Find the story, find the money, hire the people, and carry the risk from first meeting to final delivery.
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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 $85,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $46,000 at the lower end to about $146,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
3 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$8,000 to $61,000 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
$85,000
Lower end
$46,000
Upper end
$146,000
Job Bank's national median is $41.03 an hour, about $85,000 a year full time, on a page that groups producers with directors. Producers are paid a fee out of each budget, so income tracks how many projects you get made, not hours worked.
Entry-level jobs first
Production assistant, coordinator or development assistant
Job Bank does not publish starting pay. Almost everyone starts inside a production office answering phones and chasing paperwork. It is the best possible education.
$41.99 an hour
The median in British Columbia, the highest of any province
Quebec's median is $40.00 and Ontario's $39.90. Independent producers who own a piece of what they make can go well past these figures, or make nothing for two years while a project falls apart.
Roughly, all in
$8,000 to $61,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a two year college film and television production diploma at a cheaper college, and plenty of producers skip even that and come up through set work. The high end is a four year university film or business degree plus the festival and market trips where deals actually get made, which run one thousand to five thousand dollars a trip. The education is the cheap part of this career. The expensive part is the unpaid development years, option fees and script work you fund yourself before any financier is involved, and none of that is in these numbers.
The education is cheap. The expensive part is the unpaid development years while you try to get a first project financed.
Producer fee
A percentage of the production budget, paid as the project is made.
Public funding
Telefilm Canada, provincial agencies and the Canada Media Fund finance a large share of Canadian film and television.
Tax credits
Federal and provincial labour tax credits refund part of what you spend on Canadian crew. Nearly every budget relies on them.
Broadcasters and streamers
Licence fees for the right to show the finished project.
Back end
A share of profits. Real money on a hit, and nothing on most projects.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Producing is learned in production offices. School helps you get into one.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
English, business, drama, media arts. Produce something small: a short, a school show, a web series.
Training
2 to 4 years
A 2-year college production diploma, a film degree, or a business degree with film work on the side. None of these is required.
Production office jobs
2 to 5 years
Production assistant, then coordinator, then production manager. You learn budgets, schedules, contracts and unions from the inside.
Produce your own shorts
Alongside the day job
Prove you can finish something and account for the money. Funders look for exactly this.
First financed project
Year 5 to 8
A documentary, a low-budget feature or a series with a broadcaster attached, usually with a public funder involved.
Business and accounting
A budget is a spreadsheet. Producers live in spreadsheets.
English
You read scripts all day and write funding applications.
Media arts
You need to understand what each department actually does.
Law or civics
Contracts, rights and clearances are a daily part of the job.
Anyone can produce. There is no title protection and no exam. What structures the work is the union system: the Canadian Media Producers Association negotiates the agreements that producers sign with the performer, director and crew unions. If you produce professionally in Canada, you are working inside those agreements whether you like them or not.
In Quebec, producers work with a Quebec funder, a Quebec tax credit and a Quebec producers' association, on top of the federal ones.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Make short films with friends and be the one who handles the schedule and the money. College cinema programs need only a high school diploma.
Cinema DEC (Diploma of College Studies)
2 years
A 2 year pre-university program, with no tuition at a public CEGEP (public college) for full-time Quebec residents. Dawson's Cinema-Communications (500.G4) is in English.
Film degree
3 to 4 years
Concordia's BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in Film Production, in English, or the bachelor's in cinema at UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal), in French. Both select on your own work.
Or an intensive school
6 months
INIS (Institut national de l'image et du son, a Montreal film school) runs a 6 month fiction program with a producing profile. $7,500 for Canadians after aid. Back in fall 2027.
Set up a Quebec company
Before your first funded project
The Quebec tax credit goes to for-profit companies incorporated in Quebec and controlled by Quebec residents. SODEC (Société de développement des entreprises culturelles, Quebec's cultural funding agency) funds companies, not individuals.
Join the AQPM
Once you produce
AQPM (Association québécoise de la production médiatique, the Quebec producers' association) represents about 150 companies and negotiates the collective agreements that set minimum terms for performers, writers, directors and crews.
Emerging producers, directors and writers must have lived in Quebec for tax purposes for at least 2 years. Federal funding from Telefilm Canada works the same as elsewhere.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Creative producer
Finds the story and the director, shapes the script, raises the money. The job most people mean.
Line producer
Builds and defends the budget and schedule once a project is green lit. Steady work from project to project.
Production manager
Runs the day to day machinery on set. The usual step before line producing.
Documentary producer
Smaller budgets, more public funding, faster turnaround.
Budgeting and scheduling software
Knowing the standard tools makes you employable immediately.
Knowledge of tax credits
Every budget relies on federal and provincial credits, so knowing how they work makes you useful on any project.
A director you believe in
Producing careers are usually built on one long partnership.
Patience with paperwork
Funding applications, chain of title, insurance, clearances. This is most of the job.
In 2024 to 2025, foreign location and service work made up $5.3 billion of the $10.2 billion spent on film and television production in Canada, mostly American shows using Canadian crews and tax credits. Those productions do not develop Canadian stories, but they employ thousands of people, and production managers and line producers move between them and homegrown projects.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
In development: reading scripts, calls with a broadcaster, rewriting a funding application that is due Friday, arguing with a distributor about territories. In pre-production: hiring department heads, approving a budget line by line, negotiating with unions. In production: the phone does not stop, and your job is to protect the schedule and the money while the director protects the film. In post: delivery paperwork, endlessly.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The Canadian Media Producers Association reports about $10.2 billion in film and television production volume in the 2024 to 2025 fiscal year, and roughly 181,000 jobs. Canadian stories made up $3.6 billion of it.
Members of the Quebec producers' association are bound by 15 collective agreements, covering actors, composers, designers, screenwriters, directors and camera and sound crews. A producer has to know every one.
Federal and provincial credits refund a share of what a production spends on Canadian labour. Producers finance films partly by borrowing against credits they have not received yet.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Film, TV and music first, then the rest of the field. See every career in creative.
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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