Hi all,
My wife, 18 month old son and I have just started our immigration process to Canada. We are at the education credential assessment stage. We are based ou of Delhi, India and are going thru an agent.
I am a hotelier and have over 16 years of 5* luxury hotel exeperice and my wife is an IT engineer with 10 years of work experience.
We are new to our his while process and are wondering for this time onwards how long would it take to get our PR and visa.
Thank you,
Abdeali
Hi Abdeali Zoomkawala,
You still have a way to go if you are only at the education credential assessment stage - that means you haven't even submitted your Express Entry profile yet
First you have to submit your Express Entry profile - this will be dependent on how long ago you submitted your educational credential assessment request (and to which agency) and if you've already completed your IELTS/CELPIP tests. From start to finish, getting both these results can take anywhere from 1.5 months to 3 months (again, depending on which test you take and which agency is completing your ECA).
Once you submit your Express Entry profile, you have to wait for an Invitation to Apply (ITA) before you can do anything else, which is dependent on your Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) Score and when IRCC decides to conduct a draw. If you have a fairly high CRS (which, right now, is considered to be anything over 445 but that could change), you'll likely get an ITA within 2 to 3 weeks of submitting your Express Entry profile (if a draw happened just before) or within a day (if you're lucky enough for a draw to happen the day after you submit your profile).
Do you know what your expected CRS Score will be?
Once you get an ITA, you have 3 months to submit your electronic Permanent Resident Application (eAPR). How quickly you can do this is dependent on how quickly you can start getting together your documents. Some documentation (such as your Medical Information form) can't be done until you get an ITA because you have to schedule your medical exam after this. Most people can get their documents collected and their applications submitted within 1.5 - 3 months, but it is highly dependent on how cooperative the various agencies you have to get documentation from are being (your employers, the agencies from which you require police clearance certificates, the authorized clinic/doctors from whom you have to get your medical, etc.). Some agencies, like the FBI for US Police Certificates take longer than 3 months though. You can do research on which documents you can start collecting early to try to expedite this part of the process.
Once you submit your eAPR and get your AOR (Acknowledgement of Receipt), the average time until you get a PPR (request for passport to give you your PR Visa) is 6 months (this is the actual processing period, in which IRCC reviews everything you submitted and determines if your application for PR is going to be approved), although some people get through as quickly as 1 month, while others are going on a year. It depends on the complexity of your case, the immigration officers who process your file, the visa office responsible for processing your application, whether you get selected for additional security screening, and a number of other things, so it's hard to judge.
All-in-all, you're looking at anywhere from 4.5 months to 1.5 years...
Keep in mind though that nothing is guaranteed; along the way, there are numerous reasons for your application to be rejected.
