Clean water, contaminated sites and climate projects. Mostly consulting firms, with a real share of the year outdoors.
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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.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $101,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $67,000 at the lower end to about $150,000 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.
$38,100 to $70,700 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.
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
$101,000
Lower end
$67,000
Upper end
$150,000
Job Bank groups environmental engineers with civil engineers, so these are civil figures. The national median is $48.56 an hour, about $101,000 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, $32 and $72.12 an hour.
$61.75 an hour
The median in the Northwest Territories, the highest in Canada
Alberta is the highest province at $51.69, then Newfoundland and Labrador at $51.15. Prince Edward Island's median is the lowest, at $36.30. New graduates work as an EIT (engineer-in-training) first, often at consulting firms such as Stantec and WSP (a global engineering consultancy) or in government.
Roughly, all in
$38,100 to $70,700
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 are paid and can cover part of the tuition, and these numbers do not subtract that.
Engineering tuition is higher than most degrees. Field co-op terms are paid and can cover 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. Engineering schools ask for high marks; check each school's cut-off.
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 (2 in Quebec)
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 (2 in Quebec)
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.
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 civil or water engineering
About 4 years
About 4 years for CEGEP graduates. In French, water engineering at Université Laval or civil engineering with an environmental stream at Polytechnique Montréal. In English, civil engineering at Concordia or McGill with environmental courses.
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, at no charge, the 3 hour exam of the Office québécois de la langue française (the Quebec French language office). Then the order issues your permit.
Université Laval, in French
Génie des eaux (water engineering), 120 credits, the only water engineering degree in Quebec: drinking water, wastewater treatment, floods and pollution. One paid internship is required.
Polytechnique Montréal, in French
Génie civil (civil engineering) with a 12 credit environmental engineering orientation in the last year, on wastewater treatment, drinking water and city water networks.
Concordia University, in English
Civil Engineering, 120 credits, with an Environmental elective group: water resources, water pollution, air pollution, waste management and geo-environmental engineering.
McGill University, in English
Civil Engineering lists environmental engineering as a specialization, and engineering students can add an Environmental Engineering Minor.
ÉTS (École de technologie supérieure), in French
A bachelor's in environmental engineering, which ÉTS calls the first in Quebec, is awaiting approval and not yet taking applications.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Qualified person designation
Ontario's designation to sign off on contaminated site cleanups.
Water and wastewater design
Towns upgrade and expand their treatment plants. Steady 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 trioxide dust stored underground. The federal cleanup will run for decades. Environmental engineers designed the plan to freeze it in place.
Since 2005, the federal contaminated sites action plan has paid to assess about 11,000 sites across Canada and clean up about 3,000, from old fuel tanks to military bases. Engineers assess the sites and plan the cleanups.
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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