Common-Law Partner CRS Points: The Same Grid as Marriage, Different Paperwork
Search around and you’ll find people worried that a common-law relationship scores worse than a marriage on an Express Entry profile. It doesn’t — but the reason is easier to see in the paperwork IRCC actually publishes than in any single line about the Comprehensive Ranking System itself. Common law partner crs points same as spouse is really a question about consistency, and IRCC’s own fee schedules and rules answer it clearly.
Myth: common-law relationships are a lesser category
They aren’t treated as one anywhere in IRCC’s published rules. Look at where “spouse or common-law partner” actually appears across Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s fee schedule and program rules, and the two are named together, every time, as a single category — never split into a cheaper or more restrictive common-law tier. The processing fee for a spouse or partner is identical whether the relationship is a marriage or a common-law partnership: $990 processing plus $600 Right of Permanent Residence Fee, either way. Family sponsorship fees for a “spouse/partner” run at the same identical rate too, with no separate common-law figure anywhere on the schedule.
Does Common Law Get Fewer CRS Points?
Based on how consistently IRCC treats the two categories elsewhere, there’s no indication of a lesser status for common-law partners anywhere in the published rules — the same “spouse or common-law partner” wording carries through the residency obligation, the settlement-funds calculation, and the biometrics family cap without ever splitting into two different tracks. The permanent-resident residency obligation, for instance, lets time abroad count when travelling with “a spouse or common-law partner” who is a Canadian citizen or working permanent resident — one rule, one wording, no separate common-law carve-out.
Where Common Law Versus Married Express Entry Points Actually Diverges: Proof, Not Scoring
The real difference between the two sits entirely on the documentation side, not the points side. A marriage produces a certificate — one document, issued once, rarely questioned. Proving a common-law relationship for crs and the rest of an Express Entry application means demonstrating an ongoing, genuine partnership through a broader body of evidence: things like shared accounts, a shared address, and other proof of a continuing shared life, gathered and maintained rather than issued on a single date.
Counting a common-law partner in the numbers that matter
Settlement funds are calculated by family size, and that calculation explicitly includes “your spouse or common-law partner” alongside dependent children — even where that partner isn’t travelling to Canada, and even where they already hold Canadian citizenship or permanent residence. A single applicant with a common-law partner counts as a household of two for settlement-funds purposes in exactly the same way a married applicant with a spouse does; there’s no lighter-touch family-size figure for an unmarried couple.
The practical takeaway
Where a common-law relationship is genuine but comparatively recent, or where the supporting evidence is thinner than a marriage certificate would provide, the risk isn’t a lower score — it’s a slower or more heavily scrutinised proof process. None of that changes the underlying point: a common-law partner scores exactly the same as a spouse on the CRS grid — what varies is the evidence file behind the relationship, not the arithmetic.
That’s a documentation question worth working through with a licensed RCIC, particularly if the relationship history is anything other than straightforward.