Rural Community Immigration Pilot

Your job offer has to come from an approved employer in one of the 14 communities. You will find the full list on the official rural pilot page.

Yes. To apply for permanent residence through this pilot, you need a valid offer from an employer approved for the pilot in that community. Only an offer from one of these approved employers counts, so it's worth asking the employer to confirm they're approved for the pilot before you plan your move around the job.

The Agri-Food Pilot closed on 14 May 2025. It tried out a new way to answer the worker needs of Canada's agriculture and agri-food sector. Its main requirements are laid out here.

To qualify, an applicant had to meet all of the following:

• a qualifying job offer or a recognized education credential, with one of the two if you were applying from inside Canada and both if you were applying from outside
• eligible Canadian work experience
• a minimum score in English or French
• enough settlement money, in some cases

Applicants needed at least one year of full-time Canadian work experience in non-seasonal jobs within the previous three years, totalling at least 1,560 hours. That experience had to come from one or more qualifying occupations in an approved industry.

Those hours could be spread over several qualifying occupations and several employers. Taken together, they had to cover at least 12 months, and putting in longer weeks did not shrink that stretch.

The work had to be done under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program, with a work permit issued for at least 12 months based on a labour market impact assessment (LMIA). An LMIA is the approval an employer gets before hiring a foreign worker. If you had moved to an open work permit after first working on a Temporary Foreign Worker Program permit, that earlier time might still have counted.

Applicants had to show this experience with:

• a job letter from the employer
• a reference letter from the employer or the union, with a union letter only where a union was in place
• a T4 slip
• pay stubs

Whether you needed a job offer, an education credential or both came down to your place of residence at the time of your application. Applicants living in Canada could pick the job offer route or the education route. Applicants outside Canada had to satisfy both.

The job offer had to be genuine. That meant it filled a real need for the employer, the employer was actively involved in the business you'd work in, and the employer could actually keep the promises in the offer.

For schooling completed abroad, applicants turned to an ECA. An educational credential assessment, or ECA, is used to prove that a degree, diploma or certificate earned outside Canada is valid. The report needed to be under five years old on the day the application was made. The original report also could not predate the day the organization received its approval to write these reports.

Five organizations were approved to write these reports:

• the Comparative Education Service, run by the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies
• the International Credential Assessment Service of Canada
• World Education Services
• the International Qualifications Assessment Service
• the International Credential Evaluation Service

For now, the International Qualifications Assessment Service cannot issue a report saying a completed foreign high school credential falls below the Canadian high school level.

Applicants had to show their skill in English or French. In English, the bar was a level 4 score under Canada's language benchmark system; in French, it was the matching level on the French version of that scale. Canada uses these benchmarks to measure how well a person handles a language.

Test results had to be less than 2 years old at the time you sent in your application. The two years ran from the day the results arrived.

Most applicants had to prove they had enough money to settle. The amount had to cover the applicant plus any family members, including family members who were staying behind.

Applicants holding a valid work permit and working in Canada at the time they applied were exempt from this proof.