Engineering built on rock, soil and groundwater: tunnels, mine slopes, dams and contaminated ground.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed engineer
$104,000
Engineer-in-training
$65,000
Senior or principal
$173,000
Job Bank's national median is $49.81 an hour, about $104,000 a year full time. The top of the range is mostly senior consultants and mine site specialists. Government and municipal jobs sit lower but come with a pension.
$65,000 to $80,000
EIT (engineer-in-training) at a consulting firm
Field heavy first years often add per diems, truck allowances and overtime, which can push a junior's real income well above the base salary.
$170,000 and up
Principal consultants and senior mine geotechnical engineers
The people who sign off on tailings dams, deep open pit slopes and big tunnels carry real legal responsibility, and they are paid for it.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year engineering degree at about $9,000 a year, basic field gear, the professional practice exam and the first year of licence fees. The high end is a five year program at $17,000 a year, a field school that is charged separately, and the full licensing path to a P.Eng (professional engineer) licence, which costs roughly $300 to $500 a year to hold. Employers supply safety gear after your first season. Co op work terms pay well in this field because so much of the work is billable, so many graduates finish with noticeably less debt than classmates in programs without them.
Co-op terms pay well in this field because so much of the work is billable field work. Many graduates leave with less debt than classmates in non co-op programs.
Field allowances
Per diems, camp accommodation and paid travel days on remote projects.
Overtime or time off in lieu
Consulting firms usually pay overtime for field work.
Health, dental and a matched savings plan
Paid licence fees and technical training
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A degree that sits between civil engineering and earth science, then supervised work and a licence.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Calculus, Advanced Functions, Physics and Chemistry. Earth science or geography is a useful extra.
Accredited geological engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Only a handful of schools offer it. You can also reach the same work through civil engineering with a geotechnical focus.
Field school
2 to 6 weeks
A few weeks of mapping outdoors, usually after second or third year. Most people remember it as the best part of the degree.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
Register with your provincial regulator and log about four years of supervised work, usually mixing office design with site investigation.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After about 4 years
Pass the law and ethics exam, submit your experience record, and you can seal your own designs.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required, with a minimum of about 70% at most schools.
Physics and Chemistry
Both are required for engineering admission.
Earth and space science
Optional, but a real head start on rocks and groundwater.
Geography
Maps, landforms and reading terrain are daily tools.
Engineering is a closed profession in Canada: only a licensed professional engineer can practise it or use the title. Geoscience is closed too in most provinces, so some people hold both. In Alberta, APEGA (the Alberta Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists) registers engineers and geoscientists together, and Engineers and Geoscientists BC does the same. A geological engineering degree can qualify you for either stream, which is unusual and useful.
The full geological engineering degree exists at only a few Canadian schools.
Ontario
Waterloo and Queen's. Waterloo runs its program as co-op only, with work terms from first year.
West
University of British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba.
Quebec
Polytechnique Montreal and Laval offer mining and geological streams in French.
Back door
Civil engineering plus geotechnical electives and a summer of drilling work gets you into the same jobs.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Rock mechanics
Deep mines and tunnels need it and very few people have it.
Hydrogeology
Groundwater, dewatering and contamination. Steady work from cities, mines and cleanup projects.
Dam and tailings expertise
Heavily regulated since several high profile failures. Well paid, and a serious responsibility.
A master's degree
The normal entry ticket for specialist geotechnical roles.
A driver's licence
You will drive trucks on gravel roads to sites almost immediately.
Comfort outdoors
Rain, bugs, cold and long days logging drill core.
Mapping software
Geographic information system tools and rock slope modelling programs.
First aid and safety tickets
Often required before you can set foot on a mine site.
Early in your career you are the person on site: standing at a drill rig in the rain, logging core, running tests and sending samples to the lab. Later you move into the office and design what the field data supports, then send juniors out. Some people miss the field so much that they stay out longer on purpose. Others are happy to trade mud for a desk by their thirties.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
On a site week: up at 6, drive to a drill rig, log core all day, measure joints and fractures, take samples and write the field log. On an office week: run slope stability models, read lab results, write the report that tells a mine or a city what the ground will do, and sit in a meeting explaining why the cheap option is a bad idea.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Geological engineering is one of the rarest engineering degrees in Canada. Waterloo notes its program is one of only two in Ontario, and classes are often a few dozen students rather than several hundred.
When the Mount Polley tailings dam in British Columbia failed in 2014, it released mine waste and water into nearby lakes and creeks. The review that followed tightened how tailings dams are designed, inspected and signed off across Canada.
Drills bring up long cylinders of rock that get laid out in wooden boxes in order of depth. A geological engineer reads those boxes like a timeline of everything under a site, and the boxes are often kept for decades.
Across northern Canada, roads, runways and building foundations sit on ground that is frozen year round. As it thaws, the ground sinks and buildings tilt, which is now one of the busiest areas of ground engineering in the country.
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.