Permanent residence in Canada

You can apply for Canadian permanent residence from India without ever having studied or worked in Canada. Express Entry and most provincial streams accept applicants living abroad, and spousal sponsorship is built for a partner who is outside Canada, so none of the main routes require you to have set foot there. What does not exist is a shortcut for applying from India. The evidence an officer wants is the same from Bhavnagar as it is from Brampton: the same language scores, the same credential assessment, the same proof of funds and work history, assessed against the same criteria by the same department. Being outside Canada changes nothing about the standard and very little about the timeline. It does change one thing worth knowing, which is that Canadian study or work experience earns points you will not have, so the rest of the profile has to carry more.

Canadian permanent residence costs you two separate things, and only one of them is a consultant. The government and third-party side covers IRCC processing, the right of permanent residence fee, biometrics, a language test, an educational credential assessment and a medical, and IRCC publishes those amounts so you can add them up yourself before speaking to anyone. Add the proof of settlement funds, which is not a payment but does have to exist. Our professional fee is the second thing, and it depends on which route you are actually filing, because a single Express Entry profile and a provincial nomination with a spouse and two children are not the same work. So we quote it after the consultation rather than advertising a number that would not apply to you. The consultation itself is paid, and it is deducted from the fee if you go ahead.

IRCC publishes about 6 months to decide a Federal Skilled Worker application, about 7 months for a provincial nomination carried through Express Entry and about 13 months for one filed outside it, about 17 months to sponsor a partner who is outside Canada, and about 27 months where that partner is already in Canada. Those clocks start when a complete application is submitted, and each figure is a median of cases IRCC has just finished rather than a promise about yours, so it moves with the queue. In practice we see Express Entry files run 6 to 12 months and provincial ones 10 to 18. The part people leave out of their planning is everything before the clock starts. Taking a language test, waiting on a credential assessment and sitting in the pool all happen first, and together they are usually the longer half.

No fixed Comprehensive Ranking System score qualifies you, because the cut-off is set by each round of invitations rather than by a rule anyone publishes in advance. It moves with how many candidates IRCC decides to invite and which category it draws from, and the gap between categories in the same month can run to a hundred points or more. So the useful answer is never a single number. It is the cut-off from the most recent rounds in the category you would actually be invited under, plus the direction those rounds have been moving over the past year. We keep both current on our Express Entry pages, with a calculator that works out where your own score lands and shows you which real rounds would have invited it. That is a more honest basis for a decision than a target score somebody quoted you.

Your spouse or common-law partner and your dependent children go on the same permanent residence application and become permanent residents when you do. There is no separate process for them and no second wait. A child counts as a dependant if they are under 22 and have no spouse or partner of their own, or if they are older and have relied on you financially since before turning 22 because of a mental or physical condition. Ages are locked at a specific point in the process rather than moving as time passes, which matters for a child close to the limit. On Express Entry there is an additional reason to look at this carefully: your partner's education, language results and Canadian experience can add to your score, so which of you is the principal applicant is a calculation rather than a formality.

Sponsoring parents and grandparents is paused. IRCC is not accepting new interest to sponsor forms and is not inviting anyone to apply until further notice, although applications already in the system are still being processed. So for anyone starting now, the Parents and Grandparents Program is not a plan, whatever a consultant with a waiting list may tell you. The route that stays open is the super visa, which we do file. It is a long-stay visitor visa rather than permanent residence, and the distinction matters: it grants no status and no path to citizenship. What it does give is time. A parent or grandparent can stay in Canada for five years at a time, extendable by two years more from inside the country, which for most families is the thing they actually wanted.

No consultant can guarantee Canadian permanent residence, and anyone who does is either misunderstanding the law or lying to you about it. The decision belongs to an IRCC officer applying the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, and no representative, licensed or otherwise, has any power over that decision or any access to the person making it. A guarantee is therefore not a strong promise. It is a promise about something the person making it does not control. What a licensed representative actually changes is narrower and more useful: the quality and completeness of what reaches the officer, whether the route chosen is the right one for your profile, and whether the case was worth filing at all. The last of those is where most of the value sits, and it is the answer people are least often given.