Fix bones and joints: fractures, hip and knee replacements, torn ligaments. New grads can struggle to find a hospital job.
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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.
The median pay is about $419,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $144,000 at the lower end to about $767,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
12 to 15 years after high school, on the usual route.
$73,000 to $167,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
Yes. It is a regulated job, so you need a licence or registration before you can work.
Good 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
$419,000
Lower end
$144,000
Upper end
$767,000
These are Job Bank (the Government of Canada job site) figures for all surgeons together, a year, from 2023 to 2024. Job Bank pools every surgical specialty in one group, so this is not an orthopedic surgery figure.
About $539,000
Median gross clinical payment, orthopedic surgery doctors, 2024 to 2025
CIHI (Canadian Institute for Health Information) counts 1,799 doctors in this group. The middle 60% were paid $234,000 to $817,000. This is billing before office, staff and other practice costs, not take-home pay. Read from CIHI's data tables, downloaded in a browser with Claude in Chrome on 6 November 2026, because cihi.ca refuses our checker.
$73,000 to $99,000
A year in Ontario from July 1, 2025, in postgraduate years 1 to 5 (PGY1 to PGY5), over the 5 years of residency
Set by the 2023 to 2026 agreement between PARO (Professional Association of Residents of Ontario) and Ontario's teaching hospitals. Other provinces have their own agreements and pay scales. Expect 60 to 80 hour weeks and frequent overnight call for trauma.
$30,540 a year in Ontario
The 2026 CMPA (Canadian Medical Protective Association) fee for orthopedic surgery, shared with neurosurgery
The same fee is $21,552 in British Columbia and Alberta, $6,024 in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Atlantic Canada and the territories, and $1,281.84 in Quebec. Provinces reimburse part of it.
Roughly, all in
$73,000 to $167,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a three year undergraduate degree and a three year medical school at the cheaper end of Canadian tuition, plus the MCAT (medical school admission test), the MCCQE (the national medical licensing exam) and the Royal College certification exam. The high end is four years of each at the priciest schools with the full range of application and exam fees. Residency and the usual one or two fellowship years are paid at roughly resident wages, so they add no tuition. The malpractice fees quoted in the tens of thousands a year are a cost of practising later, partly reimbursed, not a cost of qualifying.
Typical debt at the end of medical school is $80,000 to $150,000. Fellowships add another 1 to 2 years at roughly resident pay.
No employer pension
Most surgeons are self-employed and save through a professional corporation.
On-call stipends
Hospitals pay extra for covering trauma nights and weekends.
Malpractice coverage
Through the CMPA (Canadian Medical Protective Association). Orthopedics sits in a higher fee band than most specialties.
Team and clinic work
Some sports surgeons work with professional teams or private sports clinics on the side.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Same road as every surgeon, with a match that is hard to win.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Top marks in biology, chemistry, math and English. A very high average is the entry ticket.
Bachelor's degree
3 to 4 years
Any major, usually life sciences. High GPA, research, volunteering. Write the MCAT (medical school admission test).
Medical school, the MD (doctor of medicine)
3 to 4 years
Admission is very competitive, and most applicants are turned down. Orthopedic electives and research in your final year matter a lot for the match.
Orthopedic surgery residency
5 years
Matched through CaRMS (the residency matching service). Paid, supervised. Trauma call, fracture clinics, joint replacements, kids, spine, sports.
Royal College exam, licence, fellowship
1 to 2 years
Pass the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada exam, register with your provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons. Many do at least one fellowship.
Biology and chemistry
Required for nearly every pre-med path.
Physics
Orthopedics is applied mechanics: levers, loads, materials.
Calculus and functions
English
Half the job is explaining an operation to a scared patient.
You need a licence from your provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons to practise, and specialist certification from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada to work as an orthopedic surgeon. Hospitals grant operating privileges only with both. Licences transfer between provinces with paperwork and fees.
In Quebec you apply to medical school straight from CEGEP (public college), with no bachelor's degree first.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
With Secondary V math (Technical and Scientific, or Science option), chemistry and physics. These are the entry courses for the CEGEP (public college) science program.
Science DEC (Diploma of College Studies)
2 years
A 2 year CEGEP (public college) program (200.B1), offered in English at Dawson and the other English colleges. Take the biology and chemistry courses medical schools ask for.
Medical school, straight from CEGEP
4 to 5 years
No bachelor's degree needed. McGill and Montréal start with a 1 year preparatory year, Laval and Sherbrooke do not. You need a top R-score (the CEGEP ranking score), the Casper test and interviews.
Orthopedic surgery residency
5 years
Matched through CaRMS (the residency matching service), as in the rest of Canada. Montréal, Laval and Sherbrooke train in French. Many add a fellowship after.
Royal College exam and CMQ (Collège des médecins du Québec) permit
End of residency
Pass the Royal College exam. The CMQ, the Quebec college of physicians, then issues your permit and specialist certificate once you show French. A Quebec high school diploma counts.
Get a hospital position
Before you start
Every specialist working in a Quebec hospital must hold a spot in its PEM (plan d'effectifs médicaux, the medical staffing plan). The health ministry approves how many each hospital gets.
Montréal and Laval set a minimum R-score (the CEGEP ranking score) of 33 for CEGEP applicants in 2026. McGill's Med-P year is only for recent CEGEP graduates.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Many new orthopedic surgeons do 1 to 2 years of fellowship.
Joint replacement (arthroplasty)
Hips and knees. Huge demand from an aging population.
Sports surgery
Torn ligaments, shoulders, keyhole knee surgery.
Spine
Shared territory with neurosurgeons. Long, high-stakes cases.
Trauma
Broken bones at big-city trauma centres. Lots of night work.
Hand, foot and ankle, pediatric
Smaller subspecialties with steady demand.
Orthopedic electives and research in med school
Reference letters from orthopedic surgeons decide the match.
Physical strength and stamina
Reducing a dislocated hip or holding a leg for an hour is real work.
Comfort with tools
Saws, drills, plates and screws. Shop class is not a joke here.
Sports background
Common in the field, and useful in sports medicine.
Demand from patients is enormous: wait times for hip and knee replacements are among the longest in Canadian health care. But the number of funded operating room hours limits how many surgeons a hospital can take on, so some new grads work short-term locums or extra fellowships before a permanent job opens.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
7:00 a.m. rounds on post-op patients. 8:00 first case in the operating room (OR): a total knee replacement, about 90 minutes, then another, then a hip. Fracture clinic on other days: 30 to 50 patients, casts, X-rays and follow-ups. On trauma call, a broken hip from a fall or a motorcycle crash can pull you in at any hour, and you may operate through the night.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The 2026 residency match offered 73 first-year orthopedic surgery positions across Canada, against 23 in neurosurgery and 101 in general surgery.
Job Bank counted about 10,500 surgeons of every specialty working in Canada in 2023, and 38% of them were 50 or older.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Surgeons first, then the rest of the field. See every career in health.
Last checked November 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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