The Canada super visa, and what it asks of your family

What the super visa is, and when it is the wrong application

A super visa is a visitor visa with a longer stay attached. It is for the parents and grandparents of people settled in Canada, and for nobody else: a sibling, an aunt or a parent-in-law cannot use it. Your spouse can apply alongside you, but no other dependant can be included in the application.

The trade is more paperwork for a much longer stay. An ordinary visitor visa lets an officer admit you for six months and asks nothing of your child. A super visa admits you for 5 years, and in exchange your child has to open their tax returns and you have to buy a year of Canadian health cover before you fly.

How much does your child in Canada have to earn?

The test has two halves and the first one causes more refusals than the second. Before any income figure means anything, Canada has to agree with you about how many people are in the family.

First, the family size Canada counts

This is not the number of people living in your child's house. IRCC counts obligations, so it reaches people who have never been to that house and, in one case, someone your child is in the middle of divorcing. Everyone below is counted.

A host with a spouse and two children, inviting both parents, is a family of six before anything unusual is counted. If that host also sponsored a brother years ago and the undertaking is still running, the brother counts too.

Then, the income against that number

IRCC last recalculated these figures on 29 July 2025. They are Canadian dollars of income before tax, proved with a notice of assessment from the Canada Revenue Agency.

Two ways to meet it, and the second one is the useful one

On the first route, your child's total income meets the whole minimum in either of the two tax years before you apply. Either, not both, which is worth knowing for a host who changed jobs or had a bad year. A spouse or common-law partner can co-sign the invitation and add their income. A sibling cannot.

On the second route, your child reaches at least 75% of the minimum in the year before you apply, and your own income makes up the rest. A pension, rent from a property in Gujarat or income from a business you still run all count towards that remainder. This is the route that decides most borderline families, and it is the one almost no page written in India mentions at all.

What the invitation letter has to prove, including the family size it declares

The insurance you cannot buy in India

Every super visa applicant needs proof of a private health insurance policy on each entry to Canada. It has to be worth at least CAD 100,000 in emergency cover, run for 12 months from the date you enter, and cover health care, hospitalisation and repatriation.

The part that catches families is who is allowed to write it. A Canadian insurance company can. A company outside Canada can only if all three of these are true at once:

No Indian domestic insurer clears that. OSFI does not keep a list of foreign insurance companies outside Canada unless they are registered with it as branches or subsidiaries in Canada. An insurer supervised by the IRDAI in India and nowhere else is simply not on the list Canada is reading, and the quality of its regulation at home makes no difference to the answer.

Four more ways a real policy still fails at the counter:

The insurance rule in full, and how a family in India buys a policy Canada accepts

• a quote rather than a policy: it must be paid in full, or on instalments with a deposit down
• a broker or a claims administrator named as the insurer, neither of which is an insurance company
• coverage that runs from the policy date rather than a year from the date of entry
• a foreign policy with no statement that it was issued while the company was doing insurance business in Canada

How long the visa actually lasts

Two different numbers get confused here. The stay is how long you may remain in Canada once admitted, and that is 5 years for anyone who applied on or after 22 June 2023. The visa is the sticker in your passport that lets you travel to Canada in the first place, and it has its own expiry.

Three ceilings apply to that expiry and the shortest of them wins:

1. 1ten years from the day the visa is issued
2. 2the expiry date of the passport it is placed in
3. 3ten years from the date biometrics were last given

A shorter visa is not a shorter stay. If you are admitted for 5 years on the day you arrive, you keep those 5 years even if the visa itself expires while you are in Canada. What a short visa costs you is the ability to leave and come back on it.

Why families like yours are refused

Meeting the income test and holding the right policy gets the application assessed. It does not get it approved. An officer still has to be satisfied that you are a genuine visitor who will leave at the end of the visit, and they weigh your ties to India, the purpose of the trip, and your family and finances on both sides.

That is where most Gujarati families lose these applications, and the patterns repeat: one parent approved and the other refused on identical papers, a stated purpose that reads to an officer like moving in rather than visiting, and net worth on paper where the officer wanted money that can actually be spent.

What a parents' refusal letter actually means, and whether to reapply

Why this is currently the only open route

The Parents and Grandparents Program, which leads to permanent residence rather than a visit, is paused. IRCC is not accepting new interest to sponsor forms and is not inviting anyone to apply, until further notice. Applications already filed are still being processed. You can apply for a super visa while a sponsorship application of yours is still waiting for a decision, and you can withdraw that sponsorship at any time and apply for a super visa instead.

What we do on a super visa file

The work splits across two countries and two people, which is why families find it harder than it looks. Your child assembles the Canadian half, you assemble the Indian half, and the two have to agree with each other about a family size, an income and a set of dates.

We count the family the way IRCC counts it, tell your child which of the two income routes their tax years actually support, check the insurance certificate against the OSFI test before anyone pays a premium, and write the invitation letter so that it proves what it has to prove rather than reading like a template. Where the honest answer is that a visitor visa fits your trip better, we say so.

Jay Sharma is a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant, licence R710507, which is what allows this firm to represent you before IRCC on a Canadian application.