the analytical chemistry lab DEC (210.AB) and the industrial process DEC (210.D0), so a technician can move up to engineer.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Process safety
Plants that handle explosive or toxic material need people who prevent accidents.
Process control
Tuning the automated systems that run a plant. A scarce skill.
Project Management Professional (PMP)
The usual route into managing projects and budgets.
A master's or PhD
Required for pharma research and development and for university-linked biotech.
Co-op in Alberta
Energy companies hire their co-op students back at graduation.
Aspen or similar simulation software
Process modelling tools employers expect you to know.
A summer as a plant operator or lab tech
You learn how a plant really runs, which drawings do not show.
Willingness to relocate
The jobs are in Fort McMurray, Sarnia, Montreal and mill towns, not downtown Toronto.
Oil sands sites near Fort McMurray fly engineers in from Calgary, Edmonton and other cities for rotations such as 14 days on and 7 off. Camp, meals and flights are paid, so most of your salary is saved. People do it for a few years to pay off debt or a house, then take a city office job. It is lonely and the days are 12 hours.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Process engineers at a plant start with a morning meeting on what broke overnight. Then it is troubleshooting: a reactor running hot, a pump losing pressure, a product batch out of spec. Afternoons go to design changes, safety reviews and reports. Design engineers at consulting firms build process models and size equipment for plants that do not exist yet. Pharma engineers spend much of the day on documentation, because every batch of medicine must be traceable.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Sarnia, Ontario, has one of the largest clusters of petrochemical plants in Canada, sitting right beside the St. Clair River. Chemical engineers there make polyethylene, synthetic rubber and refined fuels.
Canada produces more oil than any country except the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia, most of it from the Alberta oil sands. Separating bitumen from sand at that scale is a chemical engineering problem.
When oil prices collapsed in 2015, Calgary lost thousands of engineering jobs within two years and office towers sat empty. Chemical engineers who could switch to water, food or pharma weathered it best.
Banting and Best discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921. Making it by the tonne, purely and safely, is what chemical and biochemical engineers do today.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Engineers first, then the rest of the field. See every career in engineering.
Last checked October 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. How every figure on this site is sourced and checked.
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