LMIA Application Process For Employers: Cost, Steps And Approval Rates

Strip away the acronym and this is a labour market test. Before an employer may hire a foreign worker for a specific role, the government asks for proof that suitable local candidates were genuinely sought and not found, and that the hire will not undercut local workers.

Versions of this test exist in many countries under different names, so international readers will recognise the logic even if the paperwork looks unfamiliar. What differs from country to country is how prescriptive the rules are, and this one is unusually prescriptive.

Two points surprise employers hiring across borders for the first time. Only the employer can apply, never the candidate, and the assessment is tied to one job at one location rather than to the person.

There is also a threshold underneath everything else. The role must be genuine full-time employment, which means a real weekly hours commitment rather than a nominal contract created to support an application.

The Real LMIA Cost For Employers

The government fee is the number everyone quotes. It is rarely the largest line on the invoice.

Cost item	What drives it	Notes for planning
Government processing fee	Number of positions requested	Charged per position, so five vacancies means five fees; not refunded on a negative decision
Job advertising	Number of platforms and length of the posting	Rises sharply when the required advertising window is long or the occupation needs specialist boards
Professional representation	Complexity of the file and the employer’s history	Optional, but common where the employer has no in-house immigration capability
Permit and biometric costs	Whether the employer covers the worker’s own application	A choice, not an obligation, though many employers absorb it to secure the candidate
Internal staff time	Recruitment logging, interviews, document assembly	The invisible cost, and usually the biggest one for small employers

Two rules make this table stricter than a normal hiring budget. Any attempt to recover costs from the worker, directly or through an intermediary, is treated as a serious breach rather than a technicality. That includes fees charged by a recruiter abroad, which is why employers hiring internationally need written assurances from every agency in the chain.

Fee relief exists in narrow circumstances, generally tied to agricultural work and certain in-home care arrangements. These carve-outs are specific, and assuming one applies without checking is an expensive way to lose several weeks.

Realistic Processing Timelines By Stream

Processing speed varies enormously by stream, and treating a single average as “the” timeline is how hiring plans collapse.

Stream type	Typical planning range	What explains the spread
Fast-track talent stream	Around two weeks	Designed for shortage occupations in technology and specialised skills, with relaxed recruitment rules
Seasonal agricultural arrangements	One to two weeks	Bilateral, highly standardised, and driven by planting and harvest calendars
General agricultural stream	Three to five weeks	More documentation than seasonal, less than the standard streams
Standard high-wage roles	Two to four months	Full recruitment scrutiny plus employer obligations around training and retention
Standard low-wage roles	Two to four months	Additional caps, regional restrictions and worker-protection checks
Permanent residence support	Three to five months	Assessed against a longer-term labour market view

Treat those as planning ranges rather than promises. Published averages are revised on a regular cycle and have moved by weeks from one update to the next, so confirm the current figure with the program before you commit to a start date.

The number missing from every table of this kind is the advertising period. Recruitment happens before submission and is not counted in processing statistics, which is why a stream advertised at “three months” is realistically a five to seven month project once recruitment and the permit stage are included.

The LMIA Application Process, Step By Step

Read this as a sequence, because it is assessed as one.

Classify the role by wage. Compare the wage you will offer against the published threshold for that region. Falling below it puts the file into the low-wage category, and almost every rule that follows changes with that single classification.

Check whether the file can even be accepted. Some applications are stopped before assessment, typically because the employer already exceeds the permitted share of low-wage foreign workers at that location, or because the job sits in a region where processing has been suspended due to local unemployment. Confirming this first costs an hour and saves months.

Advertise properly. This is the longest stage and the one that decides most files. The requirement is not simply to post a job, but to post it on the specified national platform plus additional channels that genuinely reach qualified local candidates, for the full consecutive period, without gaps.

Document every applicant. Record who applied, who was interviewed, and precisely why each local candidate was not selected. Vague reasons, or reasons that look like a preference for a foreign hire, are the single most common weakness in an otherwise strong file.

Prepare the retention and training commitments where required. Higher-wage applications generally require a plan explaining how the employer will develop local talent and reduce reliance on foreign hiring over time. If you have made such commitments before, expect to be asked what came of them.

Submit and pay. The application, supporting documents and fee go in together. Inconsistency between the form and the documents is treated as a credibility problem, not a clerical one.

Keep recruiting. At least one advertising channel normally has to stay live until the decision arrives. Taking the posting down early is a self-inflicted refusal.

Pass the decision to the worker. The employer supplies the decision letter and the signed offer, which the candidate then uses for their own permit application to a separate department.

LMIA Requirements For Employers By Category

Requirement	Higher-wage roles	Lower-wage roles
Advertising period	Shorter consecutive window	Substantially longer window, extended in recent policy rounds
Recruitment channels	National job platform plus additional methods, at least one with nationwide reach	National platform plus multiple methods, each targeting a different underrepresented group
Candidate matching duties	Must invite strongly matched candidates identified by the platform	Must invite matched candidates at a lower match threshold
Direct applications	Must be enabled and genuinely reviewed	Must be enabled and genuinely reviewed
Training and retention plan	Normally required	Not applicable
Workforce cap	None	Capped share of the workforce at that location, with a higher allowance in listed sectors
Extra employer obligations	Standard	Transport, accommodation access and insurance duties

Above all of this sits the wage rule, which is where more applications fail than employers expect. The wage must meet the prevailing rate for that occupation and region, and it must also sit inside the range you already pay existing staff doing the same work with the same experience.

Only guaranteed wages count. Tips, commissions, overtime and discretionary bonuses do not close a gap between what you are offering and what the role should pay.

What LMIA Approval Rates Actually Show

Here is the honest position, and it is the part most guides skip. There is no official headline approval rate published as a single number.

What exists is periodic open data covering approved positions by occupation, sector, region and stream, alongside published lists of employers who received positive and negative outcomes. Any percentage you encounter has been derived from those datasets by a third party, and derived figures are easy to misread for three reasons.

Positions are not people. Approved positions do not equal workers who arrived, because a separate department still decides the permit, and plenty of approved positions are never filled.

Rejected-at-intake files vanish. Applications stopped before assessment never appear as refusals, so they quietly disappear from the denominator and flatter the apparent success rate.

The applicant mix keeps shifting. When a program tightens, cautious employers stop applying and the profile of who is left changes. A rising percentage can reflect fewer weak applications rather than easier approvals.

The practical reading is more useful than a percentage anyway. Outcomes track stream, region, occupation and the quality of the recruitment record, and a well-documented file in a genuine shortage occupation sits in a completely different position from a marginal one in a restricted region. No single number describes both, and anyone quoting one to you should be able to explain how they calculated it.

Stopped At Intake Versus Refused On Merit

These two outcomes get conflated constantly, and they call for completely different responses.

	Stopped before assessment	Refused after assessment
What happened	The file was closed without a labour market review	The file was reviewed and did not meet the standard
Common triggers	Workforce cap exceeded, restricted region, employer ineligibility	Wage below the required level, weak recruitment evidence, costs passed to the worker
Fee outcome	Generally not returned	Not returned
Sensible next move	Change the stream, the location, or wait for the restriction list to be revised	Fix the underlying evidence problem before refiling anything

Regional restrictions are reviewed periodically rather than fixed permanently. An employer blocked in one quarter can become eligible in the next without changing a single thing about the job, which is why timing a resubmission matters as much as improving it.

After A Positive Decision, The Clock Speeds Up

A positive assessment has a limited validity period, and the permit application has to be submitted before it lapses. That window is shorter in practice than it looks on paper.

Candidates abroad often need police certificates, medical examinations and document translations, and those can take weeks in some countries. Employers who wait for the decision before telling the candidate to start gathering paperwork routinely lose a third of the window.

The recommended employment duration attached to the assessment is also not the final word. The immigration authority sets the actual permit expiry, and it can be shorter than the employer expected.

Your Next Steps

• Price the whole hire, not the fee. Add advertising, professional help, staff time and any permit costs you plan to absorb, then decide whether the role justifies it.
• Run the eligibility check before spending anything. Confirm the location is not restricted and that your existing workforce mix leaves room for the hire.
• Book the advertising window first. Count backwards from the intended start date through recruitment, assessment and permit processing, then add a buffer.
• Verify the wage twice. Check it against the published rate for the occupation and region, then against what you already pay your own team in that role.
• Build the evidence file as you go. Dated screenshots, platform records, applicant logs, interview notes and written non-selection reasons, saved as you collect them rather than reconstructed later.
• Audit your recruitment chain abroad. Get written confirmation from every agency that no fee of any kind is charged to candidates.
• Brief the candidate early. Send the document checklist before the decision arrives so the validity window is not spent waiting on paperwork.
• Confirm the current rules on the day you file, since thresholds, caps, advertising periods and restricted-region lists are all revised on published cycles.

Frequently Asked Questions