Design the roads, intersections, transit lines and signals that decide how a city moves.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Licensed engineer
$101,000
Engineer-in-training
$67,000
Senior or principal
$150,000
Job Bank lists transportation engineer inside its civil engineers group, with a national median of $48.56 an hour, about $101,000 a year full time. Consulting firms in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver pay near the top; small municipalities pay less but offer a pension.
$67,000 to $80,000
EIT (engineer-in-training) at a consulting firm or a city
Traffic counts, signal timing reviews and drawing checks are the standard first two years. It is repetitive, and it is how you learn what the numbers actually mean.
$150,000 and up
Principal consultants and municipal engineering managers
Senior people who can stand in front of a hostile public meeting and defend a design earn well above technical staff, because very few engineers want that part of the job.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is a four year civil engineering degree at a cheaper public university, the professional practice exam at about 250, and the first year of the P.Eng (professional engineer) licence. The high end is a five year program at up to 17,000 a year with the same fees. Paid work terms during the degree pay roughly 20 to 32 dollars an hour, and cities and provincial ministries hire students every summer, so the real out of pocket cost is often well under the number shown. Traffic and safety courses after you qualify are normally paid by an employer, and licence dues run about 300 to 500 a year for your whole career.
Co-op terms pay roughly $20 to $32 an hour, and cities and ministries hire students every summer for counts and inspections.
Public sector pension
City and provincial jobs come with one, which is worth a lot over a career.
Steady work
Roads need rebuilding whatever the economy is doing.
Overtime or time in lieu
For night counts, construction inspection and evening meetings.
Paid licence fees and training
The exact path from high school to qualified.
There is no transportation engineering degree in most of Canada. You do civil engineering and specialise.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Calculus, Advanced Functions, Physics and Chemistry, usually with a minimum around 70% in each.
Accredited civil engineering degree
4 to 5 years with co-op
Take the transportation stream: traffic, highway design, pavements, transit planning.
Work terms
During the degree
Traffic counts, construction inspection, drafting. Most consulting firms hire their juniors out of their own co-op pool.
Engineer-in-training
About 4 years
About four years of supervised experience registered with your provincial regulator.
P.Eng (professional engineer) licence
After about 4 years
Pass the law and ethics exam, submit your experience record, and you can seal road and intersection designs.
Calculus and Advanced Functions
Required for civil engineering admission.
Physics
Required. Braking distances and sight lines are physics.
Chemistry
Required at most schools, and useful for pavement and concrete courses.
Data or statistics
Optional, but traffic work is mostly counting and modelling.
You need a provincial P.Eng (professional engineer) licence to seal a design. What goes in that design comes largely from national guides published by the TAC (Transportation Association of Canada), including the geometric design guide for roads and the manual that sets how signs, signals and pavement markings must look. Provinces and cities add their own standards on top. Knowing those books well is most of what makes a senior engineer senior.
Any accredited civil engineering program with a transportation stream will do.
Ontario
Waterloo, Toronto, McMaster, Queen's, Ottawa, Carleton, Western and Toronto Metropolitan.
Quebec
Polytechnique Montreal, Laval, Sherbrooke and Concordia.
West
University of British Columbia, Alberta, Calgary, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Atlantic
Dalhousie, New Brunswick and Memorial.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Traffic signal operations
Timing and coordinating signals across a corridor. Specialised and always short staffed.
Road safety audits
Reviewing designs and crash records to find what will hurt someone. A recognised specialty.
Transit and active transportation
Bus lanes, light rail and protected bike lanes are where public money is going.
Traffic modelling software
Microsimulation skills make you useful on every large project.
A driver's licence
You will be visiting sites constantly, sometimes at night.
Public speaking
Residents show up to meetings angry about a road, and you have to explain it.
Mapping software
Geographic information system tools are used in almost every study.
Patience with data
Counts, crash records and travel times are the evidence for every recommendation.
Cities and provincial ministries give you a pension, normal hours and a say in policy, but slower pay growth and long approval processes. Consulting gives you more projects, more variety and better money by your thirties, with timesheets and deadline pressure. A common pattern is a few years in consulting to learn quickly, then a move to a city for the stability once life gets busier.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Morning going through traffic counts and crash data for an intersection that keeps having collisions. Late morning drawing options: a roundabout, a left turn lane, a signal change. Afternoon at the site with a camera and a measuring wheel, watching how drivers and people walking actually behave, which is never what the drawing assumes. Some evenings you present at a public meeting and take the questions.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
For a country with a small population, that is an enormous network to design, maintain and rebuild. Most of it is managed by municipalities rather than the federal government.
The manual of uniform traffic control devices for Canada is why a stop sign in Halifax looks the same as one in Victoria. Transportation engineers apply it on nearly every project.
Replacing a signalised intersection with a roundabout removes the head on and right angle collisions that hurt people most. Canadian cities have been building them steadily for this reason, even though drivers complain at first.
The section of Highway 401 through Toronto is one of the busiest stretches of road in North America, carrying hundreds of thousands of vehicles a day. Engineers rebuild parts of it while traffic keeps running.
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.