Graduate Assistantships and Stipends, Explained for SA Postgraduates
Short answer first: nobody can tell you a typical stipend amount without knowing your specific university, department and supervisor’s grant funding, and anyone offering you one confident number for “graduate funding in Canada” is guessing. This is graduate assistantships and stipends explained for SA postgraduates without invented numbers: what we can walk you through is how the pieces actually fit together, in the order you’ll meet them.
Before you apply: the four terms you’ll see used loosely
- Stipend — a fixed living allowance, usually paid on a set schedule, that isn’t repayable and isn’t a wage for specific work performed.
- Teaching assistantship (TA) — paid work, usually marking, running tutorials or labs, structured as employment rather than as an unconditional grant.
- Research assistantship (RA) — paid work tied to a specific research project, drawing on a supervisor’s grant funding rather than a general university pool.
- Scholarship or fellowship — merit-based funding that doesn’t require ongoing work in exchange, as distinct from a TA or RA position.
The difference between a stipend and a scholarship, in short: a stipend is often a living-cost payment that can come bundled with work expectations attached, while a scholarship is typically awarded on merit with no work obligation tied to receiving it. In practice, most graduate students end up with some blend of several of these rather than just one.
When you get an offer: the funding package letter
In general, what a funding package letter includes is a statement of total guaranteed funding for a defined period — often the first two years of a master’s or first four or five of a doctorate — broken down by source: perhaps a base fellowship, a TA-ship for part of the year, and a top-up from the supervisor’s grant. Read every line item, not just the total. A package that looks generous as a single number can be less secure than one broken into named, confirmed sources, because the total sometimes assumes a TA position that isn’t actually guaranteed.
Once you’re enrolled: how much a TA position actually pays
This is exactly the number we don’t have a verified figure for — TA pay varies by university, by union agreement where TAs are unionised, and by the specific number of hours the position covers. Ask the graduate programme coordinator directly what the current TA rate is before you rely on it in your budget, rather than using a figure from an old forum post or another university entirely.
Ongoing: whether your supervisor is paying your funding
So, does a supervisor pay your masters funding? Often yes, in whole or in part, particularly in research-heavy programmes. Broadly, how research grants fund graduate students is this: a professor holds a research grant from a funding body, and pays some of their graduate students’ stipends or RA wages directly out of that grant as part of the research team. This means your funding security is tied not just to the university’s general policy, but to your specific supervisor’s grant renewal — worth asking about directly, since a supervisor between grants can mean a funding gap that the university’s general package doesn’t cover.
The honest note to close on
Every figure in this post was deliberately left as a concept rather than a number, because a wrong number would be worse than no number. Confirm actual current amounts directly with the specific graduate programme you’re applying to — that’s the only source that can give you something you can actually budget against.