Deliver the daily radiation treatments that cure or control cancer. Three to four years of school, weekday hours, and the same patients for weeks at a time.
Click through it
Pay, the path, pros and cons and the facts on one printable page. Good for a wall or a guidance counsellor.
Or read the whole thing here
What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$83,000
New grad
$62,000
Senior or advanced practice
$106,000
Job Bank's national median is $40 an hour, about $83,000 a year full time. Job Bank pools all medical radiation technologists under one code, so this is the group figure. Radiation therapy usually sits at the upper end because most programs are degrees and every job is in a hospital cancer centre on a union grid.
$30 to $37 an hour
About $62,000 to $77,000 a year at full-time hours
Nearly every radiation therapist works for a provincial cancer agency or hospital, so starting pay is set by the union grid. Little difference between big and small centres.
$48 to $51 an hour
Roughly $100,000 or more as a senior, planner or advanced practice therapist
Unlike imaging, there is almost no on-call. The extra money comes from seniority, planning roles and master's-level advanced practice.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The whole route is one accredited three or four year program at $5,000 to $10,000 a year, often run jointly by a college and a university. Add books, uniforms, immunizations and a police check at $1,500 to $3,000, the national certification exam at $980 plus about $89 for remote proctoring or $172 at a test centre, and provincial registration at $400 to $700 a year. That exam is set by CAMRT (Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists) and you cannot work without passing it. Registration is a yearly cost for the rest of your career, not a one time fee.
Roughly $15,000 to $40,000 in tuition. Joint college and university degree programs are the norm in this discipline.
Defined-benefit pension
HOOPP (the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan) in Ontario. Provincial cancer agencies elsewhere have similar plans.
Extended health and dental
Weekday, daytime hours
Treatment machines run roughly 7am to 6pm on weekdays. Rare weekends.
Paid vacation and sick days
Typically 3 to 4 weeks to start.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
One discipline of medical radiation technology, with its own program and exam.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Grade 12 physics, biology, math and English. Chemistry helps.
Accredited radiation therapy program
3 to 4 years
Usually a 3-year college program or a 4-year joint college-university degree. Radiation physics, anatomy, cancer biology, treatment planning and patient care, then months of full-time unpaid clinical placement in a cancer centre. Some programs want a year of university science first.
Write the CAMRT (Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists) exam
After graduation
The national certification exam. Radiation therapy is written on the second day of each sitting, in January, May and September.
Register with your provincial regulator
A few weeks
In Ontario that is the CMRITO (College of Medical Radiation and Imaging Technologists of Ontario).
Physics
Required. Radiation dose is physics.
Biology
Required. Cancer biology and anatomy every day.
Math
Dose calculations must be exact.
English
You support the same frightened patients for weeks.
Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador register medical radiation technologists, including radiation therapists. Ontario's CMRITO (College of Medical Radiation and Imaging Technologists of Ontario) lists radiation therapy as one of its five specialties. Where there is no regulator, employers require CAMRT (Canadian Association of Medical Radiation Technologists) certification. The exam is national, so moving provinces is mostly paperwork.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Treatment planning (dosimetry)
Designing the beams on a computer instead of delivering them. Quieter, technical, and well paid.
Advanced practice radiation therapist
A master's-level role that takes on some tasks doctors used to do, like marking targets and reviewing images. Top of the pay scale.
Brachytherapy
Placing radioactive sources inside the body. Procedure-based and specialized.
Quality and safety roles
Every centre needs people who own the checks and audits.
Volunteer at a cancer centre or hospice
Find out now whether you can handle daily contact with very sick people.
Comfort with computers and 3D thinking
Lining up a beam to the millimetre is spatial work.
Teamwork
Two or three therapists run each machine together, all day.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A treatment unit sees 25 to 40 patients a day, each for 10 to 20 minutes. You greet the patient, lie them on the table in the exact position from their plan, use tattoos or marks and imaging to line them up to the millimetre, leave the room, deliver the dose from the console, and watch on camera. Then the next patient. Most people come every weekday for 2 to 7 weeks, so you know them, their families and their fears. Some days you work in simulation, scanning new patients and setting up their plans.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
In 1951, teams in Saskatoon and London, Ontario built the world's first cobalt-60 units to treat cancer with radiation. Canadian radiation therapists have been delivering treatment ever since.
Modern treatment plans shape the beam to the tumour and spare the organs beside it, so patients are lined up to within a few millimetres every single day. Therapists image the patient before many treatments to check the position.
A radiation treatment is silent and painless while it happens. Side effects like tiredness and skin redness build up over the weeks. Explaining that gap is part of the therapist's job.
Cancer agencies estimate roughly half of all people with cancer receive radiation at some point, alone or with surgery and chemotherapy. That is what keeps every treatment unit in Canada full.
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.