Canada removes bonus CRS points for arranged employment from Express Entry

Additional Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) points for having a legitimate job offer—including offers backed by a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA)—will no longer be awarded to Express Entry candidates.

The Ministerial Instructions were modified with effect from March 25, 2025.

Before this modification, organised work may earn Express Entry applicants an extra 50 or 200 CRS points, increasing their chances of being invited to apply (ITA) for permanent residence (PR) through Express Entry.

All applicants in the Express Entry pool who previously received extra points for scheduled employment now have their CRS scores impacted by this adjustment.

Candidates with pending PR applications or those who have previously got ITAs are unaffected.

The withdrawal of additional points is a temporary measure, according to a news statement issued by the IRCC on December 23, 2024, but it did not specify when the action would end.

Although the provision that grants points for a qualifying offer of arranged employment has been eliminated, the remainder of the sections outlining what qualifies as such have been kept in the March 25, 2025, edition of the Ministerial Instructions.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) advises impacted candidates not to get in touch with them unless their score is still erroneous for more than a week on their CRS webpage, adding that “it may take a few days” for their new scores to appear accurately.

Eligibility requirements for the Federal Skilled Worker Program, Federal Skilled Trades Program, and certain Provincial Nominee Program streams will still be based on a valid employment offer.

This article is breaking news. As new information becomes available, CIC News will update this item.

How will this change impact Express Entry candidates?

Candidates with genuine employment offers will now show a fall in their CRS scores equal to the amount (50 or 200) they received for their valid job offer.

This implies that those who have legitimate employment offers will be less likely to be granted ITAs via Express Entry.

While their scores will remain unchanged, the scores of other applicants in the pool will have dropped, thus those without a legitimate employment offer might anticipate seeing a rise in their chances of getting an ITA.

Change to qualifying arranged employment for physicians

The IRCC also eliminated a clause extending qualifying organised employment for doctors under these revised Ministerial Instructions.

Physicians who received employment offers for less than a year were eligible under this section—29(4)—as long as the offer was from a provincial government, government agency, government-appointed agency, or healthcare provider.

Why did Canada remove valid job offer CRS points from Express Entry?

On December 17, 2024, former Immigration Minister Marc Miller first made the announcement about the change in CRS points.

Miller claimed at the time that doing so would remove incentives for candidates to “buy an LMIA,” which is against the law in Canada.

Since then, the federal government has declared that this action will “strengthen the integrity of Canada’s immigration system” and aid in the reduction of fraud.

Over the past few months, the federal government has been taking a tough stance against immigration fraud.

A compensation fund for victims of dishonest immigration consultants is one of the new measures that the IRCC suggested earlier this year to fight fraud.

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