The Cost of Bringing Spouse and Children While Studying in Canada
You’ve priced the tuition, priced the flights, and mapped out the first year’s rent — and then someone asks what it actually costs to bring your spouse and two kids along too, and you realise that number was never actually built. Cost of bringing spouse and children while studying in canada breaks into two very different piles: one-time government fees paid before anyone lands, and ongoing settlement costs that start the week the family actually arrives.
The government fees, one line at a time
- Your own study permit: $150
- Spouse’s work permit, if they pursue one: $155, plus a further open work permit fee for a spouse of $100 on top
- Children’s status: usually a visitor visa alongside the rest of the family, priced at $100 each unless the household group-applies for the $500 cap instead
- Visitor visa fees for a family: when everyone applies as one file, the total is capped at $500 rather than $100 stacked per person — provided the application is submitted as a single joint booking with children qualifying as dependants
- Biometrics fee for a family in canada: $85 individually, or capped at $170 if the whole family applies together at once
Added up for a family of four applying together, the government-fee side alone typically lands somewhere in the low thousands of dollars before a single month’s rent is paid.
The costs that start after landing
This is the half of the budget most families genuinely miss, because it doesn’t show up on an IRCC fee page at all:
- Before- and after-school care: commonly $300 to $700 a month, per child — frequently the single largest recurring line item in a newcomer family’s budget
- School supplies: roughly $50 to $150 per child, annually
- Winter clothing: $200 to $400 per child in year one alone, for a coat, snow pants, boots, hat and mittens South African children have never needed before
Two details easy to miss in the fee schedule
If a visitor-status family member needs to extend their stay once already in Canada, that’s a further $100 per person — a fee that only shows up if plans change after arrival, so it rarely makes it into a first-pass budget. And the $500 family visitor-visa cap only applies when everyone genuinely applies together, at the same time and place, with the children qualifying as dependants — a family that files in two separate batches loses the benefit of the cap entirely.
Why the two piles need separate planning
The government fees are predictable, one-time, and payable on a schedule you control. The settlement costs are ongoing, provincial, and start the moment the family lands — and the biggest of them, before/after school care, is a monthly commitment that outlasts the study permit itself in most cases. A family that budgets carefully for the first pile and treats the second as an afterthought is planning for the paperwork, not the actual cost of living as a family of four or five.
Putting the full picture together
That’s the honest version of what a family actually spends on this move — two separate budgets, not one. Add the one-time fee total to roughly a year of settlement-cost estimates, and that’s a realistic first-year number, not the tuition-plus-flights figure most families start with.
Treat every figure here as a snapshot rather than a quote, and confirm current fees on IRCC’s own fee page before budgeting against them.