What Each University Degree Pays in Canada (2026)

A Canadian engineering graduate earns a median of $79,100 two years after they finish. A visual and performing arts graduate earns $35,700. Both numbers come from tax returns rather than a salary survey, and the gap between them is $43,400 a year.

Four years of engineering tuition costs $11,948 more than four years of arts. That’s the whole price difference for the whole degree, and the pay gap covers it in about three months.

Statistics Canada publishes both halves of that calculation, in two separate tables. The table below puts them side by side, field by field.

What does each university degree pay in Canada?

Two years after graduating, the median Canadian undergraduate earns $62,400. Health graduates start highest at $82,500, engineering follows at $79,100, and visual and performing arts sits at the bottom at $35,700. Five years out every field has moved up, and the median across all fields reaches $74,200.

The table below pairs Statistics Canada’s undergraduate tuition by field of study (opens in a new tab) with median employment income two and five years after graduation (opens in a new tab). Tuition is the 2025/2026 year. The pay figures follow the 2019 graduating class, the most recent group old enough to have a five-year number, and they’re in 2024 constant dollars.

A note on the health row: the tuition table splits health into nursing ($6,587), medicine, dentistry, pharmacy and the rest, while the earnings table keeps them in one group. There’s no single tuition figure that honestly matches that row, so it’s left blank. At the undergraduate level that group is mostly nursing, which explains both the high start and the flat five-year number.

Two other rows rest on small numbers of graduates. Architecture had 690 graduates in the cohort and personal, protective and transportation services had 1,060, against 24,770 in business. Read those two as indicative.

Why the tuition column barely matters

Take the two ends of the table. Four years of engineering tuition is $38,544. Four years of visual and performing arts is $26,596. The whole difference, for the entire degree, is $11,948. Two years after they graduate, the engineering student is earning $43,400 more per year.

So the pay gap in a single year is more than three and a half times the entire four-year tuition gap.

Living costs are the same whatever you study

Tuition is also the smaller half of the bill. A student living away from home needs closer to $27,564 for one school year once rent, food and transit are counted, and tuition is about 28% of that. Our breakdown of what university actually costs in Canada has the full arithmetic.

An engineering student and a history student in the same city pay the same rent and buy the same groceries. The large costs are identical across programmes and the small one varies by a few thousand dollars, so the cost side of this decision is close to flat. The earnings side is where the variation is.

The cheapest degree isn’t the lowest paid

Education has the lowest tuition in the table at $5,712 a year, and the fourth-highest pay two years out at $64,300. Visual and performing arts costs more per year than education does and pays $28,600 less. If price told you anything about the return, those two would be the other way round.

Which degrees pay the most, and which ones are missing?

Among undergraduate degrees, health leads at two years ($82,500), then engineering ($79,100) and mathematics and computer science ($77,900). By year five, engineering ($95,000) and mathematics and computer science ($94,100) have passed health, which grew just 1%.

The programmes that top every “highest paying degrees” list aren’t undergraduate degrees at all. Medicine, dentistry, law, pharmacy, optometry and veterinary medicine are professional degrees, which means a first degree comes before them. Statistics Canada counts them separately, and they do pay more:

Law is the sharper climb. It starts $15,400 below a health professional degree and finishes $3,000 above it three years later. Dentistry is the most expensive programme in the country to study at $27,491 a year, roughly four times what a humanities degree costs.

What happens between year two and year five?

Every field gains. Health only just, at 1%, and the rest run from 12% to 33%. The all-field median rises from $62,400 to $74,200, so a two-year figure is an early reading rather than a settled one.

The lowest-paid fields grow fast, and the gap still widens

Visual and performing arts gains 24%, humanities 26%, social and behavioural sciences 25%. Education gains just 12%. Read as percentages, the bottom of the table is catching up.

In dollars it isn’t. Engineering goes from $79,100 to $95,000 while visual and performing arts goes from $35,700 to $44,300, so the gap between them grows from $43,400 to $50,700. A quarter more of a small number is still a small number, and both things are true at once.

Teaching pays early and then flattens

Education starts fourth at $64,300, ahead of business, and then grows more slowly than any field except health. By year five business has passed it, $78,300 against $72,300. That’s what public-sector salary grids do. A new teacher is paid close to what an experienced one is paid, compared with almost any private-sector field.

Personal, protective and transportation services runs the other way, up 33%, the largest gain in the table. That group is policing, firefighting, the military and transport, and it has a small cohort behind it.

Where these numbers come from

Statistics Canada builds these through the Education and Labour Market Longitudinal Platform, which matches postsecondary graduation records to tax data. Its technical guide (opens in a new tab) calls the result “a census of the resulting study population, with no imputation or weighting applied”.

The population is every Canadian student who graduated and filed, not a sample and not a group who volunteered. International graduates are counted separately and left out here, since many leave the country after finishing. Nobody opted in, and nobody typed their own salary into a form. Median employment income covers wages, salaries, commissions and net self-employment income, and graduates who reported $0 are counted in the median rather than dropped from it.

The figures do leave people out. Graduates with no tax information in any of the five years are excluded, as is anyone who went back to school full time, since a student’s income would drag the number down for reasons that have nothing to do with their field.

StatCan’s companion two-year table (opens in a new tab) runs one cohort later. For students who graduated in 2022, mathematics and computer science pay two years out came in at $76,900, the lowest since the 2017 class, while engineering rose to $80,900, its highest in a decade. That series counts a slightly different group than the table above, so read it as a direction of travel rather than an update to those rows.

So how long does a degree take to pay for itself?

No page can tell you, and the ones that give you a single number are hiding an assumption. A payback period needs to know what you would have earned instead, over the same years, in a life you didn’t live. Change that one input and the answer moves by a decade.

What the data does settle is narrower and more useful. Choosing between fields costs almost nothing up front and pays very differently afterward. Engineering’s extra $11,948 of tuition over an arts degree comes back in about three months of the pay difference, and the difference keeps running for the rest of a career. No tuition discount in the table comes anywhere near it.

So don’t pick a programme off a salary table. But do stop agonising over the price tag, because it’s the part that barely moves.

A reason to keep saving through the lean years

Whatever you studied, the first couple of years out are the thinnest ones in this data. Saving during them is hard, and it’s also when the habit is worth the most.

Lodavo is a free Canadian app that rewards you for saving. Connect the savings or chequing account you already use, and every $25 of your balance earns a free ticket in a weekly cash draw. You could win up to $10,000, and at least $100 goes to a user every single week. Your savings stay in your own bank the whole time.

The smallest number in this article

Nobody picks a degree off a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet makes a poor case for one anyway. But of everything above, the figure families argue about hardest, the few thousand dollars between one programme’s tuition and another’s, is the one that matters least.

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