What an Employer Must Do to Get an LMIA, Start to Finish
What an employer must do to get an LMIA is the hard part nobody softens for you: getting one takes months, costs the employer real money, can still come back negative after all of it, and there is nothing you as the candidate can do to speed any of it up. It’s entirely the employer’s process, on the employer’s timeline.
Week zero, before an employer can hire you through the Labour Market Impact Assessment route, they haven’t filed anything yet — they’ve decided the role genuinely can’t be filled locally, and that decision has to survive an advertising period before an application even goes in.
Proving the role couldn’t be filled locally
The employer has to advertise the position and document that effort before ESDC will look at the file. From 1 April 2026, the required advertising period doubled to eight weeks, and mandatory youth-recruitment outreach was added on top. This isn’t a formality an employer can rush through in a week to satisfy a candidate who’s already been chosen — it’s the mechanism that’s supposed to prove no Canadian or permanent resident applied and was suitable.
Week eight or so: the application goes in
Once advertising requirements are met, the employer submits the LMIA application to Employment and Social Development Canada, along with the job offer, wage information, and evidence of the recruitment effort.
Who pays the labour market assessment fee
The employer, always. The fee is $1,000 CAD per position requested — not per worker, so an employer hiring five people into the same role at the same location under one application pays $1,000 total, not $5,000. It’s non-refundable in almost every case, even if the assessment comes back negative. Legitimate Canadian employers absorb this cost themselves; it is illegal for an employer or a recruiter to charge a worker for a job or for an LMIA, and Job Bank carries a report-a-problem control on every posting for exactly this reason.
Why applicants should never fund an employer’s application
If anyone asks you, the candidate, to pay an LMIA fee, a “processing charge,” or a deposit to secure a job offer, that is not how the legitimate system works. Canadian regulators hold employers accountable for the actions of recruiters acting on their behalf, and a request like this is one of the clearest signs of a scam targeting South Africans searching for “Canada visa sponsorship” jobs.
Weeks or months later: the outcome
Processing takes time, and outcomes fall two ways.
- A positive assessment confirms only that the labour market test was passed for that specific role, at that specific wage, in that specific location — it says nothing about you personally. The employer still has to go on to make you a formal offer and support your work permit application separately.
- A negative assessment means the position, as advertised, doesn’t clear the bar — often because the wage or advertising didn’t meet the standard, or because ESDC judged the local labour market could fill it. It ends that specific application; it doesn’t automatically bar the employer from ever trying again for a different role.
Restrictions worth knowing about
Since September 2024, ESDC has stopped processing low-wage LMIA applications entirely in a rotating list of census metro areas with unemployment at 6% or higher — currently around 26 regions each quarter. There’s also generally a cap on how much of any one worksite’s workforce can be low-wage temporary foreign workers. Both of these can make an LMIA legally unavailable for a specific role in a specific city, regardless of how badly the employer wants to hire you.
That’s the LMIA process, start to finish, from the employer’s side — but none of it tells you whether a particular offer will clear — that depends on details only a licensed RCIC can properly assess. Cape2Canada’s Work Permits & LMIA Basics guide walks through how a legitimate Canadian job offer typically unfolds, and the warning signs that separate it from a scam.