The OINP In-Demand Skills stream: closed, and what replaced it

What the In-Demand Skills stream was, and who it was built for

The Employer Job Offer: In-Demand Skills stream was one of three streams in the OINP's Employer Job Offer category, and it did a job none of the others did. The Foreign Worker stream and the International Student stream both handled higher-skilled occupations. In-Demand Skills was the only Ontario route to permanent residence for people whose jobs sat in NOC TEER category 4 or 5: the farm labourers, the meat cutters, the construction helpers, the machine operators, the home support workers, the material handlers. Ontario described it as a stream for foreign workers in specific in-demand occupations such as agriculture and construction, and it was open to workers both in and outside Canada.

In practice it was an in-Canada retention stream. Its central requirement was nine months of paid work experience in Ontario in the same occupation as the job offer, so the typical applicant was someone already working in the province on a work permit whose employer wanted to keep them. Every 2026 draw that included In-Demand Skills candidates required the candidate to be living in Canada with a valid work or study permit. That is the profile the stream selected for, and it is why the closure landed hardest on people who were already living and working in Ontario and had built a plan around a stream that had run in some form since 2019.

The stream was a base nomination, not an Express Entry-linked one. A nomination did not add 600 points to a Comprehensive Ranking System score, because a TEER 4 or 5 job does not meet the criteria of any federal Express Entry programme in the first place. Nominees applied to IRCC on the paper provincial nominee route, which is slower than the Express Entry route and always has been. That distinction still matters under the replacement stream, and we come back to it below.

One structural point explains a great deal about how the stream behaved. Because it was tied to a fixed list of NOC codes, Ontario could steer the stream by drawing on subsets of that list: agriculture codes in one round, mining-adjacent codes in another, everything in a named region in a third. The scoring grid was almost incidental. What decided whether you were invited was usually whether your five-digit code appeared in the notice, not whether your score was two points higher than someone else's.

The closure timeline: three separate events, three separate dates

Almost every page still online about this stream collapses the closure into a single date, and they do not all pick the same one. There were three distinct events, and which one applies to you depends on what stage your file had reached. Here is the sequence as Ontario published it.

Two details in that table are worth pulling out, because they are where the secondary write-ups go wrong. First, the 30 May date and the 25 June date do different work. The 30 May amendments were to Ontario Regulation 421/17 and were preparatory; Ontario used that date to mark the stream closed on its own page. The 25 June amendments were to Ontario Regulation 422/17, the regulation that actually defines the streams, and they are what removed In-Demand Skills from the program. Sources that say the stream was revoked on 26 June have taken the date of the announcement rather than the date the amendments came into force, which Ontario states was the day before.

Second, the portal gap. Between 26 June and 4 August 2026 there was no way to register an expression of interest with the OINP at all, in any stream. Employers who had a job offer sitting in the Employer Portal waiting for a worker to register against it lost the registration but kept the employer account. That six week gap is why so many files from this period look strange when we open them: the employer had done its half, the worker had not yet done theirs, and the platform swallowed the pairing.

What replaced it: the Ontario Workforce Priority TEER 4 and 5 route

The Ontario Workforce Priority streamis now the OINP's single worker stream, and it has three routes: a TEER 0 to 3 job offer pathway, a TEER 4 and 5 job offer pathway, and a route for self-employed physicians with an OHIP billing number who do not need a job offer at all. If you were building toward In-Demand Skills, the TEER 4 and 5 pathway is your successor route, and it is the only one of the three that is.

Its minimum requirements are short. You need a full-time, permanent job offer in Ontario in any NOC occupation in TEER category 4 or 5. You need nine months of cumulative, paid, full-time work experience in that exact employment position, meaning the same occupation, employer and location as the job offer, gained within the two years before you submit. Full time here means at least 30 hours of paid work per week and at least 1,170 hours across a 12-month period. You need Canadian Language Benchmark 4 or higher in all four abilities, on a test taken within two years of submission. You need a Canadian secondary school diploma or its assessed foreign equivalent. You need any mandatory licence for the occupation, legal status if you are in Canada, and an intention to live and work in Ontario.

The single most consequential change is what is missing from that list: there is no occupation list. Under In-Demand Skills, if your NOC code was not one of the codes Ontario had chosen, the stream was closed to you no matter how good your file was. Under the new pathway every TEER 4 and 5 occupation in Ontario is eligible in principle. A hotel front desk clerk, a security guard, a retail supervisor, a delivery driver: all of these were outside In-Demand Skills and are inside the new pathway. On paper that is a large widening of the door.

In practice the door is narrower than it looks, for a reason we set out in detail in the scoring section below. Ontario replaced a 46-point grid that treated all its eligible occupations roughly alike with a 130-point grid that awards zero points for a TEER 4 or 5 job as such, and further zeros for the education and language levels the pathway itself sets as the minimum. Eligibility widened. Competitiveness did not.

In-Demand Skills against Ontario Workforce Priority, rule by rule

This is the comparison nobody else publishes, and it is the fastest way to work out whether the rebuilt file you are contemplating is realistic. Each row takes one In-Demand Skills requirement as it stood at closure and puts it beside the Ontario Workforce Priority TEER 4 and 5 equivalent, with a plain verdict.

Read down the verdict column and a pattern appears. The eligibility bars that keep people out at the front door, language and education, did not move at all. The occupation list, which was the stream's defining restriction, is gone. And the work experience rule, which was already the hardest thing about In-Demand Skills for a newly arrived worker, got harder in the way that matters most: it now has to be with the employer making the offer, in the position being approved, not merely in the same occupation somewhere in Ontario. A worker who spent two years in a meat plant in Guelph and then took a better job at a plant in Kitchener used to carry that experience with them. They no longer do.

Which occupations qualified under In-Demand Skills, and where they sit now

At closure the stream ran two occupation lists. Nine NOC 2021 codes were eligible for a job anywhere in Ontario, inside the Greater Toronto Area or out. A further 47 codes were eligible only where the position was outside the GTA, which Ontario defined as the City of Toronto and the regions of Durham, Halton, York and Peel. Several of the guides still ranking for this term publish a list of about 13 outside-GTA codes, which was true of an earlier version of the stream and was not true at the end.

The outside-GTA list was much longer and much less well reported. Grouped by the work it covers, it ran to 47 codes, and it is worth seeing in full because it shows exactly which parts of Ontario's economy the province was trying to staff.

All 56 of these codes are now eligible for the Ontario Workforce Priority TEER 4 and 5 pathway, because every TEER 4 and 5 occupation is. That is genuinely good news for the workers in them. What changed is not whether their code is on a list but whether their file can compete against the rest of the pool once it is scored. The list used to be the bottleneck; the grid is the bottleneck now.

Do the old In-Demand Skills occupations still have an Ontario route?

Yes, but the route is different in shape. Every occupation named in the two tables above can support an Ontario Workforce Priority registration if the worker and the employer both meet the new criteria. The four questions that decide whether that is realistic, in the order we ask them, are these.

Is the offer from the employer you already work for? The new work experience rule wants nine months in the job offer position with the job offer employer inside two years. If you are moving to a new employer, you start that nine-month clock again on your first day with them, and you cannot register until it has run. If you are staying put, you may already have it.

Is the job outside the Greater Toronto Area? Region is worth up to 15 points on the new grid, and Toronto is worth zero. Northern Ontario is worth 15, and Eastern, Central outside the GTA and Southwestern Ontario are each worth 10. For a TEER 4 or 5 worker with few other places to earn points, the difference between a job in Thunder Bay and the same job in Toronto is most of a competitive score.

Can the employer clear the revenue and headcount tests? This is where more In-Demand Skills files failed than most people realise, and the new rules are kinder to small rural businesses. The $250,000 revenue threshold outside the larger census divisions, measured across the last two completed fiscal years, brings employers into the program who could never have met the old flat $500,000 test.

Is your language result actually a CLB 4? It has to be CLB 4 or higher in all four abilities, on an accepted test taken within two years of submission. IELTS General Training, CELPIP General, PTE Core, TEF Canada and TCF Canada are accepted; the IELTS Academic, the One Skill Retake and the PTE Academic are not. A single band below the line in one ability sinks the registration, and we see that more often than any other single defect on this kind of file.

Your application, your ITA, your nomination: what happens now

This is the section the archived page does not have and the secondary guides do not attempt. Ontario has said different things about different stages, and the difference is decisive.

One warning about the narrow case in the middle of that table. If you held an invitation to apply and had not submitted before the platform closed, do not rely on a forum post, a competitor page or a consultant telling you confidently what happens, in either direction. Ontario did not publish a rule for it. Put the question to the OINP in writing, keep the reply, and act on the reply. That is the only version of this that is worth anything if the file is later reviewed.

The In-Demand Skills requirements as they stood at closure

What follows is the archival record. It is here because Ontario's own page is on its way off the open web, because two of the pages currently ranking for this term still present the stream as live, and because anyone with a file still in the system needs to know what they were assessed against. None of this is current guidance. It is what the stream required on the day it closed.

Two of those rows resolve conflicts that persist across the pages still ranking for this stream. On work experience, the figure was nine months of cumulative full-time experience, and the window was the three years before the application submission date, not the invitation date. One widely cited guide gives one year in three; another gives nine months without the window. Ontario's own page gives nine months in three years, measured to submission, and adds the 1,200-hour floor that neither of them mentions. On education, the bar was a Canadian secondary school credential or its ECA-verified equivalent, and the ECA had to be under five years old at submission, which is a deadline that quietly disqualified a number of files whose reports had been sitting in a drawer since a previous application.

What the employer had to do: revenue, employee counts and position approval

The employer side of In-Demand Skills was where more files came apart than the applicant side, and it is worth setting out properly because most of it carried over to the replacement stream. The employer had to have been in active business for at least three years before the application, have business premises in Ontario where the work would be done, and have no outstanding orders against it under the Ontario Employment Standards Act, 2000 or the Occupational Health and Safety Act.

Two of those rules had teeth that surprised people. The employee count was measured at the specific location where the worker would work or report to work, not across the whole company, so a national firm with 400 staff could still fail if the branch in question had two. And the recruitment rule carried an explicit prohibition: Ontario did not accept domestic recruitment carried out by an immigration representative, on the stated ground that the representative stands to benefit financially if the recruitment fails, and said that an application showing such recruitment would be refused. That rule sits in the same place under the new stream, and it is a good reason to keep the recruitment file firmly on the employer's side of the wall.

The revenue test is the one that changed most for the better. Under In-Demand Skills there were two tiers, $1,000,000 inside the GTA and $500,000 everywhere else. Under the Ontario Workforce Priority stream there are three: $1,000,000 in the GTA, $500,000 in fourteen named larger census divisions including Ottawa, Waterloo, Hamilton, Simcoe, Middlesex, Niagara, Essex, Wellington, Greater Sudbury, Frontenac, Brant, Peterborough, Hastings and Thunder Bay, and $250,000 measured across the last two completed fiscal years anywhere else in the province. Ontario framed that as improving access for employers in rural and northern communities, and it does. A small operation in Kenora or Renfrew that was locked out of In-Demand Skills on revenue alone can now participate.

How the old process ran: Employer Portal, expression of interest, invitation, joint application

The sequence below is the process as it ran at closure. It matters for two reasons: files still being assessed went through it, and the replacement stream uses the identical sequence with the same deadlines, so anyone rebuilding a plan is walking the same road.

1. 01

   The employer registers and submits a job offer

   The employer registered the business in the OINP Employer Portal and created a job offer describing the employment position. That generated a job offer ID, which was the applicant's key to everything that followed. Nothing the worker did could start the process.

2. 02

   The worker registers an expression of interest within 30 days

   The deadline was 30 calendar days from the employer submitting the job offer. The registration attested to each scoring factor, and the applicant had to meet every stream criterion at registration, not merely at application. Self-appointed representatives made an application invalid, and it would be withdrawn and the fee refunded.

3. 03

   Ontario invites by score, within a targeted set

   Invitations went to registrations that matched the notice: a named list of NOC codes, a named region, or both, at or above a published minimum score. A high score in an occupation outside that round's list was not invited.

4. 04

   The employer applies within 14 days

   After an invitation the employer had 14 calendar days to submit the application for approval of the employment position. This was a hard gate: the worker could not submit until the employer had.

5. 05

   The worker applies within 17 days and pays

   The applicant had 17 calendar days from the invitation, and had to wait for the employer's submission. Documents had to prove every scoring factor claimed in the registration, and an incomplete application was returned with the fee refunded.

6. 06

   Nomination, conditions, then IRCC

   A successful applicant received a nomination approval letter, a nomination certificate and, where relevant, a work permit support letter. The nomination carried conditions: continue to intend to reside in Ontario, be employed in the approved position at the nomination date if already with the employer, apply for a work permit within six months and start work within ten months if not, stay in the position on unchanged terms throughout the nomination period, and notify the OINP of any change. The permanent residence decision was then IRCC's, on a separate application.

How In-Demand Skills scoring worked, and how the 130-point grid differs

The In-Demand Skills expression of interest was scored on six factors out of a maximum of 46 points. It was a deliberately blunt instrument, and the low ceiling is the reason the published cut-offs look so small next to the Foreign Worker minimums in the same draws.

Now put a real profile through it. A greenhouse worker in Leamington, NOC 85103, broad category 8, earning $22 an hour, on a valid work permit, eleven months into the job, with a notice of assessment showing $38,000: 4 for the category, 5 for the wage, 10 for the permit, 3 for tenure, 0 for earnings and 8 for being outside the GTA and outside Northern Ontario. That is 30, which would have been invited in the 8 April Francophone round at 25 and the 18 March REDI round at 30, and missed the four regional rounds on 23 April at 34 and 35. The margins were that tight, and they turned on a couple of dollars an hour and a line on a tax slip.

The Ontario Workforce Priority grid runs to 130 points across eleven factors. For a TEER 4 or 5 applicant the arithmetic is unforgiving, and this is the analysis we have not seen anywhere else on this subject.

The practical reading is this. Under the new grid a TEER 4 or 5 worker earns points almost entirely through three things: time in the position with the employer, the region of the job, and holding a valid work permit. Everything else is either capped low or structurally out of reach. If you can influence any of the three, that is where the effort belongs. If you can add a CLB 6 in a second official language, that is the one remaining lever worth ten points that does not require moving house or changing jobs.

The In-Demand Skills draw record: the stream's final months

Ontario published a minimum score for In-Demand Skills candidates in each round that included the stream. The table below collects them, and it is the only place we know of that shows the In-Demand Skills cut-off separately from the Foreign Worker cut-off published in the same notice. Invitation counts were shared across the streams named in each notice, except on 15 April when the round was In-Demand Skills alone.

Three things stand out. The last In-Demand Skills invitations went out on 23 April 2026, five weeks before the stream was marked closed; the 30 April round that followed covered only the Foreign Worker and International Student streams. The cut-offs sat in a narrow band from 25 to 36 all year, which tells you the pool was shallow relative to the invitations Ontario was willing to issue. And the province clearly used the stream as a targeting instrument rather than a queue: more than half these rounds were defined by a sector or a two-county pilot, not by a score. Our OINP draws page carries the full 2026 record for every stream, including the Foreign Worker minimums published in the same notices.

Can you still get PR in Ontario in a TEER 4 or 5 job?

Yes. That is the honest headline, and it is a better answer than the one available in most provinces. The Ontario Workforce Priority stream's TEER 4 and 5 pathway is a real route, it is open, and it is broader in scope than In-Demand Skills ever was. But four conditions have to line up, and no amount of preparation on your side can supply two of them.

You need an employer willing to submit a job offer in the Employer Portal and then, within 14 days of an invitation, an application for approval of an employment position. That employer has to clear three years in business, the revenue tier for its location and the headcount at the specific site. You need nine months in that exact position with that employer inside the last two years. And you need a score that survives whatever cut-off Ontario sets under a grid nobody has yet seen operate at scale for TEER 4 and 5 registrations.

The federal side is worth understanding too, because it explains why the provincial route matters so much here. A TEER 4 or 5 job does not meet the work experience requirements of the Canadian Experience Class, the Federal Skilled Worker Program or the Federal Skilled Trades Program, all of which require experience in TEER 0, 1, 2 or 3 occupations. So there is no Express Entry pool to fall back on. In the round held on 1 September 2026 the Canadian Experience Class cut at a CRS of 521, and the provincial nominee rounds on 17 and 31 August cut at 760 and 697 because those scores include the 600 points a nomination adds. Those numbers are simply not part of the conversation for a TEER 4 or 5 worker, whose nomination, if it comes, leads to the paper provincial nominee application to IRCC rather than into Express Entry at all. Ontario confirms that the Express Entry option under the new stream is open only to TEER 0 to 3 job offers and to self-employed physicians.

That is why closing In-Demand Skills was a bigger event for these workers than closing any of the other seven streams was for theirs. A skilled worker who lost the Human Capital Priorities stream still has the federal pool. A TEER 5 harvesting labourer who lost In-Demand Skills has provincial nomination or nothing.

Alternatives outside Ontario for semi-skilled and in-demand workers

If the Ontario arithmetic does not work, the question becomes which other province will nominate the work you actually do. Provinces take very different views of TEER 4 and 5 occupations, and the differences are large enough to be worth a serious look before you spend another year building Ontario experience that the new rule will not let you carry to a different employer anyway.

The comparison worth making is not which province looks friendliest on paper but which one your actual facts fit. Read the Nova Scotia Occupation in Demand guide if your occupation has ever appeared on a selected list and you would genuinely move to Atlantic Canada; read the Alberta Opportunity Stream guide if you already hold or could hold an Alberta job offer. Our in-demand jobs in Canada guide sets out where the labour shortages sit by occupation, which is the honest starting point if you have flexibility about where you work rather than a fixed employer.

When an LMIA-supported PR route makes more sense than a provincial nomination

There is a route that does not depend on any province keeping a stream open, and it is the one most often overlooked by workers whose provincial stream has just disappeared. An employer can apply for a Labour Market Impact Assessment that supports permanent residence rather than, or as well as, a work permit. Our LMIA permanent resident stream guide explains what the employer has to do and what it costs them.

For a TEER 4 or 5 worker the LMIA route has three attractions. It is federal, so a provincial redesign cannot delete it overnight, which is precisely what just happened in Ontario. It rests on the employer proving a genuine labour shortage rather than on the worker out-scoring other workers on a points grid, which suits people whose profile is strong operationally and thin on paper credentials. And it can run alongside a provincial registration rather than instead of it.

The trade-offs are real. The obligations sit heavily on the employer, in recruitment, advertising, wage setting and record keeping, and many small employers will not take them on. The federal permanent residence programmes that an LMIA supports have their own eligibility criteria that a TEER 4 or 5 occupation may not meet, so the LMIA on its own does not create a pathway; it supports one that must exist independently. And processing is not quick. This is a route to assess file by file with the employer in the room, not one to assume.

Where we most often end up recommending it is the case of a worker with a committed employer, a genuine shortage that the employer can evidence, and a scoring profile that will never be competitive on a provincial grid. If that is you, the conversation to have is with the employer, and it is about what the employer is prepared to do, not about what you can add to your own file.

Mistakes we see people make after a stream closes

Closures produce a predictable set of errors, and they are expensive because they waste the one thing a temporary resident cannot replace, which is time on a permit that is running down.

Reading a page that has not been updated.Two of the pages currently ranking well for this stream still describe it in the present tense with no closure notice at all. If you are reading a guide with no date on it, treat every requirement in it as unverified until you have checked it against the province's own page. The archive banner on ontario.ca is not a formality; it is the province telling you the content is no longer maintained.

Assuming the replacement is a rename. It is not. The occupation list is gone, which helps. The experience rule now ties you to one employer and one position, which does not. People who assume continuity register on the strength of experience they earned somewhere else and are refused on a criterion they never read.

Changing jobs at the wrong moment. If you have a submitted application or an issued nomination under the old rules, your employment is part of the file. A nomination is conditional on staying in the approved position with the same employer, title, duties, wage, hours and location, and on telling the OINP in writing if any of that changes. Moving for a small raise while a nomination is live is one of the costlier decisions available.

Letting status drift. The old stream required legal status at application and expected it to be maintained to nomination; the new one says applicants may not qualify for nomination if they are in Canada without valid status at that point. Maintained status counts, but only if the extension application went in before the permit expired. Rebuilding a plan around a new stream is worthless if the permit underneath it lapses while you do it.

Paying for advice from someone who cannot give it. Only a licensed RCIC, a Canadian lawyer or a Quebec notary may give immigration advice or representation for a fee. Recruitment agencies, employers and unlicensed consultants offering to handle an OINP file are not permitted to do it, and Ontario is explicit that applications filed by self-appointed representatives are invalid and will be withdrawn. You can check any consultant on the CICC public register in under a minute.

How a licensed RCIC assesses a closed-stream file

When someone comes to us after a stream closes, the assessment runs in a fixed order, because the order determines what is worth spending money on.

First we establish exactly what stage the file reached and on what date, with documents rather than recollection: the job offer ID and its submission date, the registration confirmation, any invitation notice, the application submission receipt, the nomination letter and certificate. Ontario's transition rules turn entirely on that stage, so this is not administrative tidying. It is the whole question.

Second we score the person against the replacement pathway as it stands today, honestly, with the four structural zeros in plain view. If the number is not competitive we say so at that point rather than after an employer has committed to a job offer and a fee.

Third we assess the employer, because on this kind of file the employer is more often the failure point than the worker. Three years in business, the revenue tier for the work location, the headcount at that specific site, no outstanding orders under the Employment Standards Act or the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and a real appetite for the 14-day deadline that lands on them after an invitation.

Fourth we compare Ontario against the routes that do not need Ontario: the provinces that still run semi-skilled nominations, and the federal LMIA-supported route. Sometimes the answer is that Ontario is still the best road and the job is to make the file as strong as it can be. Sometimes the answer is that the plan should move provinces, and the sooner that is said the less time is lost.

Wild Mountain Immigration is a licensed RCIC practice based in Canmore, Alberta, working with clients across Canada and overseas. Consultations are $120, except for spousal and partner sponsorship enquiries, where the first call is free. We do not take on Quebec destination files, and we do not represent clients at the Immigration and Refugee Board or in the Federal Court.

Compliance note. Wild Mountain Immigration is a licensed RCIC practice (CICC R706497). Every figure, date and threshold on this page was read from ontario.ca on 4 September 2026 and the archival material describes the In-Demand Skills stream as it stood at closure, not as current guidance. Program rules change and the regulation governs. Meeting a stream's criteria or registering an expression of interest does not guarantee an invitation, a nomination or permanent residence, and no representative can promise any of those outcomes.