The Employer Portal Offer of Employment Number, Explained

Who actually pays for a South African to be hired on a Canadian work permit — the employer, or the person moving?

The honest answer is both, for different pieces of it — and the split depends on which route the job offer takes. Before the employer portal’s offer of employment number can be explained at all, you need to know there are two doors, not one.

Door one: the LMIA route

If the employer needs a Labour Market Impact Assessment to prove no Canadian or permanent resident was available for the role, the fee is $1,000 CAD per position requested, paid by the employer to the government, non-refundable — even if the LMIA is refused. It is illegal for that fee, or any recruitment fee, to be passed on to the worker. This is the slower and more heavily scrutinised route, and most employers filling an ordinary role won’t take it on for a candidate they’ve never met.

Door two: the LMIA-exempt route, via the employer portal

A separate category of job offers — intra-company transfers, francophone mobility, and a handful of other International Mobility Program streams — doesn’t need an LMIA at all. Instead, the employer submits the job offer through the federal government’s online Employer Portal and pays an employer compliance fee of $230. That submission is what generates the offer of employment number the worker then has to quote in their own work permit application.

Two things worth being precise about, because they get muddled constantly:

• The $230 compliance fee is the employer’s cost, paid when they submit the offer through the portal. It is separate from, and much smaller than, the $1,000 LMIA fee — one of the reasons LMIA-exempt offers move faster and employers are more willing to make them.
• The work permit application fee is the worker’s cost — $155 per person, paid directly to IRCC when the worker applies, regardless of which of the two doors the offer came through. An open work permit, where one applies, carries its own separate $100 fee on top.

So on a typical LMIA-exempt hire: the employer pays $230 once, through the portal, to register the offer. The worker separately pays $155 to apply for the permit itself. Neither figure substitutes for the other, and neither should be quoted as “the total cost” on its own.

What the worker actually needs from the portal

Practically, very little — the employer does the registering. In the end, what the worker needs from the employer portal is a single thing: the offer of employment number it generates once the employer’s submission is complete, entered correctly on the worker’s own work permit application. Without it, or with it entered wrong, the application can’t be matched to the offer it’s meant to correspond to.

The two questions this file can’t answer

Two things South Africans ask about this number honestly don’t have a confirmed public answer worth printing here: exactly how long an offer of employment number stays valid before it needs re-submitting, and the precise reasons one might not show up on a worker’s file once the employer says it’s been filed. Both depend on the specific programme and the state of the employer’s own portal account. Rather than guess, the right move is to have the employer check the submission status directly in their portal account, and to raise anything that still doesn’t add up with IRCC or a licensed immigration lawyer before the work permit application goes in.

Cape2Canada’s Work Permits & LMIA Basics guide walks through how real Canadian job offers work, and how to tell one from a scam, at no cost.