Extend Your Status in Canada — can you keep working while you wait?
Filing before your permit expires lets you stay. What you may do while the decision is pending is a separate question — and it depends on which permit you hold, and whether you leave the country.
Maintained status
What you may do while the decision is pending. Four answers, by permit.
Maintained status is not a permit and it is not an upgrade — it continues the conditions you already had. The most expensive misunderstandings on this page are people who kept working when they shouldn't have, and people who left Canada assuming they could pick up where they left off.
By permit type
What each extension actually turns on.
The fee is the smallest part. What decides the outcome is whether the basis for the permit still exists on the day you file.
Extending purely as a visitor? That has its own rules, its own 90-day restoration window and a fee figure most sites get wrong — see the visitor record page.
What changed
Four rule changes that reshaped in-Canada extensions.
You can no longer drive to the border and return with a new work or study permit. Applications go through the online portal, where employer-specific permits have been running roughly four to six months. Narrow carve-outs remain for CUSMA and other free-trade professionals and for certain international truck drivers.
Officer instructions now require the worker to be currently employed by the company abroad. Hiring someone who would begin employment on arrival no longer fits the exemption, which closes a route a number of employers had been using.
Workers and students who lose status may now restore as visitors, stated explicitly. Restoration cannot be granted at a port of entry. And an application returned as incomplete does not create maintained status — the 90-day clock still runs from the original expiry.
The temporary public policy that allowed it ended and has not been renewed. A visitor who finds a job must now apply from outside Canada unless a separate exemption applies.
Where files go wrong
Four mistakes that cost status. All of them avoidable.
Technically on time is still on time — but with processing measured in months, a late filing leaves you on maintained status far longer than necessary, unable to change employers.
Maintained status does not survive departure. You may be able to return as a visitor, but you cannot resume work or study until the new permit is issued.
If IRCC returns the application without processing it, you were never on maintained status, and your restoration window has been running the whole time.
Working for a new employer before the new permit is issued is unauthorised work. It is one of the hardest findings to recover from.
Related
If your situation sits elsewhere.
The date checker, restoration fees, and what happens once status has already lapsed.
New permits, LMIA-based and exempt categories, and changing employers properly.
A refused extension ends your status the day it is refused. What follows depends on the date.
Tell us your expiry date and what you hold.
We will confirm whether you extend or restore, what you may lawfully do while it is pending, and how fast the file has to move. Brampton, London, or remotely across Canada.
Reviewed August 2026 — general information only, not legal advice, and no consultant–client relationship is created by reading this page. Maintained status depends on the conditions of your existing permit; a condition on your document overrides anything shown here. Fees and processing times change — confirm on IRCC's fee list and the processing-times tool before filing.
Status review
Can you extend or restore your status?
Send a few details. A licensed RCIC reads your profile personally, then replies with the routes that genuinely fit, the ones that do not, and the consultation fee and next available times.
- Read personally by a CICC-licensed consultant — never a bot, never a salesperson
- A written shortlist of the programs you realistically qualify for
- Consultations are fee-based; you get the fee and available times by reply
CHK Immigration Services — Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant (CICC). Offices in Brampton and London, Ontario. Submitting this form does not create a client–consultant relationship; IRCC makes all final decisions.