Turn piles of data into predictions and decisions. Math, code and a lot of cleaning up.
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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 $96,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $62,000 at the lower end to about $145,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 7 years after high school, on the usual route.
$400 to $90,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
Moderate 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
$96,000
Lower end
$62,000
Upper end
$145,000
Job Bank's national median is $46.15 an hour, about $96,000 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, $30 and $69.74 an hour. Job Bank pools this title with the wider data scientists group (NOC, the National Occupational Classification, code 21211), which also covers machine learning engineers.
$48.08 an hour
The median in British Columbia, the highest of any province
Ontario follows at $47.69 and Quebec at $46. New Brunswick's median is the lowest, at $39.32. Stock and bonuses at large tech companies are paid on top and are not in Job Bank's wage figures.
Roughly, all in
$400 to $90,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is someone already working with data, often as an analyst, who teaches themselves statistics and programming with open source tools that cost nothing and moves across into the job. A few paid online courses is the whole bill. The high end is a four year bachelor's degree plus the master's degree that many job ads ask for, both priced at the top of their ranges. The cheap door is genuinely hard: most postings still filter on a degree, so you need to already be inside a company that can see your work. A stranger applying from outside with no credential is usually screened out before anyone opens the portfolio.
Many job ads want a master's degree. Co-op terms in a data science degree are paid and often lead to the first job.
Remote or hybrid work
Normal, though banks want some office days.
Stock options or RSUs (restricted stock units, company shares you receive over time)
At tech companies.
Conference and learning budgets
The field moves fast and employers pay to keep you current.
Pension
If you work for Statistics Canada, a province or a bank.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Math first, code second, then a lot of practice on real messy data.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Take every math course: Advanced Functions, Calculus and Vectors, Data Management if your province offers it. Computer science helps.
Bachelor's degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Data science (Waterloo, UBC, Simon Fraser, Toronto and many others now offer it), statistics, math or computer science. Choose co-op. Waterloo admits data science at averages in the mid-80s.
Projects and co-op
During school
Kaggle competitions, a public GitHub, and paid co-op terms at banks, Shopify, Statistics Canada or startups.
Master's degree (common, not required)
1 to 2 years
A 1 to 2 year master's in data science, statistics or computer science. Many jobs ask for it.
First job
After graduation
Often as a data analyst or junior data scientist, then promoted once you have shipped a model that made the company money.
Advanced Functions and Calculus
Required for every route in.
Data Management or statistics
The heart of the job.
Computer science
Python is the daily tool.
English
You will explain results to people who do not do math. That is half the job.
No licence, no exam, no professional body. The Statistical Society of Canada offers voluntary accreditation for statisticians, but almost no data science job asks for it. Employers judge you on your degree, your portfolio and a technical interview. Engineers Canada lists data scientist as an acceptable title for unlicensed people, unlike anything with engineer in it.
Quebec high school ends a year earlier, and a 2 year CEGEP (public college) diploma comes before a 3 to 4 year bachelor's.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
With Secondary V math in the Technical and Scientific or the Science sequence, plus Secondary V chemistry and physics. Those open the science programs at CEGEP.
Pre-university DEC (Diploma of College Studies)
2 years
2 years, with no tuition for full-time Quebec residents. Dawson's Science, Computer Science and Mathematics (200.C1) adds four computer science courses to the math and physics.
Bachelor's in data science
3 to 4 years
Concordia offers it as a BA or BSc (Bachelor of Arts or Science) or as a Bachelor of Computer Science, 3 to 4 years. You need Calculus 1, Calculus 2 and Linear Algebra from CEGEP.
Master's, often
1 to 2 years
Many data science jobs ask for one. At Concordia up to 16 credits of a computer science bachelor's can count toward a master's.
Adult route: AI (artificial intelligence) and data science AEC
About 1 year
Vanier's 660 hour AEC (Attestation of College Studies) is online, evenings and Saturdays, for people with earlier computer science or science training.
Mind the title
When you are hired
Anyone may use the title data scientist. Machine learning engineer is different, unless you belong to the OIQ (Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, the Quebec order of engineers).
Things you don't need, but that help.
Machine learning in production
Building models that run inside real products, not just in notebooks. This is the bridge to machine learning engineer roles.
Cloud data platforms
AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure or Google Cloud certificates. Banks want them.
SQL (the language for querying databases) at an expert level
Unglamorous, and the skill most junior data scientists are weakest at.
A domain
Finance, health, retail or insurance. Knowing the business makes your work more useful.
Kaggle or public projects
A model on real data, explained clearly, is your portfolio.
A master's degree
Not required, but it clears the filter on many job ads.
Presentation skills
Data scientists who can present get promoted. The rest stay in the notebook.
Canada punches above its weight in AI (artificial intelligence) research. The Vector Institute in Toronto, Mila in Montreal and Amii in Edmonton fund scholarships, internships and labs for graduate students. A PhD path through one of them leads to research scientist jobs at Google, Microsoft or a Canadian lab.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A meeting with a business team about a question: which customers will leave next month, or why sales dropped in Alberta. Then hours pulling data with SQL (the language for querying databases), cleaning it, and trying models in Python. Most of the time goes to the cleaning, not the modelling. Late in the day, a chart and a short write-up for people who will never look at your code. Some days you present, and those are the days that matter for your career.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 2017 Canada launched its Pan-Canadian AI (artificial intelligence) Strategy with $125 million from Budget 2017, built around three institutes: Vector in Toronto, Mila in Montreal and Amii in Edmonton. A second phase added $443.8 million in Budget 2021.
The federal statistics agency in Ottawa runs the census and hundreds of surveys, and hires statisticians and data scientists straight out of university, with a pension. It is one of the few places where the data is about the whole country.
Geoffrey Hinton, a University of Toronto professor, shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for the neural network research that underpins modern AI (artificial intelligence).
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Data and AI first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
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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