Removed Arranged-Employment Points and the 2026 Proposal Surely to Bring Back a High-Wage Version
Back in South Africa, a job offer changes almost everything about how a work visa gets structured — it is usually the whole reason a permit exists. Express Entry used to treat a Canadian job offer the same way, worth real points on the scoreboard. Since 25 March 2025 that has not been true, and understanding arranged employment points removed and 2026 proposal talk is now part of reading Express Entry properly.
Here is what actually happened. On 25 March 2025, IRCC stripped the Comprehensive Ranking System bonus for a qualifying job offer: 200 points for a senior-management role, 50 points for other skilled offers. The change applied to candidates already sitting in the pool as well as new ones, and IRCC framed it as an anti-fraud measure aimed at the buying and selling of Labour Market Impact Assessments, with no end date attached.
What still hasn’t come back
Nothing has reversed that decision. As things stand in mid-2026, a Canadian job offer earns zero CRS points, full stop, no matter how senior the role or how generous the salary.
What has appeared is a proposal, not a policy. Between 23 April and 24 May 2026, IRCC ran a public consultation on reforming the Federal High Skilled programmes and the CRS. One item in that discussion paper is a plan to reintroduce job-offer points, but only for high-wage occupations — using an occupational wage list benchmarked at 2×, 1.5× or 1.3× the national median wage. The paper describes this explicitly as a way to bring the incentive back while managing the fraud risk that caused the March 2025 removal in the first place.
Why a proposal is not a rule
A consultation paper is IRCC thinking out loud in public, gathering feedback before anything is drafted into law. Nothing in it takes effect on its own. Turning any of these ideas into reality would require amendments to the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations and to the Ministerial Instructions that govern Express Entry — a process with no announced date attached to it as of this writing.
So if you’re wondering about the status of job offer CRS points in 2026, the honest answer is: still zero, with a possible future change under discussion and nothing more concrete than that.
What this means if you’re building a profile now
Score your profile as though a job offer will never appear on it. If an employer does approach you with a genuine offer, treat any resulting benefit as a bonus on top of your existing plan rather than the plan itself. Building your strategy around points that might return in some future, unspecified, high-wage-only form is building on a number you don’t have.
The categories that reliably move a South African applicant’s ranking today — French-language proficiency, occupation categories with real work experience behind them, a strong core score — do not depend on anyone’s employer taking a chance on a candidate they’ve never met from overseas. That is worth remembering before a recruiter’s email starts to feel like the whole strategy.
Rules like this shift without much warning, so treat this as the picture at the time of writing and check IRCC’s own Express Entry pages before making decisions based on it. For how any of this interacts with your particular file, a licensed RCIC or Canadian immigration lawyer is the right person to ask, not a blog post.
Cape2Canada’s free guides track changes like this as they land — worth a look before you assume last year’s advice still holds.