Build the websites and web apps people use every day. Cheapest way into tech, and the most crowded.
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
$80,000
Junior
$45,000
Senior or lead
$119,000
Job Bank's national median is $38.46 an hour, about $80,000 a year full time. The low end is junior agency and freelance work. Full-stack developers at software companies sit closer to the software developer range, which is higher.
$45,000 to $60,000
Junior developer at an agency, small company or startup
Job Bank's low end is $21.48 an hour. Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal and Ottawa have the most openings and pay the most. Small-town agencies pay less.
$100,000 to $120,000
Senior front-end, back-end or full-stack developer
Job Bank's top end is $57.16 an hour. The biggest raise usually comes from moving out of web agencies and into a software company, where the title becomes software developer.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is the self taught route: free documentation and a few paid courses, with a portfolio doing the job a diploma would. The high end is a four year university computer science degree at one of the more expensive schools. A two to three year college diploma or a short bootcamp sits in between, roughly 12,000 to 25,000. There is no licence to buy in this field, so the expensive route is buying credentials, structure and a hiring network, not legal permission to work.
This is one of the few tech jobs where a free path is realistic. Employers hire on the portfolio, not the paper.
Salary
Agencies, in-house marketing teams, software companies.
Freelance
Building sites for small businesses. Rates vary a lot with experience. Income is uneven.
Contract
Common at banks and government. Higher hourly pay, no benefits.
Remote for a foreign company
Some Canadian developers earn US pay from home.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
Learn the tools, build things people can click on, get hired on those things.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Take computer science if your school offers it, and every math you can. Build a site for a club, a band or a family business.
Pick a route
0 to 4 years
A 2 to 3 year college diploma (Algonquin, Seneca, BCIT (British Columbia Institute of Technology), SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology)), a 4-year computer science degree, a bootcamp, or self-study. All four lead to jobs. The degree opens the most doors later.
Learn the core stack
Ongoing
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, then a framework like React and a back-end like Node or Python. Git and the command line are not optional.
Portfolio and co-op
During training
Three to five real projects online, with the code public on GitHub. Co-op terms at Algonquin pay about $7,000 to $10,000 a term.
First job
Weeks to months
Junior roles are competitive. Apply widely, including agencies and non-tech companies that need a website person.
Computer science
You learn to think in code early.
Math
Advanced Functions and Calculus are required for a computer science degree, not for a diploma.
Visual arts or media arts
Front-end work is half design.
English
You will write documentation and talk to clients constantly.
Anyone can call themselves a web developer. No licence, no exam, no professional body. The one rule: the title engineer is protected in most provinces, so companies say developer rather than software engineer unless the person holds an engineering licence. Alberta loosened this in 2023, but the rest of Canada has not.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Full-stack skills
Front-end plus back-end plus databases. Full-stack developers get the software developer pay scale.
Cloud basics
An AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Azure certificate. A few hundred dollars each.
Accessibility
Building sites that work with screen readers. Required for government and big-company work in Canada, and few developers know it well.
Performance and security
Fast, safe sites are what senior developers are paid for.
Design sense
Knowing Figma and basic typography makes you the person who can do both.
Open source contributions
Public proof you can work in someone else's code.
Hackathons
Free, fun, and a solid line on a first resume.
A blog or a few tutorials
Writing about what you build gets you noticed faster than you would think.
Plenty of web developers started by building sites for a family business, a restaurant or a hockey club. Small businesses in every town need a website and a person to keep it running. It is not a way to get rich, but it is real experience, real references, and a portfolio before your first interview.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
A short stand-up meeting, then hours of focused work: building a new page, fixing a layout that breaks on phones, connecting a form to a database, reviewing a teammate's code. At an agency you might touch three client sites in a day. In-house, you live inside one product. Deadlines cluster around launches, and something is always broken on someone's browser.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
That is Job Bank's count, and only about 11% of them are over 50. It is one of the youngest occupations in the country, and demand and supply are expected to stay roughly balanced through 2033.
Nearly everything a web developer uses is free and open source: browsers, editors, frameworks, servers. That is why a teenager with a laptop can learn the same tools the biggest companies use.
Shopify, based in Ottawa, powers millions of online stores around the world. Building themes and apps for Shopify stores is a whole career on its own for Canadian web developers.
The word engineer is legally protected by provincial regulators. That is why job ads say developer. Alberta changed its law in 2023 to allow software engineer without a licence, and it is still the only province that has.
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.