Canada drops the 90-day clock for work permits stuck behind employer assessments
Editorial illustration — Press Pass USACanada has scrapped the time limit that let immigration officers refuse a work permit application simply because the employer's labour market assessment was taking too long, under updated instructions published October 28 by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
The updated guidance directs officers not to make a decision on a Temporary Foreign Worker Program work permit application until a decision has been made on the employer's Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) — the document employers need to show they could not find a Canadian worker for the job. The previous version of the instructions told officers to hold the work permit application for a maximum of 90 days while awaiting the LMIA decision; that limit had been raised from 60 days to 90 days on August 21, 2026.
The change applies to concurrent processing, which lets a worker already in Canada apply for a work permit while the employer's LMIA application is still pending. To qualify, the worker's existing permit must expire in two weeks or less, and the employer must have submitted the LMIA with enough lead time that it could reasonably have been expected to be processed before that expiry. Workers who apply before their permit expires benefit from maintained status, allowing them to keep working under their existing permit's conditions until a decision is made on the extension.
For workers caught in processing backlogs, the practical effect is that a slow LMIA can no longer by itself kill the work permit application — though the permit itself is still not guaranteed, and still depends on the LMIA outcome and the worker meeting all other requirements.
Sources: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, updated guidance (Oct 28, 2026); CIC News (Oct 28, 2026).
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