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What Is LMIA? LMIA Jobs in Canada Explained

A Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) is a document that a Canadian employer usually has to obtain from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) before hiring a temporary foreign worker. A positive LMIA confirms that the employer needs a temporary foreign worker for the job and that no Canadian citizen or permanent resident is available to do it. The worker then uses that positive LMIA to apply to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) for an employer-specific work permit.

That is the whole mechanism behind every "LMIA job" you will see advertised: the job is real, but the hiring route runs employer first, worker second. A foreign worker cannot apply for an LMIA on their own, cannot pay for one, and cannot transfer one from another employer.

The three steps, in order

• Step 1 — the employer applies. The employer advertises the job (Job Bank advertising is mandatory under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program), then applies to Service Canada through LMIA Online and pays a processing fee of $1,000 for each position requested. That fee can never be charged to, or recovered from, the worker.
• Step 2 — ESDC decides. A positive decision means the job can be offered to a temporary foreign worker. A negative decision ends the process for that application.
• Step 3 — the worker applies for a work permit. With the positive LMIA and a signed job offer, the worker applies to IRCC. The permit names the employer, the occupation and the location — it is not an open permit.

Which stream an LMIA falls under

The offered wage decides the stream. ESDC publishes an hourly wage threshold for every province and territory (the provincial median wage plus 20%). A wage at or above the threshold is processed under the high-wage stream; a wage below it is processed under the low-wage stream, which carries extra rules: a cap on the share of low-wage temporary foreign workers at one work location (10%, or 20% in specified sectors), and a refusal to process applications for low-wage positions in census metropolitan areas where unemployment is 6% or higher, with exemptions for priority sectors. Our Wage Threshold Checker applies the current thresholds province by province.

Some routes skip the LMIA entirely — the International Mobility Program covers workers who qualify for an exemption, and the Global Talent Stream is an LMIA route with a 10-business-day service standard for eligible tech and specialized roles. The Eligibility Checker walks through which door fits a given situation.

What the approval data shows

ESDC publishes the employers who received positive LMIAs every quarter. The most recent four quarters of that list — decisions through June 2026, published on October 30, 2026 — contain 37,149 approvals covering 132,036 positions for 26,462 distinct employers. Farm and harvesting work is the single largest block, followed by food service and cooking. That register is the data behind our LMIA Approved Companies directory: it proves an employer has been approved before, which is the strongest public signal that they can hire through the LMIA route again.

Two cautions belong on every LMIA page. First, an approval is not a live vacancy — it means the employer was approved to hire for those positions in that quarter. Second, anyone who asks you to pay for an LMIA, a job offer or a "guaranteed" work permit is breaking the program's rules; the $1,000 processing fee is the employer's cost by law.

Frequently asked questions