Prove things, model things, and solve problems other people cannot state clearly yet.
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Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$106,000
Starting analyst
$65,000
Senior or in finance
$161,000
Job Bank's national median is $51 an hour, about $106,000 a year full time. Job Bank counts mathematicians, statisticians and actuaries together in one group, so the figure covers all three. Pure research jobs at universities sit lower than the banks and technology firms.
$60,000 to $80,000
Analyst, modeller or junior quantitative role
A co-op degree usually means a higher first offer, because you already have 16 to 20 months of real work behind you.
$130,000 to $200,000 and up
Quantitative analyst at a bank or trading firm
These jobs almost always want a master's degree or a doctorate plus strong coding. There are not many of them and hiring is concentrated in Toronto and Montreal.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Both ends are the four year bachelor's degree, at 7,000 a year cheap and 13,000 a year expensive. Graduate school is left out of the numbers because master's and doctoral students in mathematics are normally funded with a stipend, so those years cost time rather than tuition. There are no labs, tools, licence fees or placement fees in this field, and a laptop is close to the whole equipment list. The real price of the doctoral route is the decade on a small stipend, not the fees.
Math is one of the cheapest sciences to study. There are no labs, no tools and no placement fees, and co-op students earn while they study.
Co-op earnings before you graduate
Waterloo and other co-op programs alternate school terms with paid work terms.
Pension and benefits
Standard in government, banking and university work.
Remote-friendly
Modelling work travels well. A lot of it is done from home.
Wide exit options
The same degree opens software, finance, actuarial work, cryptography and teaching.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A degree gets you an applied job. Research and teaching at a university need a doctorate.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Take every math course offered, plus computer science. Math contests are worth doing because some universities use them in admission and scholarships.
Bachelor's degree in mathematics
4 years
Pure math, applied math, or a combined math and computer science program. Choose co-op if the school offers it.
First job, or graduate school
Decision point
Many graduates stop here and work as analysts, modellers or developers. Others carry on.
Master's degree
1 to 2 years
A year or two. Course-based master's programs in financial or industrial mathematics are aimed straight at industry jobs.
Doctorate
4 to 5 years
Original research and a thesis. Required to teach and run research at a university.
Advanced functions and calculus
The entry ticket to any math program.
Computer science
Almost no math job today is done without code.
Physics
Applied math leans on it constantly.
Math contests
The Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge and similar contests run by the Canadian Mathematical Society are used for scholarships at several universities.
Anyone can call themselves a mathematician. There is no licence and no exam. What employers look at is the degree, what you can prove you have built or solved, and your coding. Two neighbouring careers do have credentials: actuaries write a long series of professional exams, and statisticians can earn the Professional Statistician (P.Stat) accreditation from the Statistical Society of Canada. Neither is needed for a math job.
Ontario
University of Waterloo, which runs the only dedicated faculty of mathematics in North America, plus the University of Toronto, Queen's University and McMaster University.
Quebec
McGill University, Université de Montréal, Université Laval.
West
University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Calgary, Simon Fraser University.
Atlantic
Dalhousie University, Memorial University of Newfoundland, University of New Brunswick.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Quantitative finance
Pricing and risk models at banks and trading firms. The highest paid branch.
Cryptography and security
The Communications Security Establishment, Canada's federal signals agency, hires mathematicians directly to work on codes.
Operations research
Scheduling airlines, routing trucks, planning hospital capacity.
Machine learning
Optimisation and linear algebra are the core of it. The mathematics side of the field hires well.
Python and one more language
You will be asked to code in interviews, whatever the job title says.
Co-op or internships
Four work terms beats a slightly higher average, every time.
Writing ability
Explaining a model to someone who does not do math is the skill that gets you promoted.
Teaching or tutoring
Paid, flexible, and it makes you much better at the subject.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
In industry: take a messy problem from someone who cannot describe it precisely, turn it into something you can actually solve, build the model, test it against real data, then explain it in plain words to the people who will use it. Long stretches at a whiteboard or a screen. At a university: teaching, supervising students, reading, and slow careful work on a proof that may take months.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The University of Waterloo's Faculty of Mathematics is the only faculty in North America dedicated to mathematics, with departments for pure math, applied math, combinatorics and optimization, statistics and computer science.
The Canadian Mathematical Society runs the Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge, which feeds into the Canadian Mathematical Olympiad and then Canada's team for the International Mathematical Olympiad. High school students can enter through their school.
Canada's signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment, recruits mathematicians to work on codes and cryptography. The jobs require security clearance and you cannot say much about what you did.
Search job boards for the word and you find almost nothing. The same work is posted as quantitative analyst, modelling specialist, operations research analyst, data scientist or cryptographer.
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.