Ottawa Changes Immigration Rules to Allow Express Entry for ‘High Wage’ Workers

The federal government is adding new express entry points for some permanent residency applicants in “high-wage” jobs, according to Immigration Minister Lena Diab.

“These changes will help us identify, attract and retain the skilled newcomers who are best positioned to succeed in Canada, while making the Express Entry system more targeted and responsive to our labour market needs,” Diab said in an Oct. 16 statement.

The government will also remove the requirement for employers to obtain a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) for qualifying job offers used to earn the new points. An LMIA assesses the potential impact of hiring a foreign worker on the Canadian labour market, and requires employers to demonstrate that they have made efforts to recruit Canadian citizens or permanent residents.

Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) will continue to assess job offers to “confirm they are genuine and meet program requirements, with measures in place to protect against fraud,” according to a government press release.

The policies will take effect on Nov. 3, and will apply to applicants who already have Canadian work experience, or who have a qualifying job offer in a high-wage field.

Under the new rules, an occupation is considered high-wage if its median wage is at least 1.3 times the overall workforce’s median-wage benchmark. The government divides eligible occupations into three wage tiers: at least 1.3 times, 1.5 times or twice the benchmark. The applicable tier determines how many additional points candidates can receive.

The Canada Job Bank currently lists the national median hourly wage as $55.03.

The federal government lists dozens of eligible occupations, including senior government managers, mining and petroleum engineers, veterinarians, lawyers and judges, physicists, data scientists, physiotherapists, and architects.

IRCC says it may take up to two weeks to recalculate points in existing express entry profiles and that invitations to apply for permanent residency will be paused during that period.

In December 2025, Ottawa announced new immigration measures aimed at attracting medical doctors, including a dedicated express entry category for doctors with Canadian work experience.

Then in February 2026, the government announced new and renewed express entry categories to prioritize candidates with skills and experience in health care, research, transportation, education, and other fields.

Conservative MP and immigration critic Michelle Rempel Garner said on Sept. 30 that her party would oppose efforts to increase immigration levels in Canada. She said the Conservatives would push for “major decreases of immigration levels,” arguing that the government was “allowing too many people in too fast for housing, health care, and jobs to keep up.”

Rempel Garner was responding to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s comments in a September interview with The New York Times, in which he said a post-pandemic “surge in demand” for immigrants had strained Canada’s health care, education, and housing systems, prompting the government to cap numbers.

Carney said his government had reduced immigration targets in response, but would eventually consider “some controlled increase in the population” once the system was under control.

“Now the question starts to become: When do we resume some controlled increase in the population, which is the nature of Canada. So that will happen, and we just want to make sure that we’ve got it under control,” Carney said.

Canada’s population grew from about 38 million in July 2020 to an estimated 41.8 million as of July 1, 2026, according to Statistics Canada. The agency has attributed most of the rapid population changes since 2020 to international migration.