Sponsoring a Dependent Child to Canada After You've Already Landed
A dependent child sponsorship, on its own, comes with a federal fee of $180 per child — a specific, deliberately smaller figure than the four-figure totals attached to sponsoring a spouse or a parent, and it’s worth knowing why before assuming the wrong number.
Line one: the $180 sponsorship fee
Sponsoring a dependent child to canada under the family class carries an “include/sponsor a dependent child” fee of $180 per child, according to the federal fee schedule. That’s the entire government charge for this specific route — a single line item, not a bundle of separate processing and right-of-residence charges stacked on top of each other.
Line two: the fee that doesn’t apply here
This is the part that trips people up, because it works differently from spousal or parent sponsorship. The Right of Permanent Residence Fee — $600, and mandatory for most other family-class categories — explicitly does not apply to dependent children of a principal applicant or sponsor. So the dependent child sponsorship fee canada breakdown really does stop at $180; there’s no second $600 charge waiting further down the process the way there is for a spouse or a parent.
Why a different number shows up elsewhere
Anyone who’s researched Express Entry will have seen a different dependent-child figure — $270 per child — attached to that programme instead. That’s not a contradiction; it’s a different route entirely. The $270 belongs to economic-class permanent residence applications (Express Entry, Provincial Nominee and similar streams), where a dependent child is included as part of the principal applicant’s own PR application. The $180 belongs specifically to family-class sponsorship, where a child already in Canada or overseas is being sponsored into the country by a parent who’s already there or applying alongside them. Bringing your child to canada after landing, once the rest of the family is already settled, runs through the family-class sponsorship route and its $180 fee, not the Express Entry number.
What this doesn’t include
The $180 is a federal government fee only. A family class dependent child application still needs the surrounding paperwork any sponsorship requires — proof of the parent-child relationship, and depending on the child’s age and situation, the same categories of supporting documentation any other family-class file needs. None of that additional cost or paperwork is captured in the $180 figure, and it shouldn’t be mistaken for the full cost of the process.
Where the fee ends and advice begins
These numbers are current federal fees as read from IRCC’s own fee schedule and are exactly the kind of figure that gets revised without much notice — verify the live number before paying anything. Whatever else changes about sponsoring a dependent child to canada, the fee gap between $180 and $270 is the one number worth remembering. Whether a specific child qualifies as a dependant under IRCC’s current age and circumstance rules, and what that means for a family that landed without them, is a question for a licensed RCIC or immigration lawyer to confirm against the actual facts of the case.