Parents and Grandparents Super Visa

You miss them in the ordinary moments. The phone call that ends too soon, the birthday you watch through a screen, the grandchild growing up a time zone away. The Super Visa exists for exactly this feeling: it is built to bring your parents or grandparents close for years at a time, not a hurried few weeks.

What the Super Visa actually gives your family

A Super Visa is a multi-entry visa for the parents and grandparents of a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. It stays valid for up to 10 years, and each time your parent enters Canada they can stay for up to 5 years at a stretch. That is a world apart from an ordinary visitor, who is usually allowed up to 6 months. If the stay needs to run longer, your parent can apply from inside Canada to extend it, generally by up to 2 more years.

Be clear-eyed about one thing from the start: the Super Visa is a long-term visitor visa. It gives your parents the gift of time with you, but it is not permanent residence and does not become PR on its own. They cannot work on it, and because they are visitors they are not covered by provincial or territorial health care. That last point is the reason the insurance rule below matters so much.

Who can be invited, and who can invite

The person coming to Canada has to be your parent or grandparent. You, the person inviting them, have to be their child or grandchild and a Canadian citizen or permanent resident. A spouse or common-law partner travelling with your parent can be included as their dependent, but other relatives do not make someone eligible: a sibling, an aunt, or a cousin cannot be brought in on this visa.

Beyond the relationship, your parent also has to:

• Provide a signed letter of invitation from you, the inviting child or grandchild
• Satisfy an immigration officer that they will leave at the end of their authorized stay
• Pass an immigration medical exam and meet the usual security and criminality checks
• Hold the medical insurance described below, fully paid

The medical insurance, exactly right

This is one of the two places Super Visa applications most often go wrong, so go slowly here. The policy your parent buys has to meet every one of these conditions, not most of them:

• At least CAD $100,000 in emergency medical coverage
• Valid for at least 1 year from the date your parent enters Canada
• Covers health care, hospitalization, and repatriation
• Paid in full. A quote is not proof. A policy you have priced but not yet purchased will not be accepted

Here is a recent change that helps families a great deal. As of January 28, 2025, the insurance no longer has to come from a Canadian company. It can now also be bought from a foreign insurer that is authorized by Canada's Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) to sell accident and sickness insurance. If any older guidance tells you the policy must be Canadian, it is out of date. Whoever you buy from, keep the coverage continuous: an insurance lapse while your parent is still in Canada is a problem for both their health and their status, so renew before the expiry date, never after.

Proving your income, the part that trips people up

The other place applications fail is income. As the inviting child or grandchild, you have to show that your household earns at or above the Low Income Cut-Off (LICO) minimum for your family size. You prove it with documents like your most recent Notice of Assessment from the CRA, and your spouse or common-law partner can co-sign to combine their income with yours to reach the line.

Count your family size carefully

People underestimate this number, and an undercount can sink an otherwise strong application. Your family size for the income test includes:

• You, the host
• Your spouse or common-law partner
• Your dependent children
• The parent or parents and grandparents you are inviting (count every one of them)
• Anyone you have sponsored before whose undertaking is still in effect
• Anyone you are already hosting on a still-valid Super Visa

The income minimums

The LICO minimums were raised effective July 29, 2025, climbing roughly 3.9% from the year before, so any figure you saw a while ago is likely too low now. A few of the current minimums:

The minimums rise step by step for every family size in between, plus a fixed amount for each additional person. Because the exact dollar figure for your specific family size is the thing your whole application turns on, do not take a number from memory or from an old page. Read it straight off the official IRCC income table for the year you are applying in, linked in the sources below, and match it to your own household count.

Super Visa or the PGP, and why people choose each

Families often weigh the Super Visa against the Parents and Grandparents Program (PGP), and they answer two very different needs.

• The Super Visa is a long-term visitor visa. You apply for it directly, there is no lottery and no yearly cap, and a strong application can be submitted whenever your family is ready. It gives years of presence but stays temporary, and it does not lead to PR.
• The PGP is a sponsorship program that leads to permanent residence. It is not first-come; invitations to apply are issued from a pool through a randomized intake, with only a limited number each round, so it can mean a long wait or no invitation at all in a given year.

Many families use the Super Visa to be together now while they hope for a PGP invitation later. The two are not mutually exclusive, and choosing one does not close the door on the other.