What makes Canada’s highest paying jobs so in demand?

According to Robert Boersma, Chief of Staff at job search hub Talent.com, the most lucrative jobs typically have a few things in common: They require extensive education, years of experience, highly specialized skills that few can master – all of which keeps demand high.

“Speaking broadly, the more value that you create, the more you get paid,” says Boersma.

“There are lots of caveats to that – I don’t want to undermine, say, a fast-food worker who’s giving you great service and provides great value. However, niche skill sets or hard-to-find skill sets are typically worth more to employers.”

This criteria might make you think of specialist medical occupations like surgeons – and you’ll definitely find a few health-care professions on this list. But the future of work is changing all the time, and there are jobs in this top ten that scarcely crossed people’s minds ten years ago, let alone offered some of the highest salaries in the country.

To determine the top ten highest paying jobs in Canada, CourseCompare pulled Canadian salary data from a range of sources, including Talent.com, Indeed, Glassdoor, Economic Research Institute, and the Government of Canada Job Bank. Salaries can vary widely depending on location, organization size, and years of experience – but these ten reliably earn top dollar across the country.

These are the highest paying jobs in Canada of 2025:

 

Anesthesiologist – $311,820

It’s no surprise that medical specializations top any list of Canada’s highest paying careers, says Boersma. These positions are only available to a select group of individuals because they require a great deal of post-secondary education (typically more than a dozen years), and doctors will always be in demand as long as Canadians need health care.

While anesthesiologists – doctors that monitor and evaluate patients before, during and after surgery – snag the top spot in this list with an average salary of $311,820, surgeons are close behind with $311,644. Cardiologists – experts in the care of the heart and blood vessels – earn $258,932 on average, and doctors with specializations including urology, gynecology, ophthalmology, or neurosurgery can earn anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 annually.

Boersma notes that demand for many of these specializations will only increase in the coming years due to Canada’s aging population, immigration-based population growth and the increasing number of Baby Boomer-age doctors exiting the workforce. According to a Government of Canada report, seniors are expected to be one-quarter of the Canadian population by 2040 (up from one-fifth in 2019). That may mean compensation for specialists will rise to meet the country’s needs.

And while general practitioners in Canada make a competitive salary – on average, $233,719 – many family doctors have been vocal in recent years about the impact of inflation on their salaries and the increasing overhead costs of running what amounts to a small business. Now in a situation where 6.5 million people in the country don’t have a family doctor, provincial governments may need to reassess physicians’ salaries in order to provide the medical care Canadians need.

“There’s this dual pressure: A very tight labour market with not enough people to do these jobs, and a lot of people requiring these services,” Boersma says.

Orthodontist – $287,491

The scarcity of orthodontists and dentists is similar to medical doctors in that these positions require years of education and training. That said, these positions are not as susceptible to the pressures of changing demographics, says Boersma.

“Elderly people don’t typically require more dental care than younger populations. As a result, the labour market will be slightly less tight because the demand is only being pushed by population growth and less by the aging population,” he says.

Orthodontists – dentists who diagnose and treat teeth and jaw irregularities – earn an average of $287,491 for their specialized, and expensive, services, while dentists clock in at an average salary of $157,732.

Like GPs, some dentists have expressed concerns in recent years about overhead and inflation when it comes to running their practices. In fact, some dentists chose not to sign up for the recently launched federal dental plan, saying the costs recommended in the provincial fee guides are a lot lower than what normal private dental care benefits provide for. However, these are clearly occupations that are well-compensated, with little to no risk of a drop in demand.

Psychiatrist – $284,034

Mental health has become a prominent topic in Canada in recent years, both in workplaces and in society at large. While psychiatry has always been a lucrative profession, Boersma says this increased mental health awareness and actions taken by companies to provide more mental health support for employees through benefits has certainly increased demand for this profession. (Psychiatrists, unlike psychologists, psychotherapists or other mental health professionals, are medical doctors and can prescribe medication in addition to other treatments.) It can take 12-15 years to become a practicing psychiatrist.

Boersma notes that companies partnering with “two-sided marketplaces” like Dialogue and Maple are enabling easier access to mental health care with virtual options.

“It’s a double whammy where I think there’s a lot more awareness, but there’s also better and better technology to be able to connect people from their homes to [see practitioners] remotely,” he says. “It makes that service a lot more accessible for people who may have stayed on the sidelines, and that’s also going to increase the demand.”

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Software Engineering Manager – $139,840

While software engineers – people who design and develop software like computer games, applications, and operating systems for end users – have existed since the 1960s, the profession has spiked in demand over the past couple of decades. Some of the highest paying jobs in Canada are in the software space, with the base position of software engineer earning an average of $101,374. Unlike medicine or dentistry, individuals can become software engineers after only four years of post-secondary education.

More senior jobs in the software space can be even more lucrative, with a software engineering manager earning an average of $139,840 annually, a director of IT earning $132,304 and a software architect earning $127,172.

“If you hire engineers, you need to have an engineering manager,” notes Boersma. “If you start to have a large team that has a complex infrastructure, you may need a director of IT.”

However, Boersma says these are the kind of jobs that could be “oil-changed out” of the best-paying list in future years. He notes that the labour market for these positions has loosened because the tech industry has been impacted by higher interest rates.

“People who create technology companies are largely creating speculative investments that do not produce margin today. You need to hire a bunch of engineers, create your product, build it, do all the marketing, and then over many years you sell products that become profitable over time,” he says. “That’s all fine and dandy when interest rates are quite low. People are willing to pay engineers very highly because they want to capitalize on the market conditions to try to build up their company.”

There’s been a shift over the last couple of years as interest rates ratcheted up, he says, making those speculative investments less appealing for investors.

“The people who are running these companies have less cash flow to hire people at really high rates. So although there are still many, many, people who earn really good salaries doing this job, for those that are unemployed, it’s harder to find work because there are fewer of those companies hiring right now,” Boersma says.

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Petroleum Engineer – $137,107

Boersma notes that while jobs in the clean energy space have grown over the past decade and will continue to grow, people working in traditional energy systems such as oil and gas still earn good money in Canada. For example, petroleum engineers (with an average salary of $137,107) work with geoscientists and to find oil and gas deposits on land or at sea, then determine and design the best methods of extraction.

“I’m from Alberta and people forget that, especially in Canada, as much as we may want to change the environmental impacts of it, oil has been the driving momentum behind our economy for a lot of years,” Boersma says.

However, he says that it is fair to ask the question about jobs in this sector: How long will these jobs exist? Positions in the sustainable energy sector may be just as lucrative in future, meaning that engineers will continue to be highly paid, but their job titles may change.

“You may just see the word petroleum drop off and it’ll be a different form of energy as many companies continue to adapt. A lot of petroleum companies say they want to be net zero by 2050,” he says. “They are the ones with the resources to train a lot of these really smart people who understand how to extract energy, how to store it and how to create different forms of energy. And they’re the ones who will be able to continue paying these types of engineers.”

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Chief Financial Officer – $136,398

When it comes to the C-suite, you might expect the top job – CEO – to be the highest paid. But the amount of compensation you get as a CEO depends on how big your company is, notes Boersma. The CEO of a ten-person company is going to get paid a lot differently than the CEO of a multinational organization.

Meanwhile, the average salary of other C-suite jobs, like Chief Financial Officer ($136,398) and Chief Marketing Officer ($128,886) is actually higher than the average CEO salary ($125,222), because any organization with multiple C-suite positions is likely to be a larger enterprise. Another potential reason for the discrepancy is that CEOs are more likely to be paid out in other ways – such equity, stocks or dividends – that wouldn’t be captured in an annual salary.

Years of experience can play a large role in determining C-suite compensation, though Boersma notes that isn’t always the case.

“With so many startups, you see founders/CEOs who have brilliant ideas and not necessarily a lot of experience. They can hire, they can earn some revenue, and then all of a sudden they’re running a medium-sized business. And that can happen pretty quickly. These are not bank CEOs who worked their way up.”

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Corporate Lawyer – $131,049

A lawyer’s salary can vary depending on their area of specialization, but Boersma points out that corporate lawyers typically come out on top. This type of lawyer is hired by a corporation to represent the interests of that corporate entity, ensuring the corporation is in compliance with government regulations.

“Legislation is becoming more and more complex every year, so corporate lawyer is a position that is likely to stay on the highest-paying list,” he says. It can take upwards of seven years of post-secondary education to become a lawyer.

Law is one of the industries where there is concern about how technology and artificial intelligence may impact the field. Technological advances are enabling legal teams to automate or expedite time-consuming tasks like conducting legal research and producing legal briefs. While that may impact the ability of junior employees like first-year legal associates to get jobs, it is unlikely to erase the need for experienced leaders in the field, Boersma says.

“Automation doesn’t mean that an industry is gone, it means that it’s more efficient and that the people working in it can upskill themselves to do more human work and less of the production type of work,” he says.

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AI Engineer – $117,954

Speaking of artificial intelligence, the job of AI engineer wouldn’t have even existed on a highest paying jobs list from ten years ago. AI engineers develop, program and train complex networks of algorithms so that they can function like a human brain.

Boersma notes that data scientists (with an average salary of $106,169) and data architects (average salary $114,856) are also essential jobs in this space. “You cannot produce large language models or machine learning models, which are the things that power AI, without data scientists. They’re the ones that are putting the fuel in the fire.” Data scientists collect, analyze and interpret data, while AI architects design and implement the infrastructures of AI systems.

This is an industry that is bound to grow in future, says Boersma. “A term that was thrown around a lot five or six years ago was, ‘Big data is the new oil.’ That remains largely true. People who can understand and structure that data are going to be key for the development of more modern and advanced algorithms.”

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Pharmacist – $108,240

Pharmacists across Canada make a good salary, but Boersma points out that the pressures happening in the medical field could make this an even more lucrative business in future.

Pharmacists’ main job is to dispense medication according to doctors’ prescriptions. However, pharmacists are being given an increasingly broad scope of work in provinces across the country, allowing them to treat minor ailments including eczema, insect bites, and UTIs, among others.

Seen as crucial support for a health-care system struggling to serve Canada’s population, pharmacists who can prescribe medications and treat minor but bothersome afflictions will be in high demand.

“As pharmacists are enabled more by government programs to be more prescriptive and to create value further down the chain towards taking some of the pressure off the system from [the demand for] doctors, that’s going to increase the value that they’re providing to the people that they serve. As they bring more value, their compensation will probably continue to rise,” Boersma says.

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Controller, Financial Services – $106,806

Boersma says that this was the most surprising occupation on the list. A financial controller is a senior manager who typically leads the accounting department and oversees a business’s day-to-day financial operations, helping to shape an organization’s financial strategy.

“I don’t know why it’s there. Obviously, cost control is paramount,” he says. He notes that Canada’s higher-interest rate environment for the last couple of years may have something to do with the robust compensation for controllers.

“With interest rates being higher and companies focused on controlling their cash burn or preserving higher returns for investors in a more public setting, this job probably crept its way up because cost control has become so much more important as money became more expensive to loan,” Boersma says.

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