If you have been building your Express Entry profile over the past year, you may have heard rumblings that the system is about to change. Those rumblings are real. In 2026, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) put forward the most significant rethink of Express Entry since the system launched in 2015 — a proposal that could reshape who gets invited to become a permanent resident and why.

At Kabir & Alam, we have been following these developments closely so our clients are not caught off guard. Here is a clear, jargon-free look at what is being    proposed, where things stand right now, and what you can do today to protect your plans.

What is actually being proposed

Right now, Express Entry manages three separate federal programs: the Federal Skilled Worker Program, the Canadian Experience Class, and the Federal Skilled Trades Program. Each has its own eligibility rules, which is part of why the system can feel confusing.

IRCC has proposed retiring all three and folding them into a single, unified pathway with one set of entry requirements. Under the proposal, every applicant would need to meet the same baseline: at least a high school diploma or its equivalent (verified through an Educational Credential Assessment), language ability at roughly Canadian Language Benchmark 6, and one year of skilled work experience in a TEER 0 to 3 occupation, gained either in Canada or abroad.

The bigger change is to how candidates are ranked. IRCC wants to overhaul the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) so that it rewards earning potential and genuine job offers more heavily. The centrepiece is a proposed “high-wage occupation factor” that would award extra points to candidates working in — or holding a job offer for — occupations that pay well above the national median wage. The proposal floats bonus points for jobs paying roughly 1.3, 1.5, or 2 times the median wage, with the official wage data drawn from Statistics Canada and the federal Job Bank.

This also signals the return of points for a job offer. Those points were removed in 2025 to discourage the buying and selling of labour market documents. The new approach would bring job-offer points back, but tie them to wage levels rather than offering them across the board.

Why Canada is moving in this direction

The thread running through every part of the proposal is a deliberate shift toward selecting newcomers based on their predicted economic contribution. IRCC’s own research points to language ability, earnings history, and occupation-level wages as among the strongest predictors of how well a newcomer will do in the job market after arriving.

This is happening against a backdrop of tighter numbers. Canada’s Immigration Levels Plan sets permanent residence targets at 380,000 for 2026 and 365,000 for 2027 — lower than in recent years. With fewer spots available, the government appears to want each invitation to go to candidates it believes will integrate quickly and earn competitive wages.

Who could gain, and who could lose

No final scoring formula has been published, so this is informed reading of the proposal rather than certainty. That said, the direction is clear enough to make some general observations.

Candidates likely to benefit include those already working in higher-wage skilled roles in Canada, people with strong language scores, and applicants holding legitimate job offers in well-paid occupations. Workers in fields tied to current labour shortages may also continue to do well through category-based draws, which IRCC plans to keep using.

Candidates who may find themselves at a disadvantage include those whose strength was simply having Canadian work experience in a lower-paid role, and some early-career professionals — including certain graduate students and entry-level specialists — whose long-term earning potential is high but whose current wages sit below the median. If the system rewards present-day wages, strong futures may not count for as much as they once did.

Is this happening right now?

This is the most important point: these are proposals, not law. IRCC ran a public consultation that closed on May 24, 2026, and is now reviewing the feedback. Any binding change would still need to go through the formal regulatory process and be published in the Canada Gazette before it takes effect.

IRCC has suggested the full set of changes could be implemented somewhere in the range of 12 to 18 months out, though officials have hinted the high-wage factor might arrive sooner. In the meantime, Express Entry continues to operate under the current rules, and regular draws are still taking place. Nothing about your existing profile has changed yet.

What you should do now

Uncertainty is not a reason to sit still. A few practical steps can put you in a stronger position whichever way the rules land:

• Strengthen the fundamentals that matter under any version of the system. Retaking a language test to push your scores higher, and making sure your Educational Credential Assessment is current, will help you regardless of how the CRS is rewritten.
• Pay attention to your wage and occupation. If a higher-paying role or a legitimate job offer is realistically within reach, it may carry more weight in the future than it does today.
• Do not wait unnecessarily if you already qualify. If you are competitive under the current rules, there may be an advantage to acting while those rules still apply rather than gambling on where the new formula lands.
• Get a professional read on your specific profile. General trends only go so far. How these proposals affect you depends on your occupation, your scores, your experience, and your timeline.

The Express Entry system is not moving away from economic immigration — it is becoming more precise about who it invites. That precision rewards preparation. If you would like a clear assessment of where you stand and how to plan around these proposed changes, we would be glad to help. Book a consultation with our team and we will walk through your options together.