IRCC processing times: visitor visas, study permits and work permits, on one page.

For most temporary residence streams, the figure is how long it took IRCC to finalize most complete applications it decided in the recent past. It is a description of what already happened to other people’s files. Your file joins the queue today, and the queue IRCC is working through when it reaches yours may be shorter or longer than the one those earlier files went through.

The clock starts on the day IRCC receives a complete application and stops at the decision. Anything you do before that, and anything IRCC asks you for after that, sits outside the figure: giving biometrics, the courier legs between a visa application centre and the office, a medical exam, and the time you take to answer a request for documents. If your application was incomplete, it is returned rather than refused, and the clock never started.

Study permit extensions and work permit extensions are not measured the same way as the rest of the page. IRCC counts the applications already in that inventory and estimates how long it will take to reach a file submitted now. That is why those two tiles show how many people are waiting, and why they move with volume rather than with history. A policy change or a graduation season lands in these queues first. Today they read 9 weeks for study permit extensions and 13 weeks for work permit extensions.

If you applied to extend before your permit expired, you keep your status and your conditions while IRCC decides, which is what the regulations call maintained status. That is the practical reason the extension figure matters less than people fear and the deadline to apply matters more. How extensions work in practice is covered on our study permit and work permit pages.

Applications from outside Canada are processed across a network of offices, each with its own inventory and its own mix of files. Verifying employment letters, bank records and civil documents takes a different amount of effort in different places, and the proportion of files that need a second look varies too. The table above makes that spread visible in a way the IRCC page, one country at a time, never does.

“No processing time available” and “Not enough data” are not warnings. They mean IRCC finalized too few applications of that type from that country to publish a figure it trusts. Apply as you normally would.

The same product can carry very different figures depending on where you apply from. A visitor visa applied for from inside Canada currently lists at 11 days, while a visitor record, which is the extension of visitor status, lists at 370 days. A new work permit from inside Canada sits at 14 weeks and a new study permit at 8 weeks. These are separate inventories with separate priorities, and the right one for you depends on your status today, not on which number looks better. For parents and grandparents, the super visa is usually the better fit than a visitor visa, whatever the two figures say this week.

First, check that the posted time has actually passed for a completeapplication submitted on your date, and read your account for any request you may have missed. Then use the IRCC web form to ask about the file. If you still hear nothing, your Member of Parliament’s office can make an inquiry, and ordering your file notes under access-to-information shows which step the file is stuck on, which is usually more useful than any status page.

When a delay has gone well beyond the norm for no reason the file explains, the Federal Court can order IRCC to make a decision through an application for mandamus. It is a last resort, and whether a delay qualifies is a judgment call about your specific file. That is the kind of question to bring to a lawyer.

In our experience the delays people can control come from the same handful of causes: a form that contradicts a document, a travel history with gaps, a job letter that does not say what the application says, biometrics never given, and requests for documents that went to a spam folder. The delays people cannot control are security and background screening, medical follow-ups, and measures like the one IRCC currently posts above the form (foreign nationals living in the democratic republic of the congo, south sudan and uganda are temporarily not permitted to travel to canada). A file that is complete and internally consistent on the day it is submitted avoids the first group entirely.