Moving to Canada from Australia

How to move to Canada from Australia

To move to Canada from Australia means securing the right Canadian immigration status for what you intend to do: permanent residence to settle, or a temporary work or study permit to stay for a set time. There is no single "Australia to Canada visa"; instead, IRCC runs separate programs, and the right one depends on your profile. Australians start with real advantages. English is one of Canada's two official languages, so you score well on the language factors that drive most economic programs. Australian degrees and trade qualifications are well understood and straightforward to have assessed, and the two countries share similar systems and institutions, which makes the move feel familiar. As an Australian passport holder you travel visa-exempt to visit. Still weighing the two countries? Our Canada vs Australia comparison sets the points systems, job markets and cost of living side by side.

What you cannot do is simply turn up and stay: visiting and immigrating are different things, and the route that fits depends on your age, your occupation, your work experience and whether you have a Canadian job offer or close family already in Canada.

It comes down to two outcomes. Permanent residence lets you live, work and settle anywhere in Canada with no end date and leads to citizenship, while temporary status on a work or study permit brings you for a set time and is commonly used as a stepping stone toward PR. For many Australians the IEC Working Holiday is that first stepping stone. The sections below cover each route in turn.

The main routes from Australia at a glance

Express Entry from Australia

Express Entry is the route most skilled Australians take, and the quickest federal path to PR. It is Canada's flagship skilled migration system. You lodge an online profile, it is ranked by the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), and each draw invites the top-ranked candidates. Native English gives Australian profiles a strong language base, but age, experience and education still need to line up. Three federal programs sit inside Express Entry:

• Canadian Experience Class (CEC), for people who already have skilled Canadian work experience, for example after an IEC Working Holiday.
• Federal Skilled Worker (FSW), the main route for skilled Australians applying from Australia with foreign experience.
• Federal Skilled Trades (FST), for qualified tradespeople.

Before you submit, you will need an Educational Credential Assessment of your Australian degree and an approved English test (most Australian applicants sit IELTS General Training or CELPIP). Small differences in age, experience and test scores move your CRS more than people expect, and a provincial nomination adds a decisive 600 points. Try our free CRS calculator to see where you stand, then we help you find the points you are leaving on the table.

Provincial Nominee Programs for Australian movers

If your CRS sits under the current federal cut-off, a Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) is often the way forward. A province nominates the workers it is short of, and an enhanced nomination adds 600 CRS points, generally enough to clear recent Express Entry cut-offs, with IRCC making the final invitation. A few provinces keep coming up for Australian movers:

• Alberta (AAIP), an easy sell to Australians for its Rockies, ski country, lower taxes and busy worker streams. We are based in Canmore, so Alberta is our home ground.
• British Columbia (BC PNP), a strong draw for tech, healthcare and skilled workers who want the West Coast and an outdoor lifestyle that feels familiar.
• Ontario (OINP), the country's largest job market, with streams that pull from the Express Entry pool.
• The Atlantic Immigration Program, an employer-led route across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI and Newfoundland and Labrador.

Australians working in Canada: every route explained

For younger Australians, the International Experience Canada (IEC) Working Holiday is one of the easiest ways to get to Canada. It is an open work permit, so you are not tied to one employer, and it lets eligible Australian citizens (generally 18 to 35) live and work almost anywhere in Canada. Beyond the adventure, it is strategically valuable: skilled Canadian work experience gained on a Working Holiday can qualify you for the Canadian Experience Class, turning a working holiday into a springboard to permanent residence.

Working Holiday is the best-known route, but it is not the only way Australians work in Canada, and it is not the right fit for everyone. If you already have a genuine job offer in a management, professional or skilled role, the IEC Young Professionals category runs under the same Australia agreement, ties the permit to that employer rather than leaving it open, and suits two groups in particular: Australians who have aged out of Working Holiday at 35 but can still line up a qualifying offer, and anyone who would rather build Canadian experience on an employer track from day one. Outside IEC altogether, an employer can sponsor an LMIA-backed, employer-specific work permit, staff of a multinational with Canadian operations can move on an intra-company transfer, graduates of a Canadian institution can work on a Post-Graduation Work Permit, and a partner whose spouse already holds Canadian citizenship or PR can, on the inland sponsorship route, apply for a Spousal Open Work Permit to work while their own application is processed.

Where Australians actually land tends to cluster. Ski-town hospitality and resort operations hire heavily, in Whistler and the BC interior and, closer to home for us, Banff and Canmore, where seasonal roles regularly convert to LMIA-backed permanent positions. Healthcare pulls in Australian-trained nurses once they are provincially registered (more on that below). The trades draw on Alberta's construction and energy sector, and tech and professional roles cluster in Calgary, Toronto and Vancouver. Whichever door you come in through, the detail below on work permits and study covers the mechanics of each route in full.

IEC Working Holiday: ages, eligibility and how the Australia pool works

Australia's IEC agreement sits toward the generous end of what IRCC offers. The age band for Australian citizens runs the full 18 to 35 inclusive, the widest window IEC allows (several partner countries stop at 30), and the Working Holiday permit issued under that agreement runs for up to 24 months, again toward the long end of IEC permit lengths rather than the shorter 12-month permits some nationalities receive. Confirm both figures are still current on canada.ca before you plan around them, since IRCC reviews bilateral terms periodically.

You do not apply for Working Holiday directly. You submit a profile to the pool for the category, and IRCC holds rounds of invitations through the season, drawing candidates largely at random until Australia's quota for the category is filled; the 2026 season pool opened in December 2025. An invitation gives you 10 days to accept and then 20 days to submit the actual work permit application, complete with proof of at least CAD $2,500 in funds and health insurance covering your entire stay. Because the exact quota, the number of rounds and the timing all change each season, sitting in the pool is not a guarantee, and the live status is worth checking on canada.ca rather than assuming last year's numbers still apply.

Ageing out matters more for Australians than it sounds, because 35 arrives faster than a working holiday plan often allows for. Once you pass your country's ceiling you cannot submit a new Working Holiday profile, though a permit already issued keeps running to its expiry date. From there, three doors stay open: apply for Young Professionals before you turn 36 if you can secure a genuine TEER 0 to 3 job offer, since the same age ceiling applies at the point you submit that profile too; move onto an LMIA-backed employer-specific permit if an employer will sponsor you directly; or, if you have already banked skilled Canadian work experience, build an Express Entry profile under the Canadian Experience Class, which carries no age ceiling of its own, though age still feeds into your CRS score.

Do Australian qualifications and trades count in Canada?

This is really two separate questions, and conflating them is where Australians get caught out. Your immigration score is handled by an Educational Credential Assessment, which is straightforward for Australian degrees because the two education systems are broadly comparable. Your right to actually practise is a different matter entirely, decided by a provincial regulator, and an ECA plays no part in it. A strong CRS score built on an assessed degree does not, by itself, let you work in a regulated occupation.

For the trades, Australian certification (a Certificate III or IV in a trade such as electrical, plumbing, carpentry or automotive) is not automatically recognised. The route runs through a trade equivalency assessment from the province you plan to work in (in Alberta, through Alberta Apprenticeship and Industry Training), and depending on the trade you may then need to sit a provincial or interprovincial Red Seal exam, sometimes after logging supervised hours, before you hold a Canadian certificate of qualification. Electricians and welders tend to have a clearer, faster path than more niche specialisations. That certificate matters beyond the job itself: the Federal Skilled Trades Program accepts either a certificate of qualification or a one-year job offer, so being close to provincial certification can open a permanent residence route, not just a work permit.

Regulated professions run through named provincial bodies, and Australian registration does not transfer automatically to any of them, no matter how comparable the two countries' standards look on paper. Nurses register with the relevant provincial college (the College and Association of Registered Nurses of Alberta in our home province, or the College of Nurses of Ontario), typically sit an exam and sometimes complete supervised or bridging practice; AHPRA registration in Australia does not carry over. Teachers need provincial certification (Alberta Education's Teacher Certification, for example), which assesses your Australian qualification and can require additional coursework depending on the province. Doctors face the longest path of any of these: Medical Council of Canada exams plus provincial college registration, a lengthy process even for an AHPRA-registered Australian physician. Engineers generally move fastest, since a provincial association such as APEGA in Alberta assesses Australian engineering degrees against broadly similar accreditation standards, but registration is still a separate provincial step, never automatic. We check whether your occupation is regulated in your destination province before you commit to a route, and where the licensing timeline is long, medicine especially, we plan for it well ahead of landing rather than after.

Bringing a partner from Australia

Two different situations get confused here, and they lead to different applications. In the first, your partner does not yet hold Canadian status and you want to move together. In the second, your partner already holds Canadian citizenship or permanent residence and you are the one without status.

If neither of you has status yet, most Express Entry programs and Provincial Nominee Program streams let you include your spouse or common-law partner as an accompanying spouse or partneron the same application, so you land together as permanent residents rather than filing two separate cases. Their age, language and education can add to your household's CRS profile even though they are not the principal applicant. If your partner already holds Canadian citizenship or PR and you do not, the route runs instead through spousal sponsorship, inland if you are already living together in Canada (which usually opens a Spousal Open Work Permit so you can work while the application is processed) or outland if you are applying from Australia.

Proving the relationship trips up more Australian couples than the paperwork itself. An Australian de facto relationship, even one registered with an Australian state relationship register, is not automatically recognised as Canadian common-law status: IRCC applies its own threshold of 12 months of continuous cohabitation in a conjugal relationship, proven through a sworn IMM 5409 statutory declaration plus supporting evidence such as a shared lease, joint bank accounts and matching addresses. Couples who assume Australian de facto status simply carries over, or who spent part of the relationship living at separate addresses while dating, often need to rebuild that file against Canadian rules rather than reuse an Australian one. Married couples avoid this step entirely and rely on the marriage certificate instead. The single thing a case officer scrutinises hardest on a partner file is genuineness, particularly where the cohabitation history is short or split across two countries mid-move, so we build the evidence file, joint finances, communication history and a relationship timeline, before we submit, rather than let a thin one draw a request for more information.

Salaries and cost of living: Australia vs Canada

Compare take-home pay, not the headline number, and check a live exchange rate rather than trusting a figure printed in any guide, since AUD and CAD move against each other and a snapshot conversion goes stale within months. The occupations Australians most often bring, nursing, the skilled trades, hospitality and resort management, and tech, pay competitively in both countries, and neither is uniformly higher; our full Canada vs Australia comparison sets wages, tax and cost of living side by side without duplicating it here.

On housing, Alberta reads cheaper than Sydney or Melbourne on paper, and there is no provincial sales tax to add to everyday purchases, but Canmore and Banff, often the biggest single draw for Australians weighing a move to Alberta, run a tight, expensive rental market driven by resort-town demand and building caps, not something Calgary or Edmonton rents resemble. Our jobs in Canmore and Banff and renting in Canmore and Banff guides carry the real wage and rent numbers for that specific market.

Healthcare: Medicare vs Canada's provincial system

This is the surprise that catches the most Australians off guard. Both countries run tax-funded, universal healthcare systems with a reputation for reciprocity between Commonwealth nations, so it is easy to assume Medicare travels with you. It does not. Australia holds Reciprocal Health Care Agreements with a handful of countries, including the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Italy, and Canada is not one of them. Landing in Canada does not activate any Medicare-linked coverage, and a trip back to Australia does not activate Canadian coverage either; each system starts from zero.

Provincial coverage kicks in only once you hold status the province recognises, and it varies more than people expect. Alberta's AHCIP and Ontario's OHIP cover eligible newcomers from the date of residency once registered, with no waiting period. British Columbia's MSP imposes a wait of the rest of the arrival month plus two further months. Work permit holders qualify in most provinces once the permit is long enough (Alberta: 12 months, or 6 months with a stated intent to stay; Ontario: a full-time job with an Ontario employer for six months or more), which is exactly why IEC requires you to buy private health insurance covering your whole stay before it issues a Working Holiday permit: a typical Working Holiday permit often falls short of the length several provinces set for provincial coverage, so treat that policy as continuous cover rather than a box ticked at the border. Our healthcare for newcomers guide sets out the province-by-province detail, and our moving to Alberta guide covers AHCIP registration specifically, since Alberta is the province with no wait at all. Buy an interim newcomer plan before you fly so the flight, any provincial waiting period and the registration lag are all covered; a hospital stay without coverage runs into thousands of dollars a day.

Work permits and employer routes

A Canadian job offer, whether secured or in progress, lets a work permit bring you over and often becomes a bridge to PR. The right permit hinges on the role and employer: an employer-specific permit backed by a Labour Market Impact Assessment, an intra-company transfer for staff of a multinational with a Canadian office, or a bridging open work permit to keep you working once your PR file is advanced. Plenty of Australian professionals start on the IEC or a work permit, build Canadian experience, then switch to PR through Express Entry or a PNP.

Studying in Canada as a route to PR

Studying first is another proven Australian route to PR. A study permit at a designated learning institution gets you onto a Canadian course, and graduating can open a Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP), an open permit whose Canadian work experience feeds straight into the Canadian Experience Class. You will need proof of funds for tuition and living costs, plus a Provincial Attestation Letter in provinces that ask for one.

Family sponsorship

If your spouse, common-law or conjugal partner already holds Canadian citizenship or PR, sponsorship through spousal sponsorship may be open to you. Sponsoring a partner normally carries no income test, and the sponsored spouse lands as a permanent resident. Australian parents and grandparents of Canadians can also consider the Super Visa for long visits. Our full family sponsorship guide sets out who can sponsor whom.

What is different when you move from Australia

• eTA, not a visa. You travel visa-exempt on an eTA for visits, but settling requires PR and working requires a permit.
• IEC for under-36s. Eligible Australians can take an IEC Working Holiday open work permit, a popular first step. See IEC.
• AFP police certificate. IRCC asks for an Australian Federal Police (AFP) check covering your time in Australia; order it early, as it can take time to arrive.
• ECA for qualifications. Your Australian degree is assessed by a designated organisation so it can be scored against Canadian standards.
• Professional licensing. Regulated professions, such as nursing, medicine, teaching and many trades, often need Canadian provincial registration before you can practise.
• Healthcare and settling in. Provincial health cover, banking, credit history and driving licences all restart in Canada; we flag the practical steps so nothing catches you out.

How much it costs and how long it takes

Costs sit in two groups. Government charges cover IRCC processing, the right-of-permanent-residence fee and biometrics; third-party costs add your ECA, an English test, the AFP check, a medical exam and, for most Express Entry applicants, the settlement funds you must show. For Australians, long-haul flights and shipping are usually the largest line on top. These amounts change periodically, so we itemise the current figures for your route rather than quote one headline, and government fees can be checked on canada.ca.

On timing, a complete Express Entry application is usually finished about six months after the invitation, with provincial nomination and family sponsorship adding stages and the IEC running in seasonal rounds. Knowing both numbers up front is what makes a plan to move to Canada from Australia realistic rather than a guess. Our fees guide explains our professional fee and how it differs from government fees.

For most Australians, the largest single line item is the long-haul move itself, not the government fees. Long-haul flights and international shipping from the other side of the world routinely outweigh IRCC processing costs, so any honest budget to move to Canada from Australia has to count the relocation alongside the application.

How Wild Mountain Immigration helps you move from Australia

1. 01

   Assess your profile

   We review your age, Australian qualifications, experience and language to find the route where you are strongest, whether that is Express Entry, a PNP or the IEC.

2. 02

   Plan and prepare

   We map the pathway, the ECA, the AFP check, the language test and your Express Entry, IEC or provincial strategy, with clear, written fees.

3. 03

   Apply and land

   We build a complete application and represent you with IRCC from Australia through to your arrival in Canada, keeping you updated at every milestone.