Take care of a family and a body in the days after a death, and get every legal detail right.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed director
$65,000
Intern
$37,000
Manager or owner
$105,000
Job Bank's national median is $31.25 an hour, about $65,000 a year full time. The low end is the internship year. The high end is a funeral home manager, and owners can earn well beyond it because the business itself is the asset.
$18 to $22 an hour
About $37,000 to $46,000 a year
You are paid while you intern, which makes this one of the cheaper professional routes. Interns usually live near the home because of on-call nights.
The real money is ownership
A funeral home is a business, not just a job
Many independent homes in Canada have been bought by large chains over the past 30 years. Buying one now takes serious capital, but a managed home is a well-paid salaried position.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is the cheapest funeral service education program at around $8,000 plus the licensing examinations. The high end is a program at the top of the range, the exams, and your first annual licence renewal with the provincial regulator. The internship that follows is paid work, a year for an embalming licence in Ontario and six months without, so it costs you nothing but time. Compared with other licensed professions this is cheap and quick. The hard part is winning one of the limited program seats and then finding a funeral home willing to take you on.
Compared with most licensed professions this is cheap and fast. The hard part is getting one of the limited seats, then getting a funeral home to take you as an intern.
Employer vehicle
Many homes provide a car, since you are on call and moving between sites.
Health and dental
Standard at established funeral homes and chains.
On-call pay
Nights and weekends carry extra pay or time off in lieu at most homes.
Stable demand
The work does not disappear in a recession.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
School, a paid internship, exams, licence. Two to three years in most provinces.
High school diploma
Grade 12
Biology and chemistry if you want the embalming licence. English matters because you deal with families all day.
Funeral service education program
1 to 2 years
Only a few approved schools per province. In Ontario the approved institutions are Humber and Collège Boréal. In Alberta, Mount Royal University runs online theory plus supervised practicums.
Internship at a funeral home
6 months to 1 year
In Ontario, 1 year for the Class 1 embalming licence and 6 months for the Class 2 non-embalming licence, working through a set list of competencies.
Licensing examinations
Weeks
Set by your provincial regulator, covering law, business practice, care of the deceased and funeral services.
Apply for your personal licence
Ongoing
Then renew it every year and keep up continuing education.
Biology
Anatomy is the foundation of embalming.
Chemistry
Preservation is chemistry, and the safety rules around it matter.
English
You write obituaries and speak to grieving families.
Business or accounting
Funeral homes are small businesses with strict rules about pricing and prepaid contracts.
You cannot work as a funeral director in Canada without a provincial licence. In Ontario the regulator is the BAO (Bereavement Authority of Ontario), which administers the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act and issues two personal licence classes: Class 1, which includes embalming, and Class 2, which does not. Other provinces have their own boards with their own rules, so a licence does not automatically move with you. Licensing exists because the job involves dead bodies, grieving families and large prepaid contracts, three things that attract bad actors.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Embalming licence
The Class 1 route in Ontario. More training, more responsibility, more pay and more job options.
Crematorium operator certification
Separate training. Cremation is now the majority choice in most of Canada.
Preplanning and sales licence
Selling prepaid funeral contracts is its own licensed activity in some provinces.
Grief support training
Short courses that make you better at the part of the job families remember.
Driver's licence
Not optional. You will drive hearses and transfer vehicles.
A second language
Funeral customs differ by community, and families want to be understood.
Knowledge of religious rites
Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Christian funerals all have specific requirements and timing.
Steady nerves
First removal from a home or a hospital is the moment people find out if this is for them.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A call comes in overnight and someone goes out to bring the deceased into the home. Morning is the arrangement meeting: sitting with a family for two hours, working out the service, the casket or urn, the obituary, and the bill. Then paperwork, because a death certificate, burial permit and cremation authorization all have to be exact. Afternoon might be preparation work in the back, or setting up a visitation. Evening is a service, a receiving line, and a family you will see again next week.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Funeral service education in Ontario runs through Humber and Collège Boréal, the second being the only French-language program of its kind in the province. Seats are limited, so applications are competitive.
Ontario separates the Class 1 licence, which includes embalming, from the Class 2 licence, which does not. The internship is a full year for Class 1 and six months for Class 2.
Cremation has become the most common choice in most of Canada, which changed the business: smaller facilities, more memorial services held weeks later, and far more urns than caskets.
When a family prepays for a funeral years in advance, provincial law controls how that money must be held in trust. It is one of the main reasons the sector is regulated at all.
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.