What It Costs Firmly to Restore One Family Member's Status While Everyone Else's Stays Valid

Day zero: a permit quietly lapses. It’s rarely the whole family at once — usually it’s one person whose renewal paperwork slipped, whose employer was slow to confirm details, or who simply misjudged how long processing would take. Restoring one family member’s status in Canada while everyone else’s documents stay perfectly valid is a genuinely common scenario, and the cost of fixing it depends entirely on which type of status lapsed.

The window: act before it closes. There’s a limited period after status lapses during which restoration is actually possible — after that, the option disappears and the situation becomes far more serious. Because that cutoff is one of the fastest-moving details in immigration processing, confirm the current deadline directly on IRCC’s site the moment a lapse is discovered, rather than assuming there’s more time than there actually is.

The decision point: which lane applies. Restoration isn’t one flat fee — it depends on what kind of status the family member held before it lapsed, and that’s where the cost timeline actually diverges:

• Restoring status as a visitor costs $246.25 — a single fee, with no separate permit issued alongside it.
• Restoring status as a worker costs $401.25, made up of the $246.25 restoration fee plus a further $155.00 work permit fee.
• Restoring status as a student costs $396.25, made up of the same $246.25 restoration fee plus a $150.00 study permit fee.

Restore status as a worker versus a visitor cost comparison makes the pattern obvious: the base $246.25 restoration charge is constant across all three, and what changes is whether a new permit has to be issued on top of it. A worker or student is paying for both the restoration itself and a fresh permit; a visitor is only paying for the restoration.

The part families find genuinely reassuring: it’s individual, not collective. One family member’s permit lapsing while the others stay valid doesn’t put the rest of the household’s status at risk. Each person’s immigration status is assessed and held independently — a spouse’s valid work permit, a child’s valid study permit, or another family member’s permanent resident status isn’t affected by one person’s restoration process running in parallel. The family doesn’t need to treat this as a household-wide emergency; it’s a contained, individual fix.

The follow-through: budgeting the right total. Status restoration fees for a Canadian family should be planned per affected person, using whichever of the three figures above matches their actual status type — not assumed to be a single flat number across the household. A family with one lapsed worker and one lapsed student, for instance, would be looking at $401.25 plus $396.25, not a single shared restoration cost.

The caveat that matters most: these are federal processing fees only, and they change. Before relying on any of these numbers for a real restoration decision, confirm the current amounts on IRCC’s own fee schedule, and if the lapse happened close to or past any deadline, get advice from a licensed RCIC or immigration lawyer immediately — timing is the one variable in this situation that a fee table alone can’t tell you enough about.