After you graduate
Rules read 16 Aug 2026
What Canada's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Money you must prove before the visa
CA$22,895per year, for a single applicant with no accompanying family members, covering the first year of the programme — and explicitly EXCLUDING tuition and transportation, which must be shown on top
Shown as a balance in a bank account. You keep control of it.
Figure published for: for applications made on or after September 1, 2025, in IRCC's own wording; the page was last modified 2026-01-26 and states 'These amounts are updated each year'. The previous figure, for applications between January 1, 2024 and August 31, 2025, was $20,635. This amount is revised regularly, so check it again before you transfer anything.
Applies to every province and territory EXCEPT Quebec; a student going to Quebec needs a Certificat d'acceptation du Québec and must meet costs set separately by the Ministère de l'Immigration, de la Francisation et de l'Intégration, which IRCC does not publish. The figure is living expenses only — tuition and return transportation for the applicant and any accompanying family are additional. Accompanying family raises it: $28,502 for 2 people, $35,040 for 3, $42,543 for 4, $48,252 for 5, $54,420 for 6, $60,589 for 7, and $6,170 for each further person. Funds must be available without working in Canada. Proof is needed for the first year; for a programme longer than a year the applicant must also explain how the rest will be paid. IRCC accepts several forms of proof and mandates none: bank statements for the past 4 months, a guaranteed investment certificate (GIC) from a participating Canadian financial institution, proof the first year of tuition and housing is already paid, a student or education loan, a bank draft convertible to Canadian dollars, a letter from a person or institution providing the money, or proof of a Canadian-funded scholarship. Local visa offices can require more, and an applicant from a country with foreign-exchange controls must also prove the money can legally be exported.
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Work during study
International students on a study permit may work off campus without a separate work permit if they are a full-time student at a designated learning institution (DLI), enrolled in a post-secondary academic, vocational or professional program (or a Quebec secondary-level vocational program) that is at least 6 months long and leads to a degree, diploma or certificate, hold a valid study permit with work conditions printed on it, and have a Social Insurance Number (SIN). During regular school terms or semesters they may work up to 24 hours per week off campus (across more than one job if needed). During scheduled breaks in the school year — such as summer and winter holidays or a reading week — they may work unlimited hours off campus. Working more than 24 hours per week during a term is a violation of study permit conditions.
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Post-study work visa
Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP) . Up to 3 years
Available to eligible graduates of designated learning institutions (not every institution or program qualifies). Permit length depends on the level and duration of the study program (and the passport's expiry date, whichever is shorter): a program of at least 8 months but under 2 years gets a PGWP up to the same length as the program; a program of 2 years or more gets a PGWP valid for 3 years. Graduates with a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree face no field-of-study eligibility restriction (a restriction that does apply, since 1 November 2024, to some non-degree college/polytechnic programs), but all applicants now generally need a minimum Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) 7 language-test result (CLB 5 for non-university college/polytechnic graduates) unless their PGWP application was submitted before 1 November 2024.
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Route to permanent residence
Express Entry's Canadian Experience Class (CEC) is a federal permanent-residence stream for people with qualifying Canadian work experience — the kind of experience a Post-Graduation Work Permit lets a graduate accumulate. To be eligible, the work experience must be paid, gained in Canada while authorized to work, in a National Occupational Classification (NOC) Training/Education/Experience/Responsibilities (TEER) category of 0, 1, 2 or 3, and total at least 1 year of full-time work (or the part-time equivalent — 1,560 hours) within the 3 years before applying. There is no minimum education requirement for the CEC stream itself, and a successful applicant must intend to live outside Quebec, which runs its own skilled-worker selection process.
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Route to citizenship
Canadian citizenship is administered by the same department that runs immigration, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). An adult applicant must have been physically present in Canada for at least 1,095 days (3 years) during the 5 years immediately before signing the application; time spent in Canada as a temporary resident or protected person before becoming a permanent resident counts at half value toward this, capped at 365 of the 1,095 days. Applicants must have filed Canadian income taxes, if required to, for at least 3 of those 5 years. Applicants aged 18 to 54 must demonstrate English or French to at least Canadian Language Benchmark (CLB) / Niveaux de compétence linguistique canadien (NCLC) level 4, and must pass a citizenship test on the rights and responsibilities of citizens and on Canada's history, geography, government, laws and symbols; applicants 55 and over are exempt from both the language proof and the test. All adult applicants take the oath of citizenship at a ceremony. Canada permits dual and multiple citizenship: on this same page IRCC states plainly that becoming a Canadian citizen does not require giving up another nationality, while flagging that a person's other country of citizenship may not reciprocate that position.
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What the government currently prioritises
Express Entry (the federal system covering the Canadian Experience Class, Federal Skilled Worker Program and Federal Skilled Trades Program) periodically runs category-based rounds of invitations that target published categories directly relevant to this dataset's fields: 'Healthcare and social services occupations' and 'Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) occupations', alongside separate categories for trade occupations, education, transport, French-language proficiency, and Canadian-experienced physicians, senior managers and researchers. Eligibility for either category requires at least 12 months of work experience within the past 3 years in a single occupation named on IRCC's published table for that round, identified by National Occupational Classification (NOC) code. The STEM table has included, among others, architecture and science managers, cybersecurity specialists, civil/mechanical/electrical-and-electronics/industrial-and-manufacturing engineers, geological engineers, and civil/mechanical/electrical engineering technologists and technicians. The healthcare and social services table has included, among others, specialists in clinical/laboratory medicine and in surgery, general practitioners and family physicians, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists, psychologists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, registered nurses and registered psychiatric nurses, nurse practitioners, licensed practical nurses, dental hygienists and dental therapists, medical laboratory and medical radiation technologists, and social workers — and a separate category exists specifically for 'Physicians with Canadian work experience'. Which categories run, and which occupations are listed, is decided round by round and is not guaranteed for any particular occupation.
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PGWP eligibility rules changed materially on 1 November 2024: most applicants must now show a minimum language-test result, and non-degree study-permit applicants from that date must be in a field of study linked to occupations in long-term shortage — this field-of-study requirement does not apply to bachelor's, master's or doctoral graduates. Category-based Express Entry rounds (including the STEM category) run at IRCC's discretion, are not on a fixed schedule, and are not guaranteed to recur for any given occupation. Read 16 August 2026; Canada has changed PGWP and Express Entry settings more than once in the last two years, so re-check before relying on this. Deepening pass, 17 August 2026: inDemandOccupations re-cited to the same already-archived category-based-selection.html page to add the Healthcare and social services occupations category (specific named occupations) alongside the STEM category that was already there — the page names both categories together, so a single quote listing the category names supports the expanded value; the occupation lists themselves come from tables already present in the same archived snapshot (6a889eff73384e54). citizenshipRoute added 17 August 2026, cited to the same canada.ca 'Who can apply' page already used above (c361760c231416e7) — that single page carries the physical-presence figure, the language/test age bands, the tax-filing rule and the dual-citizenship statement together, so one citation supports the whole field. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route' on 18 August 2026: the authority already cited under citizenshipRoute publishes criteria a foreign resident could actually follow, which is the only claim this field makes. It is deliberately not a judgement about how attainable that route is in practice. studentVisaFunds added 19 August 2026. mechanism is recorded as bank-balance, not guaranteed-investment, and the reason matters: the Student Direct Stream — the route whose defining requirement was a CAN$20,635 GIC — no longer exists. IRCC's own student-direct-stream.html URL now serves the general study-permit hub with no SDS content on it at all (snapshot d26354c8c0a85eb7, read the same day). A GIC is still listed on the proof-of-funds page as one of several accepted documents, but it is no longer attached to a faster stream and no longer a required mechanism, so recording 'guaranteed-investment' would describe a programme that has been withdrawn. Quebec is deliberately left without a figure: IRCC's page says only that Quebec applicants must meet costs set by the Ministère de l'Immigration, de la Francisation et de l'Intégration, and that ministry is not an allowlisted immigration domain here, so the Quebec amount was not collected rather than guessed. The $22,895 is the single-applicant row; the larger household figures are in conditions verbatim from the same table.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗