Build the websites and web apps people use every day. A cheap way into tech, and a crowded one.
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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.
Programs in the fields this career usually comes through. Each has its own page: what it takes to get in, the courses you need and what it costs.
The median pay is about $80,000 a year. Across everyone in the job it runs from about $45,000 at the lower end to about $119,000 at the upper end. The source is listed under Sources at the end of this page.
1 to 4 years after high school, on the usual route.
$200 to $53,000 all in for tuition, fees, exams and kit. Living costs are not counted.
No. There is no licence to hold, though many employers still ask for training or a certificate.
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
$80,000
Lower end
$45,000
Upper end
$119,000
Job Bank's national median is $38.46 an hour, about $80,000 a year at 40 hours a week. The low is $21.48 and the high is $57.16 an hour: the bottom and top of the range for everyone in the group. Software developers are a separate Job Bank group.
$69,361 a year
The first step of the entry level (IT-01) in the federal information technology group
The latest published rate, from December 22, 2024, in the agreement with PIPSC (Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada). The top step of IT-01 is $89,382. Agencies, startups and other private employers set their own pay.
$40.23 an hour
The median in Alberta, the highest of any province
Ontario is close behind at $40.00, and Nova Scotia and Quebec match the national median of $38.46. Manitoba is lowest, at $31.25. Job Bank has no figure for the three territories.
Roughly, all in
$200 to $53,000
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is the self taught route: documentation that costs nothing and a few paid courses, with a portfolio doing the job a diploma would. The high end is four years of computer science tuition at one of the more expensive Ontario universities, about 13,000 dollars a year at Waterloo. A two or three year college diploma sits in between, roughly 6,000 to 17,000 dollars in tuition and fees. Bootcamps are private and set their own prices. 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 path with no tuition 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. Paid by the hour, 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 (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), 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 are paid work.
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 by law, so companies say developer rather than software engineer unless the person holds an engineering licence. Since 2023 Alberta lets anyone use the title software engineer. The other provinces and territories still reserve it for licensed engineers.
Quebec trains web developers in 3 year CEGEP (public college) programs, which have no tuition for full-time Quebec residents.
Finish Secondary V
Age 16 or 17
For the programming route you need Secondary IV math in the Technical and Scientific or Science sequence, or Secondary V Cultural, Social and Technical math. The multimedia route has no extra course requirement.
Choose a college program
3 years
Computer Science Technology DEC (Diploma of College Studies, 420.B0) for code, or Multimedia Integration Techniques DEC (582.A1) for design plus code. Both take 3 years.
Pick web electives and an internship
Years 2 and 3
In the computer science DEC (Diploma of College Studies), colleges choose web application courses as options. Dawson's program builds web and mobile apps and ends with an industry placement.
Build a portfolio and apply
Final year
Put college projects and your internship work online. Employers hire from the DEC (Diploma of College Studies) without a degree.
Optional: a bachelor's
3 to 4 years
Concordia's computer science degree accepts the computer science DEC (Diploma of College Studies), and advanced standing may be possible.
Computer Science Technology (420.B0)
Programming first: databases, web and mobile apps, security. In English at Dawson, Vanier, John Abbott and Heritage. Best if you want back-end or full stack work.
Multimedia Integration Techniques (582.A1)
Design and code together: images, animation, video and interactive pages. Jobs include web designer and web programmer. In English at Vanier College only.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Full-stack skills
Front-end plus back-end plus databases. Full-stack skills open software developer jobs.
Cloud basics
An AWS (Amazon Web Services) or Azure certificate. A few hundred dollars each.
Accessibility
Building sites that work with screen readers and keyboards. Public bodies and larger employers have to meet an accessibility standard, so they look for it.
Performance and security
Fast, safe sites are senior developer work.
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
Usually no cost to enter, 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 for 2023, and only 11% of them are 50 or over. Job Bank expects demand and supply to stay roughly balanced through 2033.
Since January 1, 2021, Ontario public bodies, and businesses and non-profits with 50 or more employees, must make their public websites meet WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 at Level AA (the middle of its three levels), the international accessibility standard.
Shopify says businesses on its platform have made more than $1 trillion in sales, and 675 million shoppers bought from Shopify stores in 2023. Building themes and apps for those stores is a career of its own.
Nearly everything a web developer uses is open source and costs nothing: browsers, editors, frameworks, servers. That is why a teenager with a laptop can learn the same tools the biggest companies use.
Every list is built from the same numbers shown above, so you can see where this career sits next to the others.
Software first, then the rest of the field. See every career in tech.
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.
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