Clean water, contaminated sites and climate projects. Mostly consulting firms, with a real share of the year outdoors.
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.
Licensed (P.Eng)
$101,000
Engineer-in-training
$67,000
Senior or principal
$150,000
Job Bank groups environmental engineers with civil engineers, so these are civil figures. Consulting pays less at the start and more at the top. Mining and oil sands environmental roles in Alberta and northern BC pay the most. Government pays in the middle with a pension.
$62,000 to $72,000
EIT (engineer-in-training), straight out of school
Consulting firms such as Stantec and WSP (a global engineering consultancy) start at the low end. Provincial and federal government jobs start higher. Co-op students earn $19 to $26 an hour.
$90,000 to $120,000
Licensed engineer, 5 to 10 years in
Project managers who bring in clients earn more. Principals and partners at consulting firms pass $150,000.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Almost all of this is four years of engineering tuition, which runs higher than most degrees. The low end is in province tuition at a cheaper school plus the engineer in training registration, the professional practice exam, and the first year of the professional engineer licence. The high end is expensive tuition and the top of every fee. Field co op terms pay less than oil and gas placements but still cover a good part of the tuition, and these numbers do not subtract that.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. Field co-op terms pay less than oil and gas but still cover a good part of it.
Pension
Defined-benefit at municipalities, provincial ministries and the federal government.
Health and dental
Field pay
Per diems, a company truck and overtime during field season at consulting firms.
Bonuses
Consulting firms pay annual bonuses tied to billable hours.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, supervised experience, exam, licence.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry are required. Marks in the high 80s or above at most schools.
Accredited environmental 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. Civil or chemical engineering with an environmental option is just as accepted.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
Register with your provincial regulator and work under a licensed engineer. Log your experience, including field work.
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. Now you can sign off on site assessments, water system designs and remediation plans.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Chemistry
Required, and used constantly for water and soil work.
Physics
Required.
Biology and Earth science
Not required, but the job is about living systems and groundwater.
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 easily. Ontario closed its engineer-in-training program to new applicants in 2023: there you work, log your 4 years of experience and then apply. In Ontario, signing off on a contaminated site record also requires a separate qualified person designation, which needs the licence plus years of experience.
Dedicated environmental engineering degrees, plus civil programs with a strong environmental stream:
Ontario
Waterloo, Guelph, Carleton, Windsor, Toronto (civil with environmental focus).
Quebec
Polytechnique Montréal, McGill, Sherbrooke (civil with environmental focus).
West
UBC (University of British Columbia), Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba.
Atlantic
Dalhousie.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Qualified person designation
Ontario's licence to sign off on contaminated site cleanups. Firms pay for people who hold it.
Water and wastewater design
Every town is upgrading its treatment plant. Steady, well paid consulting work.
Project Management Professional (PMP)
The usual route into managing projects and clients.
A master's in water resources or hydrogeology
Opens groundwater and climate adaptation roles.
Field co-op
A summer sampling groundwater teaches you what the models are based on.
Safety tickets
Workplace hazardous materials training, first aid and a clean driver's licence. Firms need them before you can go on site.
Excel, Python and mapping software
Most of the analysis lives there.
Comfort outdoors in bad weather
Field season runs through mud, bugs and cold.
Consulting firms send junior engineers into the field from spring to fall: sampling wells, supervising drill rigs, walking sites in a hard hat. Days are long and you live out of a hotel, but per diems and overtime add up. Winters are for writing the reports. After the licence, most people spend far less time in the field, which some miss.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
In consulting: a morning on site checking a contractor digging out contaminated soil, then back to the office to update a groundwater model and write the report a client is waiting on. Municipal engineers review development plans and manage water treatment upgrades. Government engineers inspect permits and enforce discharge limits. Billable hours are tracked closely at consulting firms.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 2000, contaminated drinking water in Walkerton, Ontario, killed seven people and made thousands sick. The inquiry that followed rewrote Ontario's drinking water laws and made engineers and licensed operators responsible for every public water system.
Canada holds roughly 20% of the world's fresh water, though much of it is locked in lakes and glaciers that cannot be tapped. Protecting it is a big share of the job.
A closed gold mine in Yellowknife left 237,000 tonnes of arsenic dust stored underground. The federal cleanup was estimated in 2022 at $4.38 billion and will run for decades. Environmental engineers designed the plan to freeze it in place.
The federal government's own inventory lists roughly 20,000 contaminated sites across Canada, active and closed, from old gas stations to military bases. Each one needs an engineer to assess it and sign off on the cleanup.
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.