Immitracker vs. IRCC: Canadian Immigration Processing Time Insights, 2024 Year in Review
It has now been over 1.5 years since Immitracker began running the application processing time analytical reports for Canada! With the help of our users who thoughtfully put in their case information, we’re able to glean valuable insights regarding actual processing times for the most popular Canadian immigration programs.
For each visa, immigration program and citizenship, the IRCC provides average application processing time estimates. These official estimates by program can be found here. From the cases that get logged in the Canadian trackers on Immitracker, we noticed that reality can vary significantly from what is presented by the IRCC.
This report is a special edition that dives into all of the 2024 data we collected and maps out the processing time trends we witnessed throughout the year in comparison with the IRCC.
The programs that Immitracker reviewed are from the most popular trackers and include:
Additionally, for this special edition report, we included the annual overview of the application processing time trends for the following visa trackers:
It’s important to note that for the visa trackers, we’re only able to provide general processing time trends from the data collected by Immitracker. The government data varies significantly by country of application and program which makes it difficult to compare with our observations.
Average Processing Times Overview for 2024
We’re kicking the report off with two graphs that highlight the general application processing time differences between the IRCC and Immitracker for 2024 and highlight the processing time gap between the quickest and most time-consuming cases we observed for each program.
This goes to show that regardless of the averages, immigration really is a very individual process and you never know which bucket you might end up in!
This graph summarizes and compares the government processing time estimates for each of the programs in the left columns with the actual processing time estimates calculated by Immitracker on the right side.
The government estimates were collected approximately every month from the IRCC website and averaged out for the entire year. The Immitracker numbers were calculated based on the cases that successfully finished processing over 2024. Case timelines were counted from application submission to final approval.
This graph highlights the cases that took the longest to process for each program in the left columns and the cases that were the quickest to get processed on the right side.
The goal was to show just how wide the processing time range can be, from shortest to longest case. For some programs the discrepancy was huge!
2024 Processing Time Trends by Program
IRCC vs. Immitracker
In the sections below, we break down our Immitracker processing time insights for each individual program by conducting a month-to-month comparison between our data and the IRCC averages.
Citizenship
Last year, the IRCC has consistently been stating that Citizenship application processing is slower than what the actual user data was showing us.
Especially during the beginning of 2024, we were noticing a very significant difference between the average processing times our users were reporting vs the IRCC 12+ month average being displayed.
The averages only began somewhat matching towards the end of the year.
Spousal Sponsorship
Although Spousal Sponsorship estimates are broken down into two buckets on the IRCC website (Inland and Outland), we can notice that outside of the February long processing time blip, this program was also being processed faster than expected.
Particularly March through July and during the end of the year, we can see an acceleration of spousal sponsorship application processing times even though the government averages do not give us any hints regarding these changes happening.
Express Entry Provincial Nominee Programs (PNPs)
The government started the year off strong with the PNP applications being processed faster than they estimated until we hit the blip in May. During that month, we saw a few outlier, longer cases get completed which significantly affected the average processing time for that month.
For the remainder of the year, the PNPs have remained relatively consistent and close to the government processing timelines.
Express Entry Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSW) Program
Although it’s not displayed in this graph, we did notice a reduction in the FSW cases being tracked on Immitracker during the second half of the year which seems to mirror the government’s focus on prioritizing within Canada applicants for permanent residence.
Generally, we saw that the cases were getting processed 1-2 months faster than the government estimated for most of the year outside of a couple of blips in June and August (the only month when what we observed and the government estimate exactly matched!).
Express Entry Canadian Experience Class (CEC) Program
CEC was the most stable program in terms of processing times in 2024. The amount of new cases we were seeing tracked kept steadily increasing throughout the year (an exact inverse of the FSW observation).
Additionally, unlike PNP and FSW cases that were faster at the start of the year, CEC cases were being processed slower until March after which we consistently saw pretty much the same processing timelines being posted by the government and observed by our users.
Additional Insights
The Immitracker Study Permit and Work Permit trackers were launched late in 2023. We didn’t conduct a regular processing time analysis for these trackers throughout 2024 which limits our ability to compare our insights with the IRCC estimates for the same time period.
For both of these visas, we mapped out the processing time trends for 2024 by each month to highlight any general increases or decreases in application processing speed.
What’s interesting to highlight is that for both of these trackers, we had insufficient cases to analyze for the month of March - resulting in us leaving out the March datapoint on both graphs. Additionally, both trackers had a spike in cases that were taking longer to process completing in October. Completely different visa programs but some processing time trends seemed to coincide regardless.
If we compare the two graphs below, we might notice that a couple of their portions are very similar which seems to suggest a potential correlation between processing speeds for different visa types depending on the time of the year.
Work Permits
The work permits tracker encompasses most of the popular work permit types including PGWPs, Spousal Work Permit, Startup Visa Work Permit, Bridging Work Permit, Open Work Permit, and Closed Work Permit.
Study Permits
The Study Permit tracker included both the now deprecated SDS program cases as well as the non-SDS ones.
If you’re interested in getting a copy of our data analysis summaries, you can download them along with the infographic for free at the following link!
Looking for processing time insights for other programs? Check out the Immitracker trackers or reach out to us through our Contact Form and we can help you find the answers!
