From temporary to permanent.
The whole journey, and where you stand in it.
Sign in and claim your timeline to see your real dates and wait in every “You are here” block below.
You're already here, and you're far from alone.
Long before the ITA, there's a life being built: a program, a campus, a first job. If you're reading this from a classroom or a shift, that is exactly where most permanent residents were standing not long ago. Over a million people hold study permits right now, and hundreds of thousands more hold work permits. That is the ground the whole journey grows from, and it's worth seeing how large and ordinary this starting point really is before we follow it forward.
Who's here on a temporary permit
Number of permit holders, by permit type and program (latest full year)
Study permits
Work permits
Top source countries
Number of study & work permit holders, by country of citizenship (latest full year)
How people like you cross over.
Becoming permanent almost always means transitioning from a temporary status you already hold. Very few people arrive from abroad and land as PRs in one step. The most travelled road runs study permit → PGWP → Canadian Experience Class, one status flowing into the next. The chart below counts how many people made each crossing, so you can see which routes are well-worn and which are quieter. If your own plan follows one of the busier paths, that is a good sign: it means you're walking a road the system already knows how to process.
Temporary → permanent, by prior program
Number of people who became PRs, by the status they held first (latest full year)
The bar you have to clear.
This is the part that keeps people awake. Express Entry ranks everyone in the pool by CRS score and invites from the top down, so the whole thing can feel like standing on a line that keeps moving. The question underneath every refresh of the draw page is simple and human: is the bar rising, and does my score clear it? The charts here won't promise you an answer, but they will show you honestly how the bar has actually behaved, who is getting invited, and which lanes tend to sit lower than the general pool.
Who gets invited, by program and year
Number of invitations (ITAs) issued each year, by program · 766,380 in total across all years
Each stacked bar is a count of real invitations for that year, not a share or an average. The shape of the stack has shifted over time as IRCC has leaned more on category-based rounds, so the program that dominated a few years ago may not be the one issuing the most invitations today. If your program looks like a thin slice, don't read that as bad news. It usually reflects how IRCC chose to split its draws that year, not your personal odds.
CEC draw cut-off, recent trend
Minimum CRS needed to be invited in each CEC round (recent draws, a score, not a count)
Each point is the cut-off from one CEC round, so this line is the bar itself, moving in real time. It rises and falls with how many invitations IRCC issues and how large the pool is that week, which is why a single high draw shouldn't be read as a verdict on your chances. Watch the trend rather than any one dot. If you're a few points under a recent cut-off, the honest read is “keep improving your profile,” not “give up.”
Latest cut-off by draw category
Most recent CRS cut-off in each draw category (a score, not a count) with the draw date
CRS score bands of invited candidates
Number of candidates invited in each CRS score band (all years, counts rounded to the nearest 5)
How long it really takes.
The wait is the hardest part, so we'll be honest about it from two directions at once. On one side is what real applicants in the community actually lived through, the median gap between AOR and eCOPR for people who shared their timelines. On the other is what IRCC's own throughput, the raw count of COPRs it issues, says about how fast the queue in front of you is clearing. One is lived experience, the other is machinery. Neither is a promise, and reading them together is far more honest than trusting a single number from either.
AOR to eCOPR: community timelines
Median days from AOR to eCOPR across 627 shared community timelines
COPRs issued: IRCC throughput
Number of eCOPRs IRCC issues per month
COPR throughput data arriving soon.
Who crosses the finish line.
If you're deep in the wait, it can feel like Express Entry is the whole world. It isn't. It is one important channel inside a much larger picture of how people become permanent residents, and seeing the bigger frame can be steadying. Below is where EE sits within all permanent residence, and the occupations that land most often. One honesty note we take seriously: Express Entry (C) sits inside economic PR, which sits inside all PR (F). These are nested groups, not separate buckets, so the figures never add up to a single total, and we never pretend they do.
Express Entry within all PR landings, by year
Number of people admitted as PRs each year · Express Entry: 1,046,265 · all PR: 3,996,335 (all years; EE is a subset of all PR, so these don't sum)
Express Entry PR
All PR
Top occupations of people landing as PRs
Number of new PRs admitted in each occupation (2026), counts rounded to the nearest 5
Where you'll put down roots.
It's easy to picture PR as the finish line, but for most people it's really the start of the settled part. The journey continues into a city, a neighbourhood, a community that slowly starts to feel like home, and for many, citizenship a few years on. This last act steps back from deadlines and cut-offs to show where people who make this journey actually put down roots, and roughly when the door to citizenship tends to open.
Where new PRs settle
Number of new permanent residents, by the destination city they named (counts rounded to the nearest 5)
New Canadian citizens
Number of citizenship grants per year
Citizenship grant figures arriving soon.
The whole picture, honestly. A gift back to the community.
This community built a spreadsheet that helped thousands feel less alone. Trends is the next step: taking that lived experience and every dataset Canada publishes, and turning it into the clearest, most useful map of the journey we can honestly draw, so the next person doesn't have to figure it out on their own.
- 01Official is labelled official; community is labelled community. You always know whose number you're reading.
- 02We connect datasets as narrative, never as fabricated joins. No invented conversion rates, no false precision.
- 03Rounded and suppressed data stays rounded. Estimates say "estimate." A projection is never a promise.
- 04The personal layer is yours. "You are here" reflects your real, claimed timeline. Only you see it.
Source: IRCC — IRCC: Express Entry invitations (ITAs). Data through 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: operational processing (COPRs issued, new-citizen grants). View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: Express Entry permanent residents. Data through Apr 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: transitions from temporary to permanent residence. Data through Apr 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: study-permit holders. Data through Apr 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: permanent-resident admissions (all programs). Data through Apr 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada
Source: IRCC — IRCC: work-permit holders. Data through Apr 2026 · published 2026-06-16 View on open.canada.ca → · Open Government Licence – Canada