Get oil and gas out of the ground. The best starting pay in engineering, tied to an industry that booms and busts.
Click through it
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 $135,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $96,000 at the lower end to about $200,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
4 to 8 years after high school, on the usual route.
$33,000 to $58,000 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.
Moderate 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
$135,000
Lower end
$96,000
Upper end
$200,000
Job Bank's national median is $64.90 an hour, about $135,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The lower end ($46.25) and upper end ($96.15) are the bottom and top of the range for everyone in the group. The pay is high and the work is unstable: in the 2015 to 2016 downturn thousands of Calgary engineers lost their jobs and new-grad hiring nearly stopped.
$67.87 an hour
The Job Bank median in Saskatchewan, the highest of any province
Ontario ($67.30) and Alberta ($66.35) are close behind, and Quebec is lowest at $48.18. Bonuses, company stock and field rotation allowances can add a lot in a good year.
Roughly, all in
$33,000 to $58,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Both ends are a four year engineering degree in Alberta, which sits at the cheaper end of Canadian engineering tuition, plus registering as an engineer in training, the yearly fee while you log your supervised experience, and the professional practice exam. The gap between the two figures is mostly which university and how many years you carry the trainee registration. Safety tickets for gas and first aid are usually paid by the employer. Co-op terms in the oil patch are paid work, so many graduates finish with little or no debt.
Alberta tuition is lower than Ontario's, and co-op terms are paid work, so many graduates finish with little or no debt.
Bonuses and stock
Big in good years, gone in bad ones.
Flex days
Many Calgary offices give every second Friday off.
Rotation allowance and camp
On field and oil sands jobs.
Health, dental and a matched savings plan
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Degree, supervised experience, exam, licence. Most of it happens in Alberta.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Advanced Functions, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry are required for admission. Marks in the 80s at most schools.
Accredited engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Petroleum engineering at the University of Alberta, or oil and gas engineering at the University of Calgary. The University of Regina also has a program, and Memorial University in Newfoundland offers oil and gas engineering as a master's after a first degree. Chemical or mechanical engineering with an oil and gas focus works too.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years (2 in Quebec)
Register as an engineer-in-training (EIT) with APEGA (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta) or your provincial regulator. Work under a licensed engineer. Log your experience.
Professional practice exam
During your EIT years
A law and ethics exam, written during your first years of work.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After 4 years (2 in Quebec)
Apply with your experience record and references. Now you can sign well designs and take legal responsibility for them.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required.
Physics
Required.
Chemistry
Required. Reservoir fluids are chemistry.
Earth science or geology
Helpful. You will spend a career thinking about rock.
Only licensed professional engineers can practise engineering or use the title. Most petroleum engineers register with APEGA (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta). Your P.Eng (professional engineer) licence transfers to BC (British Columbia), Saskatchewan or Newfoundland with a simple application. Licensed engineers pay a yearly fee to keep it. Offshore work off Newfoundland has extra survival and safety training on top.
Alberta
University of Alberta (Edmonton), University of Calgary.
Saskatchewan
University of Regina.
Newfoundland
Memorial University (St. John's), close to the offshore platforms. Oil and gas engineering there is a master's; the undergraduate route is process or mechanical engineering.
Anywhere else
Chemical or mechanical engineering, then an oil and gas job.
Quebec banned oil and gas exploration and production in 2022 and has no petroleum engineering degree, so Quebecers study and get licensed in the West, mostly in Alberta.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
Take Secondary V math in the Technical and Scientific or the Science sequence, plus Secondary V chemistry and physics. All three are required for the Science DEC (Diploma of College Studies).
Science DEC at a CEGEP
2 years
The 2 year Science program (200.B1). In English at Dawson and the other English colleges. Engineering schools look for its calculus, physics and chemistry courses and your R score (the Quebec college ranking mark).
Petroleum engineering out of province
4 years plus co-op terms
The University of Alberta has a co-op petroleum engineering degree, the University of Calgary offers oil and gas engineering, and the University of Regina has petroleum systems engineering. Check each school's rules for CEGEP (public college) graduates.
Licence where the wells are
About 4 years
Register as an engineer-in-training with the regulator where you work, such as APEGA (Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta), and follow its experience and exam rules.
Coming back to Quebec
About 20 business days
A licensed engineer from another province applies to the Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec (the Quebec order of engineers) for $560, takes four short online courses in French and shows French. A one year temporary permit is possible without it.
On April 12, 2022, Quebec ended the search for and production of oil and gas on its territory by law. It revoked 165 exploration licences and the one production licence, and ordered 62 wells to be permanently closed. The Quebec government says it was the first state in North America to do this.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Well control certificate
Required to supervise drilling. Renewed every 2 years.
Reservoir simulation skills
The people who model how oil flows through rock get the office jobs that survive downturns.
Carbon capture, hydrogen and geothermal
Same rocks, same wells, new purpose. This is where the growth is as the energy transition unfolds.
MBA (master of business administration) or CFA (chartered financial analyst)
Calgary has a big energy finance scene.
H2S Alive (a gas safety course) and standard first aid
Required before you set foot on most sites. One-day courses.
A summer on a rig or in the field
Even as a labourer. It shows you know what a well site is.
Spreadsheets and Python
Reservoir work is data work.
A driver's licence
Field jobs mean hours on gravel roads.
Canada produces more oil today than it ever has, and the industry will need engineers for decades to run wells, clean them up and eventually close them. But fewer companies are hiring, automation has cut office headcount, and enrolment in petroleum programs fell sharply after the 2014 price crash. The skills transfer to carbon storage, geothermal and hydrogen. If you go in, go in with a plan B.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Reservoir engineer in Calgary: in by 7:30, run models of how oil and gas move through the rock, meet with geologists about where to drill next, and build the economics for a new well. Drilling engineer: on site at a rig in northern Alberta, watching the drilling data, adjusting the plan as the rock changes, on call around the clock. Field jobs run on rotations, such as 8 days on and 6 off.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Natural Resources Canada says Canada has the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world, most of them in the oil sands. Much of that oil is too thick to pump, so engineers often inject steam underground to thin it first.
The first cargo of LNG (liquefied natural gas) from the LNG Canada plant left Kitimat, BC (British Columbia), for Asia on June 30, 2025. It was Canada's first large-scale LNG export.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Engineers first, then the rest of the field. See every career in engineering.
Last checked October 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.
Tell us about this page. A person reads every message.
No email app on this device? Use Gmail instead: report a mistake in Gmail or say what you like in Gmail.