Work out how matter and energy behave, then build instruments to prove it. The longest science training, and the widest exits.
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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
$117,000
Early career
$73,000
Senior researcher or professor
$200,000
Job Bank's national median is $56.49 an hour, about $117,000 a year full time. That is high because almost everyone counted already holds a PhD. The wage before the PhD is far lower.
$22,000 to $35,000
Graduate student stipend during a master's and PhD
You are paid to do physics from about age 22, but at student rates for five to seven years. This is the real cost of the career.
$180,000 to $200,000
Senior professors, national lab scientists, principal scientists in industry
Job Bank's high wage is about $96.15 an hour, roughly $200,000 a year full time. Physicists who move into finance, semiconductors or machine learning can pass that without a research title.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
Almost all of this is the four year undergraduate physics degree, because graduate physics in Canada is normally funded: a master's usually covers tuition and a doctorate pays a stipend of roughly 25,000 to 35,000 dollars a year. The gap between the two figures is which university and which province, plus incidental graduate fees. What the numbers hide is time rather than money: you will spend most of your twenties on a student or postdoctoral income, and postdoctoral contracts are paid but temporary. Permanent research positions are scarce enough that many physics doctorates end up in industry instead.
You will not pay tuition for graduate physics in Canada in the normal case. You will spend most of your twenties on a student income.
Universities and national labs
The classic route, and the hardest. Permanent research positions are scarce.
Medical physics
Planning radiation treatment in hospitals. A regulated, well paid clinical path with its own residency.
Technology and industry
Semiconductors, optics, lasers, quantum computing, aerospace, defence, energy.
Finance and data
Banks and trading firms hire physics PhDs for modelling. Pay can exceed any research job.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Longer than medicine, and with no guaranteed job at the end. Go in knowing that.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Physics, calculus and advanced functions, plus chemistry. Math matters more than physics class does.
Bachelor of Science in physics
4 years
Four years of mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and a lot of math. Research placements in the summers are the single best thing you can do.
Master's degree
2 years
Two funded years attached to a research group. Some Canadian programs let strong students go straight into a PhD.
PhD
4 to 6 years
Four to six years building and defending original research. This is where you actually become a physicist.
Postdoctoral research
2 to 6 years
One or two paid research contracts, often in another country, before a permanent position.
Calculus and advanced functions
The most important courses. Physics is written in math.
Physics
Required, and it shows you whether you like the way the subject thinks.
Chemistry
Required by most physics programs for admission.
Computer science
Modern physics is simulation and data analysis. Coding is not optional.
You do not need a licence to call yourself a physicist in Canada. The Canadian Association of Physicists offers a voluntary Professional Physicist (P.Phys) designation, which is mostly used by physicists doing applied or consulting work. The exception is medical physics: to plan radiation treatment in a hospital you need a clinical residency and certification, and that is a separate career with its own gate.
Ontario
University of Toronto, University of Waterloo with the Perimeter Institute next door, McMaster University, Queen's University, University of Ottawa.
Quebec
McGill University, Universite de Montreal, Universite Laval.
West and prairies
University of British Columbia beside the particle accelerator centre, University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Victoria.
Atlantic Canada
Dalhousie University, Memorial University, University of New Brunswick, St Francis Xavier University.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Medical physics
Hospitals, radiation treatment, certification and a residency. The clearest job path in physics.
Optics and photonics
Lasers, sensors and imaging. Canada has a real industry in Ottawa, Quebec City and Toronto.
Quantum information
Waterloo, Sherbrooke, Vancouver and Calgary all host quantum companies and institutes.
Geophysics and space
Mining exploration, satellites and instruments. Applied and employable.
Serious coding
Python and C++ at a level you could be hired for on their own. This is the exit ramp if research does not work out.
A funded summer research award
Grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada pay undergraduates to work in labs. Apply in first year.
Machine shop and electronics skills
Experimental physicists build their own instruments. Being handy is a genuine advantage.
Teaching experience
Every physicist explains things for a living, whether to students, managers or funders.
Most physics PhDs in Canada do not end up as professors, and that is not a tragedy. The training is a licence to model hard problems, build instruments and write code, and that gets hired in semiconductors, energy, defence, medical imaging, finance and machine learning. Plan for it from the start by keeping your coding and instrument skills sharp, and the day you decide to leave research is a choice rather than a crisis.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
If you are an experimentalist: mornings aligning or repairing equipment, afternoons running measurements or waiting on a machine, evenings analysing the data. If you are a theorist: a whiteboard, a notebook and a long simulation running somewhere. Both spend a surprising share of the week writing, because funding applications, papers and referee reports are how the field works. And a lot of coffee spent arguing about why a result cannot possibly be right.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
Art McDonald shared the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing that neutrinos change type, using a detector built deep underground in a working nickel mine near Sudbury.
The underground science facility near Sudbury (SNOLAB) sits far below the surface so the rock blocks cosmic rays. Researchers there hunt for dark matter and study rare nuclear events.
Canada's particle accelerator centre (TRIUMF) sits on the University of British Columbia campus with more than 500 researchers, engineers, technicians and students. It also produces medical isotopes.
The World Wide Web was created at a particle physics laboratory in Europe so scientists could share results. Physics departments keep producing tools that escape into the wider world.
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.