BC Skills Immigration in 2026: Skilled Worker Stream and Health Authority Stream
Eight days after 22 January 2026, a BC PNP application that would have cost $1,475 the week before now costs $1,750. That’s the kind of detail that’s easy to miss if you built a budget from an article written even a few months earlier. This post lays out how the BC Skilled Worker stream and Health Authority stream currently work, and what the cost picture actually looks like.
The fee, and the two active streams it applies to
BC’s Skills Immigration application fee rose from $1,475 to $1,750 on 22 January 2026, and an updated Skills Immigration Program Guide took effect 28 May 2026. That fee sits on top of federal processing fees, biometrics, credential assessment and everything else — treat it as one line in a longer list.
BC PNP’s Skills Immigration category currently runs on two active streams. Skilled Worker covers NOC TEER 0, 1, 2 or 3 occupations broadly, needs at least two years of relevant work experience, a Canadian Language Benchmark of 4 or higher, and a job offer meeting BC’s wage requirement. Health Authority is narrower — it’s for healthcare workers employed by a BC health authority, with requirements set by that employer rather than a fixed provincial list, and the same CLB 4 language floor.
Both streams share one condition that trips people up: the job offer must be full-time and indeterminate. Indeterminate means ongoing, with no end date built in — a fixed-term contract, however well paid or however long, does not satisfy this requirement. If you’re weighing two offers of similar salary, the one without a specified end date is the one that actually clears BC’s bar.
What’s already closed, and where semi-skilled workers go now
The Entry Level and Semi-Skilled stream — BC’s route for occupations below the Skilled Worker threshold — issued its final invitations on 10 December 2024 and hasn’t returned. So does BC have a semi-skilled immigration route today? Not an equivalent one. That closure matters most for applicants without a TEER 0–3 occupation, who previously had a viable BC PNP option, and it leaves an open question about where semi-skilled workers go after ELSS closed. If your occupation sat in that former ELSS category, BC’s current PNP structure doesn’t have a direct replacement — worth confirming against WelcomeBC’s current published streams rather than assuming a workaround exists.
The Care, Build, Innovate framing
BC restructured its whole PNP around three priorities on 23 April 2026: Care, Build, Innovate. At least 35% of nominations are anticipated to go to communities outside Metro Vancouver, a genuinely practical signal for applicants willing to consider Kelowna, Kamloops or Prince George rather than assuming Vancouver is the only viable landing spot. Within these priorities, BC also issues targeted invitations to candidates it judges to have outsized economic value — not a published points calculation you can run yourself, but a real factor in who actually gets invited.
Building the honest budget
For a Skilled Worker or Health Authority applicant: the $1,750 BC application fee, plus federal processing and biometrics fees, plus whatever credential assessment and language testing your file requires, plus the cost of getting SA documents through the pipeline in the first place. None of these figures are static — BC has already changed its fee once in 2026, and PNP rules generally are moving faster this year than in almost any other area of Canadian immigration policy. Verify the current fee on WelcomeBC before you finalise a budget.
Our free Provincial Nominee Programs guide covers how the province-by-province route works more broadly, if BC’s current structure isn’t the fit for your occupation.