Total Cost of a Five Year Family Immigration Plan to Canada: Study Permit, PGWP and PNP Fees

“We budgeted for the study permit and figured the rest would sort itself out” is a sentence that comes up more often than it should, usually from families two or three years into what turns out to be a five-year plan. Total cost of a five year family immigration plan to canada isn’t one number — it’s a sequence of separate fee categories that land at different stages, and skipping any one of them at the planning stage is the single most common mistake families make.

Mistake one: pricing only the study permit

The study permit fee itself is $150 per person — genuinely small next to what comes later. Families who stop their budgeting there are pricing the first stage of a five-stage plan as if it were the whole thing.

Mistake two: forgetting the PGWP has its own fee line

A post-graduation work permit is applied for under the standard work permit category, currently $155 per person, plus biometrics again if the previous set has expired. It’s easy to assume the PGWP is bundled into something already paid — it isn’t.

Mistake three: assuming a provincial nomination is free

Study permit to pr total government fees very often runs through a Provincial Nominee Program stream, and PNP applications carry their own fees, set independently by each province and prone to change without much warning. British Columbia’s Skills Immigration fee, for example, rose from $1,475 to $1,750 in January 2026 — a fee that has nothing to do with anything IRCC charges and is easy to leave off a federal-only budget entirely.

Mistake four: forgetting the RPRF lands at the very end

The Right of Permanent Residence Fee — $600 — is charged when a PR application is approved, right before landing, not earlier. Families who’ve spent years budgeting toward “the PR fee” sometimes discover this is a separate, additional charge due at the finish line, not folded into a number already paid.

Mistake five: treating biometrics as a one-time cost

Biometrics get charged again each time a new application type requires them, at $85 per person or $170 for a family applying together — not once for the whole five-year journey, which is how many families read the fee the first time they pay it.

Family cost breakdown study route to pr, roughly assembled

A federal-only worked example for a family of four — two adults and two children — comes to $3,890 in IRCC fees alone once the study permit, PGWP, PR application, RPRF and family biometric cap are all counted. That excludes any provincial nomination fee, language tests, credential evaluations, medical exams, police certificates, translations and courier costs entirely — which is exactly why a five year canada immigration budget worksheet needs its own line for “everything that isn’t a government fee” too.

The fix

That’s the whole point of pricing out what this five-year journey actually costs before it starts, not while it’s already underway. List every stage on paper before the first payment is made, then rebuild the list against the live fee page before committing to a number, since every fee on it can and does move.