Who Gets In Under the Canada Immigration Levels Plan for 2027?

A skilled worker abroad with no Canadian experience, sitting in the Express Entry pool at 450 points, had 92,434 people ahead of them on October 25, and nothing in the immigration plan Canada tabled this week shortens that line.

The Canada immigration levels plan 2027–2029, released inside Budget 2026 on Thursday, holds Canada permanent resident admissions at 380,000 a year through 2029, with 370,000 new temporary arrivals a year alongside them. The headline did not move. The plan was due by November 1 and arrived four days late, folded into the budget for the second year running.

Federal High Skilled places fall to 100,000 in 2027. The federal stream rations Express Entry places, including for applicants abroad. Last year’s plan had promised 111,000 for the same year, and 2026 held 109,000. The economic total does not move, at 244,700, so the cut was absorbed inside the category: the Provincial Nominee Program rises from 92,500 to 95,000. “Ehna ne pnp da processing time v ght kita ja nhi?” asked sarao.rohit on Instagram, hours after the plan appeared (in Punjabi: “did they also cut the PNP processing time?”). The plan’s table gives the places for each stream; it says nothing about how long any of them take to process.

Two days before the plan, on Tuesday, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada rewrote the points that ration those places. A new Labour Market Integration factor in the Express Entry CRS is worth up to 150 points (140 with a spouse) for Canadian work experience, or for a job offer in a high-wage occupation, never both. A candidate abroad with neither scores nothing from it. Job-offer points return after being removed in March 2025, and no labour market impact assessment is needed any more; the online form still asks for one, so IRCC tells candidates to answer yes and type 00000 as the number. Every profile is being recalculated (the department says that could take up to two weeks), and no invitations are going out meanwhile. Under the announcement, its.preet_94 asked, in Punjabi, “Bro Truck drivers da ki banuga Alberta vich ji?” (“what will happen to truck drivers in Alberta?”). The last round before the pause, on October 28, invited 150 transport workers at 477 points.

228,724 profiles sat in the Express Entry pool on October 25. Of those, 134,617 scored between 401 and 500, and only about 9 percent scored above 500. Every round this year has been category- or program-specific. No all-program draw was held in 2026. The Canadian Experience Class round on October 15 needed 519 points. The French-language round on October 27 took 5,000 people at 407. “Express entry CEC da kine loka nu aayega” (in Punjabi: “what will Express Entry CEC bring for people?”), wrote krishna.khurana99 on Instagram. The 100,000 federal places for 2027 will be rationed among that pool by the rewritten points, and the plan sets no draw schedule.

Up to 200,000 temporary residents Canada plans to move to permanent residence by the end of 2027, up to 100,000 workers, through Express Entry and the provincial programs, and up to 100,000 in a humanitarian cohort. The budget does not say whether they count inside the 380,000. CIC News counts them on top and reaches 622,000 new permanent residents in 2027; the Conservative opposition puts the real total at 580,000. IRCC told the CBC the older one-time initiatives are “not counted toward the permanent resident target,” but it has not said whether the same applies to the 200,000.

The promise the plan is built around (temporary residents below 5 percent of the population by the end of 2027) is met in part by changing people’s status rather than by anyone leaving. Under one Instagram post about the plan, s_7nsari wrote, “Good keep em flat .” The parliamentary budget officer calculated that without the 148,000 one-time transitions from last year’s budget, temporary residents would stand at 5.3 percent at the end of 2027, above the target. The transitions, the office wrote, “reduce the NPR population without affecting the number of people present in Canada.” The same mechanism now extends to the 200,000. Almost half the people admitted as permanent residents in 2025, 48 percent, were already in Canada as students or temporary workers.

New temporary resident arrivals have already fallen from 971,815 in 2023 to 686,010 in 2024, and the plan sets 370,000, 62 percent below 2023. The figure counts only new arrivals: permit extensions for people already in Canada do not count toward it. New international student arrivals fell 71 percent between January and August 2026 and the same months of 2024.

The backgrounder promises the new measure will “significantly help bring wait times closer to 12 months for the spouse or common-law partner class.” The plan cuts spouses, partners and children from 69,000 places to 66,000, the whole of the family stream’s 3,000-place cut landing on them. Parents and grandparents hold at 15,000. The humanitarian cohort of the 200,000 includes spouses, common-law partners and dependent children of Canadians and permanent residents already living in Canada. French-speaking admissions outside Quebec rise from 31,825 in 2027 to 40,200 in 2029, 8,375 more places and 26 percent, while the total stays flat.

Budget 2026 sets aside $302.3 million over four years to process the 200,000 transitions ($1,511.50 a person). A further $151.5 million over five years goes to reforming the temporary foreign worker program.