What an Accompanying Spouse's Work Permit Actually Costs to Apply For

Picture yourself on IRCC’s fee page, calculator open, trying to work out the cost of an accompanying spouse’s work permit application before you commit to a submission date. There isn’t one single line item to type into that calculator — there are three, and missing one of them is how a household’s budget comes in short.

The permit fee itself

Every work permit, spousal ones included, carries a standard processing fee on Canada’s fee schedule: $155.00 per person, as at the government’s current published rate. That’s the baseline cost of the application being looked at, regardless of what kind of work permit it is.

The open work permit holder fee explained

This is the one people miss, because it isn’t obviously a second fee — it reads more like a footnote. An open work permit, the kind that lets a spouse work for almost any employer rather than one named employer, carries an additional charge on top of the standard permit fee: $100.00. So the permit-related total for a spousal open work permit sits at $255.00, not $155.00, before anything else gets added.

Biometrics

Biometrics — fingerprints and a photo — carry their own separate fee: $85.00 per individual. If the spouse and the study permit holder are applying around the same time, biometrics can sometimes fall under a family cap of $170.00 rather than being charged individually for each person, which matters if there are two or more of you providing biometrics close together. Confirm the current cap applies to your specific applications before assuming it automatically will.

Extra fees a spouse’s application adds to a study permit file

Add it up and a spouse’s file layers roughly $255.00 in permit-related government fees onto a household that’s already paying the student’s own study permit fee, plus whatever share of the biometrics fee doesn’t fall under a shared cap. None of this includes courier costs, document legalisation, translations, or any professional fees if you use one — this is the government-fee slice only, and it’s worth treating it that way rather than mistaking it for the whole picture.

Where this sits next to the student’s own fee

Worth setting side by side: the study permit itself carries its own separate government fee of $150.00 on the same schedule. So a household running both applications together is looking at roughly $150.00 for the study permit and $255.00 for the accompanying spouse’s open work permit before biometrics — two different fee categories, on two different application forms, added to the same monthly outflow.

What isn’t on this list

This breakdown doesn’t cover police certificates, medical exams where they apply, document legalisation through DIRCO, or the cost of getting a marriage certificate upgraded from abridged to unabridged — all real costs, all outside the IRCC fee schedule itself. A full household budget for this stage needs those categories accounted for separately, not folded into the permit fees above.

The one number worth writing down

If you take away a single figure from this: $255.00 is the accompanying spouse’s own government fee load for an open work permit, before biometrics. Government fees move — this schedule carries a “date modified” stamp for a reason — so check the current published rate before you pay, rather than working from a number printed in an article.

For a wider look at what a study-and-spouse move costs beyond this one permit, browse the cost breakdowns on the Cape2Canada blog.