PGWP eligibility checker

Check your school first. It must be a designated learning institution, meaning a school the government has approved to accept international students, and it must also be marked as having programs that lead to a PGWP. Of the 1,127 post-secondary institutions on the government's list, 628 are marked this way. When a school is listed as having no PGWP-eligible programs, nothing you study there can lead to a permit.

Then look at your credential. Permit length, language score and field of study rules are not the same for every qualification: a college diploma is treated differently from a university certificate, and both differ from a bachelor's or a master's degree. Your credential is simply the diploma or degree you finish with. A polytechnic is a college that focuses on hands-on, job-ready programs. The final check is the program itself, which needs to be long enough and delivered in the right way.

The checker gives you three answers: how long your permit can run, what language score you need and when you must apply. That deadline never changes: you have 180 days from the day your school confirms you finished your program.

Your program has to last at least 8 months and be offered by a school with eligible programs. Quebec counts it in hours instead: a program of 900 hours or more leading to a DEP, ASP, DEC or AEC (Quebec's vocational and college diplomas) qualifies. DEP and ASP are Quebec's vocational (trade) diplomas, and DEC and AEC are its college diplomas. Anything shorter than 8 months gives no permit, and English or French language classes don't count either.

Certain programs are excluded no matter how long they run. A program delivered by a private college under licence from a public college, known as curriculum licensing, is not eligible in most cases. When both colleges sit in the same province, you qualify only if you began on or before 15 May 2024. When they're in different provinces, your start date must be on or before 31 January 2023.

Holding a Global Affairs Canada scholarship that requires you to return home means you can't get the permit. And you only ever receive 1 PGWP, so completing another program after a first permit won't get you a second one. Global Affairs Canada is the federal foreign affairs department, and some of its scholarships ask you to go home after your studies.

You must have studied full time in Canada each semester, except that you may study part time in your final semester. When you submit your application, you'll be asked to show that you were enrolled full time. Your study permit must also have been valid at some point during the 180 days after you finished, and you have to apply within those same 180 days.

A language test is now required for most graduates. Scores are measured in CLB, the Canadian Language Benchmark, the scale the government uses to interpret test results. If you graduated from a university with a bachelor's, master's or doctoral degree, you need CLB 7 across reading, writing, listening and speaking. Graduates of colleges and polytechnics need CLB 5 in each of those 4 areas. On French tests, the same levels are labelled NCLC 7 and NCLC 5, and the result must be recent: under 2 years old when you submit. NCLC is simply the French version of the CLB scale. The test requirement doesn't apply if your application went in before 1 November 2024 or if you finished flight school.

If you hold a degree, your field of study doesn't matter. Everyone else graduating from a university or college needs to have completed a program in an eligible field, though this only applies to people whose study permit application was made on 1 November 2024 or later. The government chose these fields because they lead to work in long-term shortage occupations. In plain words, these are jobs Canada has had trouble filling for years. Flight school graduates are excused from both the language and field requirements. They can qualify by holding a Canadian commercial pilot licence, or by holding an instructor rating together with a job offer to teach flying at a Canadian flight training centre. An instructor rating is the licence that lets a pilot teach others to fly.

The eligible fields list stays put: the government isn't adding or removing fields during 2026. Of the 2,119 program categories the government uses, 1,096 are on the eligible list. Because the list is frozen for 2026, a field that appears on it now will remain there for the rest of the year.

Where you studied is judged by your lock-in date, the date the government relies on to pick which version of the rules applies to you. It is the earlier of two dates: the day your program started, or the date on the receipt IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the federal immigration department) sent for your study permit application. With a lock-in date of 1 September 2024 or later, at least 50% of your program has to be completed in class in Canada, and any time you studied outside Canada gets subtracted from your permit length. Completing more than 50% of any program through distance learning makes you ineligible. Distance learning means courses you take online or away from the classroom.

Right now, an application made from inside Canada takes roughly 16 weeks to be processed.

How long you get depends on your credential and the length of your program.

That means a 1-year master's still earns you 3 years, while a 1-year college diploma can give you up to 1 year.

Only during your final semester. All earlier semesters must have been full time, because the permit rests on you having met your study permit conditions the whole way through. Those conditions are the rules on your study permit, such as studying full time. A single part-time term midway through the program interrupts that record.

Taking a break isn't the same as studying part time. A school-approved leave of up to 150 days may still meet your study permit conditions, so approved time off is not treated like a part-time semester.