Design ships and everything else that floats: hull shape, stability, structure and the systems inside.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed engineer
$104,000
Junior designer
$58,000
Senior or chief
$171,000
Job Bank has no separate wage page for naval architects, so these figures come from its other professional engineers group, where the national median is $50 an hour, about $104,000 a year. Treat the numbers as the range for that wider group. Shipyard and offshore work sits at the higher end.
$58,000 to $75,000
Junior designer at a yard or a design office
Halifax, Vancouver, Levis in Quebec and St. John's are where the work is. Pay is lower than oil and gas engineering, but the projects last for years.
$150,000 and up
Chief naval architects and senior offshore specialists
Stability and structural specialists who can sign off on a design are rare in Canada, so experienced people get chased by recruiters and often work overseas for a stretch.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is four years of engineering tuition at a low cost school such as Memorial University in Newfoundland, which runs the main undergraduate program in this field, plus the professional practice exam and the fee to apply for a P.Eng (professional engineer) licence. The high end is five years at a pricier school, the same exam and licence fees, and the first couple of years of annual dues. Sea time and shipyard work terms are paid placements, so they cost you nothing. Tuition is set each year and usually rises, so check current rates before you plan.
Memorial University in Newfoundland charges some of the lowest engineering tuition in Canada, which matters because it runs the main undergraduate program in this field.
Long project cycles
A shipbuilding contract can mean a decade of steady work.
Travel
Sea trials, yard visits and overseas design reviews.
Pension or matched savings
Government and large yard employers usually offer one.
Defence work is stable
Navy and coast guard programs do not follow the business cycle.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A specialised degree if you can get into one, otherwise mechanical engineering plus marine experience.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Calculus, Advanced Functions, Physics and Chemistry. Physics carries most of the weight.
Engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Memorial University in St. John's runs ocean and naval architectural engineering, the main route in Canada. Mechanical engineering with ship design electives also works.
Work terms in a yard or design office
During the degree
This is where you learn how steel is actually cut, welded and assembled. Employers hire heavily from their own students.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
About four years of supervised work with your provincial regulator, logging real design experience.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After about 4 years
Law and ethics exam plus an experience record. Now you can seal drawings that a yard will build from.
Physics
Required. Floating, moving and breaking are all physics.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Chemistry
Required for engineering admission. Corrosion in salt water is a real problem.
Technical drawing or shop
Reading and making drawings is the everyday language of a shipyard.
Naval architecture is practised as engineering in Canada, so you need a provincial P.Eng (professional engineer) licence to take responsibility for a design. On top of that, Transport Canada sets the rules for how Canadian vessels are designed, built and maintained, and classification societies review structural drawings before a hull is built. Your work gets checked by people who are paid to find problems in it.
Newfoundland and Labrador
Memorial University in St. John's. Its ocean and naval architectural engineering program is the best known in Canada and runs as a co-op degree.
British Columbia
University of British Columbia offers naval architecture and marine engineering at the graduate level.
Nova Scotia
Dalhousie in Halifax has mechanical engineering beside the country's largest naval shipyard.
The common back door
A mechanical engineering degree, a yard job, and a master's in naval architecture later.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Stability and damage stability
Working out whether a ship stays upright, loaded or flooded. A specialty that few people master.
Ice class design
Ships built for Arctic ice need heavier structure and special rules. Canada needs more of these people.
Offshore structures
Rigs, platforms and floating production vessels pay above shipbuilding.
A master's in ocean or marine engineering
Often the fastest way into design authority roles.
Time on boats
Sailing, fishing or a summer on a ferry all help you picture what you are designing.
Computer aided design skills
Ship design software and three dimensional modelling are used daily.
A passport
Yards, owners and class societies are spread around the world.
Welding or fabrication basics
Knowing how a plate gets shaped changes how you draw it.
Not every naval architect works on warships. Canada has a busy industry designing fishing vessels, ferries, tugs, workboats, water taxis and pleasure craft. These firms are small, the projects are short, and you see a boat go from sketch to launch in a year or two instead of a decade. The pay is usually lower than defence work, but the variety and the credit for your own designs are higher.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Most of it is at a computer, running a hull model, checking weight and balance and adjusting structure to hit a target. There is a long meeting about why the owner wants another deck and what that does to stability. Once or twice a month you are down at the yard in a hard hat and boots, climbing through a half finished hull, noticing that something built does not match something drawn.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The National Shipbuilding Strategy puts decades of navy and coast guard work through yards in Halifax, Vancouver and Levis, Quebec. It is the reason naval architecture hiring in Canada has been steady for years.
Before a hull is built, a scale model gets towed and hit with waves in a test tank to see how it behaves. Canada has world class ocean test facilities in St. John's, Newfoundland, which is one reason the degree lives there.
Ships that work in Arctic waters need thicker hull plating, stronger frames and protected propellers. Designing for ice is a skill Canadian naval architects are known for internationally.
Every tonne added to a ship above the waterline makes it less stable, so naval architects track weight obsessively through a build. A design can fail simply because too many small additions crept in.
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.