The Super Visa Minimum Income Requirement for the Canadian Host, Explained

Here’s a number most people applying for a super visa never see coming: it isn’t their income being tested. The super visa minimum income requirement for the Canadian host is what actually decides the outcome — the child or grandchild sponsoring the visit, rather than the visiting parent themselves.

A super visa lets a parent or grandparent visit for up to five years at a time without needing to renew status, instead of the shorter stay a regular visitor visa allows. To qualify, the host has to show income at or above Canada’s low income cut-off (LICO) for their household size, including the visiting parents or grandparents in that household count.

The threshold itself

LICO is a Statistics Canada threshold used across several federal programmes, including the settlement-funds table for Express Entry, as a rough measure of the income a household needs to avoid spending a disproportionate share on necessities. It scales with household size and is published as a table, updated periodically. Exactly what the LICO threshold for a super visa works out to in your case is something to check on IRCC’s super visa page directly rather than relying on any number printed in a blog post, including this one — these thresholds are revised, and a stale figure is worse than no figure.

Where household size actually matters

This is the part that trips people up. The host’s household size for this test includes everyone who normally lives with them plus the visiting parent or grandparent — and, notably, plus that parent or grandparent’s spouse or common-law partner if both are visiting. That’s exactly how household size changes the super visa income test in a way people don’t expect: two parents visiting a single adult child’s household is a materially bigger number than one parent visiting.

If the host has their own spouse and two children already, and both of the host’s parents plan to visit, the household size used for the LICO calculation reflects all six people, and the required income rises accordingly. Get this wrong and you’ll check the requirement against the wrong row of the table.

The income question people assume wrong

Whether the host income includes the visiting parents’ own income is a common point of confusion, and the answer is generally no — the test is built around the host’s income, evaluated against a household size that includes the visitors as dependants for calculation purposes, without treating their income as an offsetting contribution. The host typically provides a Notice of Assessment or equivalent from the Canada Revenue Agency, sometimes for more than one recent tax year, along with a letter confirming the invitation and the promise of support. Income has to be legitimate, ongoing income — the kind a tax return actually shows, rather than a one-off transfer or a loan parked in an account to make a number look better for a snapshot in time.

Combining two incomes

This is a genuinely case-specific question. So can two children combine income for a super visa through co-sponsorship? That depends on the exact circumstances and current IRCC guidance, and so does combining a household’s income in an unusual family structure. That’s worth a direct question to a licensed RCIC or immigration lawyer, rather than a guess made from a general explainer.

The honest summary

The income test is the host’s problem to solve rather than the visiting parent’s, and it’s stricter about household size than most families expect on a first read. Get the actual current LICO figure from IRCC before you calculate anything, and don’t let a generous but recent-looking bank balance stand in for what the requirement is actually asking for.

Our Family Sponsorship guide covers who can sponsor whom in more general terms — a useful starting point before you get into the specifics of any one visa category.