What Happens If You Ignore Your Express Entry Profile

You created your Express Entry profile eighteen months ago, life got complicated, and you haven’t logged in since. Nothing has visibly happened. The honest answer to what happens if you ignore your Express Entry profile is that quite a lot happens — none of it visible from outside.

Month one to six — the documents behind the score start ageing

A CRS score isn’t fixed the moment you enter it. It’s built on inputs that expire independently of the profile itself. Your language test result is only valid for a limited window before it’s considered too old to rely on, and once it lapses, a profile still technically “active” is resting on a document IRCC would no longer accept if you were invited. The same logic applies to a medical exam completed upfront under the current process — IRCC states plainly that results are valid for 12 months only, and if you haven’t landed as a permanent resident within that window, you may need another one.

Ongoing — the policy underneath your profile keeps moving whether you log in or not

This is the part passive profile-holders miss most. Express Entry isn’t a static queue; the rules governing what earns points change under you. On 25 March 2025, IRCC removed CRS points entirely for a qualifying job offer — 200 points for senior management roles, 50 for other skilled offers — and stripped those points automatically from profiles already sitting in the pool, with no grandfathering for anyone who hadn’t already received an invitation. On 18 February 2026, the work-experience threshold for every occupation-based category jumped from six months to a full year. A profile built around an old set of assumptions may no longer reflect what actually qualifies today.

What decays while you wait

The blunter version of the question: does an Express Entry profile expire? Not in every dimension, though it isn’t neutral either. Age-related CRS points are calculated from your date of birth at the time your profile is assessed, so simply getting a year older while your profile sits untouched can lower your score even if nothing else about your file has changed. Work experience inside the relevant lookback window can also fall outside it as time passes, particularly for category-based selection, which draws on experience gained within a specific recent period rather than your whole career.

What to actually do with a profile you created and forgot

So: is an old Express Entry profile still valid? The practical test comes down to three checks: whether your language test result is still within its valid window, whether your work experience still falls inside whatever lookback period the category or programme you’re relying on requires, and whether the categories or programme rules that existed when you first entered your details still describe your situation accurately. None of this takes long, and all of it is easy to skip precisely because nothing about an untouched profile looks broken from the outside.

An Express Entry profile isn’t something you set up once and leave running safely in the background. It’s a live document sitting inside a system that keeps changing policy underneath it, and the gap between “still technically in the pool” and “actually competitive” can open up over eighteen months without a single email telling you it happened.

If you’re not sure whether your specific documents or work experience are still valid under current rules, that’s worth confirming directly on your IRCC account rather than guessing from a post like this one.