Canada's Immigration Levels Plan, Explained: Where the 380,000 Comes From
380,000. That’s how many immigrants Canada plans to admit as permanent residents in 2026 — and it’s the single document that decides how many Express Entry invitations go out and how competitive your file needs to be. Almost nobody reads it. Here’s the Canada immigration levels plan explained.
What the plan actually is
Every year, IRCC publishes a multi-year Immigration Levels Plan setting targets for how many people will be admitted as permanent residents, broken down by category. The current one covers 2026 through 2028, released 5 November 2025 and last updated on canada.ca on 22 June 2026. It sets 380,000 as the overall planned admissions figure for each of 2026, 2027 and 2028, with an official range of 350,000 to 420,000. One recurring question — is the levels plan revised every year — has a simple answer: yes, targets for the later two years are notional and get confirmed or adjusted annually.
Who the 380,000 is for
Economic immigration is the largest slice by a wide margin: 63% of total admissions in 2026, rising to 64% in 2027 and 2028. Within that, Federal High Skilled — the Express Entry streams FSW, FST and CEC — is targeted at 109,000 for 2026, Provincial Nominee Program admissions at 91,500, the Atlantic Immigration Program at 4,000, and federal economic pilots at 8,175. Family class sits at 84,000 for 2026, and refugees and protected persons at 49,300. Even with economic immigration dominating the headlines, it’s still under two-thirds of the total.
The distinction that trips people up
This is where a lot of published content gets it wrong. The 91,500 PNP figure above is an admissions target — the number of people expected to land as permanent residents through provincial nominee programs in 2026, principal applicants plus their spouses and children. It is not the same as a nomination allocation, which counts how many nomination certificates provinces can actually issue that year for principal applicants only — those usually convert into landings a year or more later.
IRCC does not publish one national nomination-allocation total. Each province publishes its own figure on its own timeline, and several hadn’t published a 2026 number at all as of the most recent check. On top of provinces’ individual allocations, IRCC reserved 10,000 supplemental nomination spaces for 2026: 5,000 for provinces to nominate licensed doctors, and 5,000 to boost Francophone immigration outside Quebec. Never read 91,500 as “how many nominations provinces will issue this year” — those are different numbers measuring different things entirely.
What it means for draw sizes
The plan sits upstream of every Express Entry round. When IRCC sets 109,000 as the Federal High Skilled target, that ceiling shapes how many CEC, FSW and FST invitations go out across the year, and how the category-based draws get allocated. A tighter target in a future year means fewer invitations at the same CRS cut-off; a looser one means more. Reading the plan doesn’t tell you your odds, but it explains why draw volumes shift year to year in ways that feel arbitrary from inside the pool.
Where to check the numbers yourself
As for where to read the Canada immigration levels plan, IRCC publishes it and its supplementary tables on canada.ca under the corporate and mandate section, and revises the page periodically. Treat any levels-plan figure you read elsewhere, including this one, as a snapshot rather than a fixed fact, and check the live page before building a decision around it.
Our free Express Entry Explained guide walks through the points system and the three federal programmes these targets apply to, from zero.