Trim hooves and forge horseshoes. Self-employed, physically brutal, and well paid once your book is full.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Established farrier
$72,000
Apprentice or first years
$45,000
Full book, sport horses
$100,000
Job Bank's national median is $34.72 an hour, about $72,000 a year full time. Job Bank pools farriers with other small technical trades, and nearly all farriers are self-employed, so your real take-home depends on how many horses you can do in a day and what your truck, forge and fuel cost. Alberta's career site says net earnings vary widely with reputation and business skill.
$21 to $25 an hour
Apprentice riding along with an established farrier
Job Bank's low end is $21.63 an hour, about $45,000 a year. Some apprentices are paid per horse or per day and earn less than that in the first year while they are slow.
$47 an hour and up
Job Bank's top end is $47.85, about $100,000 a year
A farrier who shoes 6 to 8 horses a day at $150 to $250 a set grosses well over that. The catch: winter is slow in most of Canada, and a bad back ends careers early.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is apprenticing under a working farrier, which has no tuition, plus a starter set of hand tools. The high end is a formal program such as the thirty week course at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia or the program at Olds College in Alberta, with about two thousand two hundred dollars in tools on top, and a voluntary certification exam or two at a few hundred dollars each. Neither figure includes your rig, meaning the truck, forge and anvil you need the day you work for yourself, which runs into the tens of thousands. Apprenticing is often unpaid or low paid at the start, so the cheap route costs you in income rather than tuition.
The big cost is not school, it is the truck and forge you need the day you go out on your own.
Per horse
A trim, a set of shoes, or specialty work. You set the price.
Regular barns
A stable with 20 horses on a 6-week cycle is steady income.
Racetracks and show barns
Higher rates, harder schedules, picky owners.
No benefits
You are a business. Buy your own insurance and save for slow months.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
No licence in Canada. Learn the craft, then learn the business.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Time around horses matters more than marks. Ride, muck stalls, work at a barn. Shop class and metalwork help.
Farrier school, optional
About 8 months
Kwantlen Polytechnic University in BC runs a 30-week Certificate in Farrier Science with a 240-hour practicum beside a working farrier. Olds College in Alberta also runs a farrier science program.
Apprentice with a farrier
1 to 3 years
The traditional route, and what most farriers did. You ride along, hold horses, pull shoes, then trim, then forge. Alberta's career site describes this as the usual way in.
Go out on your own
Ongoing
Buy a rig, build a client list one barn at a time. It takes years to fill a schedule.
Voluntary certification
Any time
Farrier associations run practical and written exams. Not required, but they set you apart with vets and show barns.
Biology
You are working on a living leg. Anatomy is the job.
Shop and metalwork
Forging is blacksmithing.
Physical education
You bend under a 500 kg animal for hours.
Business
Pricing, invoicing, taxes, a truck loan.
No province in Canada licenses farriers. Alberta's career site lists the job as unregulated, and Job Bank shows no regulator for it. Anyone can buy an anvil and start. Vets, trainers and barn owners protect horses by word of mouth: a farrier who lames horses does not get called back. Voluntary certification through farrier associations in Canada and the United States is how good farriers prove themselves.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Therapeutic and corrective shoeing
Working with vets on lame horses. Skilled, in demand, well paid.
Sport and race horses
Show jumpers, racehorses and reiners need frequent, precise work.
Draft horses
Big feet, big shoes, few farriers who will do them.
Competition forging
Farrier associations run shoeing contests. Winning builds your name.
Horse handling
Reading a nervous horse keeps you from getting kicked.
A reliable truck and a clean driving record
You drive to every job.
Welding or blacksmithing course
Speeds up your forge work.
Membership in a farrier association
Clinics, a find-a-farrier directory and a community that shares work.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Load the truck before dawn, drive to the first barn. Each horse: pull the old shoes, trim and balance the hoof, shape a shoe hot at the forge in the back of the truck, nail it on, finish. Four to eight horses, sometimes three barns. Talk to every owner about the horse's feet. Long drives between clients, lunch in the truck, home late to sharpen tools and do invoices.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Hooves grow like fingernails. Every horse in Canada needs a trim or new shoes several times a year for its whole life, whether the economy is good or bad.
Job Bank reports 39% of workers in this trade group were 50 or over in 2023, with a median retirement age of 67. That is a lot of client lists looking for a younger farrier to take them over.
Farrier comes from the Latin word for iron, ferrum. For centuries the farrier was the village blacksmith, and horseshoeing is still forge work: heating steel to shape it to one hoof.
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.