The Cost of Reapplying to a Canadian Provincial Nominee Program After a First EOI Attempt Fails

In South Africa, a rejected job application costs nothing but time — you update the CV and send it again. A rejected or unsuccessful nomination application in Canada isn’t free to retry.

The cost of reapplying to a provincial nominee program is a real number, and it is worth knowing before the first attempt, not after.

What one BC application now costs

British Columbia’s Skills Immigration application fee rose from $1,475 to $1,750, effective 22 January 2026 — a straightforward BC Skills Immigration fee increase, and one of the few PNP fee changes confirmed directly from an official source rather than a secondary report. That fee is charged when you submit the actual application after being invited from the EOI pool, not when you register the initial expression of interest.

What a second attempt actually adds

If that first, paid application does not result in a nomination — as opposed to simply an EOI sitting unselected — the practical path forward is registering again, waiting to be invited again, and paying the application fee again. Paying twice for a provincial application isn’t a penalty written into the rules; it’s simply what a second, separate attempt requires, in the same way a second exam sitting carries the same fee as the first.

At BC’s current rate, two attempts at the Skills Immigration stream now add up to $3,500 in PNP fees alone — and that’s before any federal cost. Once a nomination succeeds and the candidate proceeds to the federal permanent residence stage, IRCC’s own processing fee sits at $990 per principal applicant, or $1,590 once the Right of Permanent Residence Fee is included, plus $270 per dependent child. None of that is refunded because an earlier attempt failed; it is a separate expense at a separate stage. Trying again isn’t just a financial hit, either — it also adds the time lost restarting the EOI clock from zero.

Building in a margin

Budgeting for more than one PNP attempt means treating that application fee as a cost that can recur, not a one-time expense. It is worth setting aside a second fee’s worth of margin before submitting the first application, particularly for occupation- or location-specific streams where a small change in your circumstances between attempts — a different NOC classification, a different region, a different intake window — could change the outcome.

The honest complication is that most provinces haven’t published fee figures as clearly and recently as BC has. Treat any other province’s fee as unconfirmed until you check its own current application page, and never assume a figure quoted in an old forum post is still accurate — fees, like cut-off scores, move. Newfoundland and Labrador shows how differently provinces can handle this: it waived its own application fees entirely as at 5 December 2025, meaning a second attempt there currently carries no extra fee at all, only the time cost of starting over. That gap between provinces is itself a reason to check the specific stream you’re applying to rather than assuming BC’s numbers apply everywhere.

Cape2Canada’s What It Really Costs guide sets out the whole process’s expenses in rand terms, including the ones a first attempt doesn’t warn you about.