ANALYSIS: How many Express Entry ITAs can we expect to see in December?

Previous years of Express Entry draws can help us make reasonable estimates of how many Invitations to Apply (ITAs) we might expect to see issued for the remainder of 2024.

Should the number of ITAs issued in the remainder of 2024, relative to the landing target for 2025, be the same as it was on average for years 2021 to 2023, we might expect IRCC to issue about 3,522 ITAs through Express Entry in December.

That said, this number is only a reasonable estimate given the truth of the assumptions above—the actual number of ITAs issued in December may be significantly higher or lower than this estimate.

In the rest of this article, we’ll explain how we arrived at this estimate, and will also discuss some reasonable expectations of who may receive these invitations.

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How can we guess how many more ITAs IRCC will issue this year?

IRCC issues ITAs with the intention of meeting a specific target for landings—when a foreign national first arrives in Canada as a new permanent resident, or when a temporary resident already in Canada receives permanent residency.

There are two things to keep in mind here:

Not every ITA will result in a landing (some ITAs will be returned); and
Landings will lag ITAs significantly, on account of processing times.

IRCC’s landings target is set out in the annual Immigration Levels Plan.

The Immigration Plan details admissions, not ITAs. An admission, or landing, is defined as the final interview with an immigration officer, either at a port of entry or a local office in Canada, during which an applicant signs their confirmation of permanent residence (COPR) and becomes a permanent resident. This process can be done electronically as well but always involves the approved immigrant arriving in Canada to accept their PR status.

Although it might seem easy enough to simply compare annual immigration targets to ITAs issued in a year to deduce the number of remaining ITAs, doing so would not take into account the lag between ITAs and landings due to IRCC processing times, as well as the logistics of moving from one’s home country to Canada.

Per a newly released IRCC memorandum from July of 2024 to the Deputy and Associate Deputy Ministers of Immigration, due to the “lag between ITA (Invitation to Apply) and to admission(s) (between six to 16 months...), most ITAs issued between now [July 2024] and December (and up to the end of February 2025, for the most part) will count towards 2025 permanent residence targets.”

Therefore, a more robust method to derive the number of remaining ITAs in a given year may be to look at the number of ITAs delivered between July to December, relative to the following year’s Immigration Levels Plan target.

Assuming that IRCC will keep ITA issuances at consistent proportions to previous (non-COVID) years, the department issues a number of ITAs equal to between 43-46% of the following year’s landing target, between July 1 to December 31 of the current year. Outside of COVID years, this percentage has remained consistent:

Year	ITAs issued between July to December of the previous year	Annual landing target through Federal High-Skilled pathways	ITAs issued as a percentage of the year’s landings target
2018	34,738	74,900	46.38%
2019	50,100	81,400	61.55%
2022	25,509	55,900	45.63%
2023	35,750	82,800	43.18%
2024	50,718	110,770	45.79%

After removing the proportion of ITAs relative to landings in 2019 as an outlier, we can average out the remaining proportions to build a general idea of how IRCC manages the issuances of ITAs. The average number of ITAs issued between July to December in a year, expressed as a proportion of next year’s landings target is 45.245%.

How many more ITAs could we see in December?

For 2025, IRCC has set an immigration target of 124,680 new newcomers through the Express Entry system. Between July to November of this year, the department issued 52,888 ITAs through the Express Entry system. This is equal to 42.42% of next year’s landings target.

If we assume that the proportion of ITAs issued this year relative to next year’s landings target will align with the average of the non-outlier previous five years, we might expect that IRCC will issue a number of ITAs equivalent to 2.825% of its admissions target for 2025, in December of this year. This equates to 3,522 more ITAs delivered to candidates in the Express Entry pool over the remainder of 2024.

This estimate is only a reasonable expectation should the above assumptions hold true. There is no certainty that what IRCC does this year will line up with what it has done in previous years. The department could issue far fewer or far more ITAs, as it sees fit.

The forecast also does not consider several factors that we do not have visibility into, but IRCC likely does (for example the average rate of ITA refusal, or variable processing times for PR applications).

Who is likely to get these ITAs?

IRCC’s Immigration Levels Plan can also shed some light as to which kinds of candidates in the Express Entry pool are likely to receive these ITAs.

The 2025-2027 Level’s Plan split the Federal High-Skilled allocation (under which Express Entry falls) into two separate categories that will be handled through the federal system: “Federal Economic Priorities” and “In-Canada Focus”.

These two categories cumulatively make up the totality of landings/targets through the Express Entry system in 2025.

The “Federal Economic Priorities" category (allocated 41,700 admissions) will encompass category-based selections for candidates who have professional skills and experience in in-demand sectors of the Canadian economy—as well as those with strong French language proficiency.

In 2025 eligible categories will include:

Healthcare occupations;
Trade occupations; and
French-language proficiency.

Targets for Francophone immigrants outside Quebec are also set to increase, from 8.5% of all admissions in 2025 to 10% in 2027.

The “In-Canada Focus” category (allocated 82,980 admissions) will invite candidates who are already in Canada, in a bid to meet the targeted immigration levels, without further adding to the country’s population. Research also shows that these individuals tend to perform well in Canada’s labour market.

In 2025 this category will encompass:

Canadian Experience Class (CEC) candidates;
Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) candidates in Express Entry-aligned PNP streams;
(possibly) Federal Skilled Worker Program (FSWP) candidates; and
(possibly) Federal Skilled Trades Program (FSTP) candidates.

Based on the government’s stated intention, we might reasonably expect that many of the remaining 3,522 ITAs may be issued to candidates in the CEC program, PNP programs, candidates who have strong French language proficiency, and/or who have professional experience in healthcare or trade occupations.

This trend is also reflected in Express Entry draws held in the previous months of 2024. For example, consider the last 20 Express Entry draws that IRCC has held (from August 2024 onwards):