Right of Permanent Residence Fee: Who Pays the $600, When, and Why an RPRF Request Is Not an Approval

The right of permanent residence fee is $600 per paying person, and it buys exactly one thing: the right to actually become a permanent resident once your application is approved. Principal applicants and their spouse or partner pay it. Dependent children and protected persons do not.

Being asked for it is the best news you will get that week, and it is still not a decision. Ansari Immigration treats an RPRF request as a scheduling signal rather than a verdict, and pays it the day the letter arrives, because the deadline IRCC publishes and the deadline its own officer instructions use are not the same number. Readers who treat the request as the finish line are the ones who let a work permit lapse while waiting, or who miss a payment window that was shorter than the one on the public page.

What the right of permanent residence fee is, and the regulation that sets it

The fee sits in section 303 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Regulations, and the number written into the regulation is not the number you pay. Section 303(1) says: "A fee of $500 is payable by a person for the acquisition of permanent resident status." Section 303(1.1) then indexes that amount to the Consumer Price Index every two years, starting in 2022. That is why the figure keeps moving without any new policy announcement.

Think of it the way you think of a transit fare that is tied to inflation by bylaw. Nobody votes on it each time. The formula runs on a schedule, the number comes out the other end, and the posted price changes. The last adjustment took effect on April 30, 2026, which moved the fee from $575 to $600 for every paying person, and IRCC's notice confirms that permanent residence fees "are adjusted every two years." So if you are reading an older guide, or even an older government page, assume the number is stale and check the current IRCC fee list.

That is not a hypothetical. IRCC's own program delivery instruction on the right of permanent residence fee still prints $575 as the current amount, because that page was last modified on April 30, 2024, two full years before the increase. The instruction page is the better source for how the fee works. The fee list is the only source for what it costs.

Here is what an economic-class application actually costs in government fees today.

Line as the fee list prints it	Amount (CAD)	Notes
Your application (includes processing fee and RPRF)	$1,590	Printed for the principal applicant and again for a spouse or common-law partner
Your application (without RPRF)	$990	The same application with the $600 right of permanent residence fee removed
Include your dependent child	$270	Per child. No right of permanent residence fee applies
Right of permanent residence fee	$600	Charged to the principal applicant and to a spouse or common-law partner

Source: IRCC fee list. Verified October 2026. These are government fees only and are separate from any professional fee.

So which number applies to you?

If you are a single applicant in Express Entry, you are looking at $1,590. If you are applying with a spouse and one child, you are looking at $1,590 twice plus $270, because the child pays a processing fee and no right of permanent residence fee. Family class and other permanent residence streams have different processing fees, but the right of permanent residence fee is the same $600 across the board. For the full picture across every application type, our IRCC fee list for 2026 breaks the fees down by stream, and the April 30, 2026 permanent residence fee change covers what moved and when.

Who pays the right of permanent residence fee, and who is exempt

Almost every adult who becomes a permanent resident pays it. The exemptions are specific, and they are listed in section 303(2) of the Regulations and repeated in IRCC's instruction page.

Exempt group	Where it comes from
Dependent children of a principal applicant	R303(2), through paragraphs (b) and (c) of the definition of family member in R1(3), which can still include a dependent child aged 22 or over
A member of the permit holder class who is a dependent child of another permit holder class applicant, or of a permanent resident or Canadian citizen	R303(2)(b.2)
Protected persons applying to remain in Canada as permanent residents, and their family members	A95(2)
Members of the protected temporary residents class described in R151.1(2)(b), and included family members	R303(2)
Convention Refugees Abroad Class and Humanitarian-Protected Persons Abroad Class, with included family members	R303(2)(d) and R303(2)(e)
A sponsored dependent child, or an orphaned sibling, niece, nephew or grandchild, or a child to be adopted	R117(1)(b), (f) or (g)
A principal applicant in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds who is the dependent child of a Canadian citizen or permanent resident	R66

Source: IRCC right of permanent residence fee instruction. Verified October 2026.

Two practical readings of that list. First, a spouse or common-law partner is not on it, so a spouse included in your application pays the fee in full. Second, "dependent child" is doing real work here, and the age question is a trap of its own: whether your child still counts as a dependent child is frozen at a particular date rather than tested on the day of the decision, which our guide to the dependent child age lock-in explains in detail. A child who ages out of the definition does not simply start owing $600. They may stop being includable at all.

When you pay the right of permanent residence fee, and the two different deadlines in play

You can pay it at any time, and IRCC has to accept it whenever you send it. The instruction page is blunt about the two moments that matter: "Payment of the RPRF will be required before issuance of the permanent resident visa..." for applicants abroad, and, for people applying from inside Canada, section 303(3) requires payment before the person becomes a permanent resident.

Most people have a simple choice. Pay it up front with the application, or wait to be asked. IRCC's Express Entry fee page, last modified June 22, 2026, tells applicants to "Avoid delays by paying all of your fees now (including your right of permanent residence fee)," and allows you to pay the right of permanent residence fee later, including when you add a spouse or a child after a marriage or a birth.

Paying early carries less risk than it looks like it does, because the same instruction page states that IRCC has no authority to refuse to refund the fee on request to a client who paid up front. Money sent early is not money locked away.

There is one group that should not pay up front, and it is the one most likely to be reading a fee guide a year before anything happens. For parents and grandparents sponsored under the family class, where processing runs long, the instruction page says the client should wait to pay the right of permanent residence fee until IRCC contacts them. If you are a sponsor in that stream, the advice below about paying on the day of the request is the advice that applies to you, not the advice about paying at submission.

If you wait, you get a request letter. This is where the published page and the internal operating instruction part company.

The published instruction gives 30 days. For inland cases it says: "A period of 30 days will be given for the applicant to submit the RPRF following the request," followed by a second 30 day request if the first goes unanswered. For sponsored family class cases, CPC Mississauga gives the sponsor 30 days and then another 30.

An internal Express Entry operating procedure released under the Access to Information Act says something different. In the section listing request-letter windows, the document gives 30 days for passports and police certificates and seven days for "everything else," and in the fee paragraph it instructs officers to request outstanding fees and "give 7 days," holding the file for the payment to arrive. That document is undated on its face and predates the current fee figures, so it is evidence of how one processing lane was instructed rather than a statement of current law. The published 30 day instruction is the rule.

But you do not want to discover which number your officer is working from. Pay on the day the letter arrives and the question never comes up.

Doing it alone: you read the 30 days on the public page, diary it for week four, and hope the letter in front of you is not running on the shorter internal clock.

With Ansari Immigration: the firm's licensed RCIC watches the request window on your file, pays inside it, and keeps the receipt where the next officer can find it. Express Entry representation is a flat CAD $3,000 with all family members included, quoted upfront, and the government fees in the table above are separate.

Book a 30 minute consultation ($80)

One thing worth saying out loud, because it causes real panic: missing the window does not close your file. The instruction page states that a client who has met every other requirement but has not paid gives IRCC no legal basis to treat the application as abandoned, and that a file cannot be closed on that ground alone. An internal intake manual from the same family of documents goes further, instructing the assistant reviewing fees not to reject a file for unpaid requested fees but to escalate it, flagged high importance, to a resource agent. Late is recoverable. Unpaid forever is not, because the fee has to be in before status can be granted.

Did your request letter give you 30 days or seven? If you still have the letter, that one line is the most useful thing in it. Tell us what yours said in the comments, real numbers help the next person reading this.

Why an RPRF request is not an approval

The reason an RPRF request feels like good news is that, operationally, it is. The same ATIP'd Express Entry procedure tells officers to request the right of permanent residence fee when a file is marked "Passed, Recommend Passed OR Approved," which means the request normally arrives after eligibility has been assessed favourably rather than before.

Now the part that nobody puts in a celebration post. The same document instructs officers that a file can be marked "passed" with outstanding items still on it, including police certificates, medicals, forms and the right of permanent residence fee itself, and to record those in a separate note listing outstanding items. "Passed" in that system is a stage, not a decision.

And approval itself is not the end of the testing. IRCC's own permanent residence decision-making training material, also released under the Access to Information Act, asks officers to identify situations where someone holding a permanent resident visa may still be refused the grant of status, and lists five: a subsequent change in the composition of the family or the situation, new and unfavourable information surfacing after the visa was issued, failure to produce proof of funds or requested documents at the port of entry, expiry of the permanent resident visa, and reasonable grounds to believe the visa was obtained by fraud. The training's worked example is an inland spousal applicant whose application was approved in December 2021, who separated from her sponsor in February 2022, and who was scheduled for her landing appointment that April. The model answer is that she cannot be granted permanent residence, because at the landing appointment she no longer met the requirements of the class.

Paying $600 does not freeze your file in its approved state. Your circumstances have to keep matching the class you applied under, right up to the moment status is granted.

What happens after you pay the right of permanent residence fee

For someone inside Canada, IRCC's page on an approved application, last modified June 22, 2026, sets out the sequence: you wait for IRCC to contact you, you confirm your email and that you are physically in Canada, IRCC creates your Permanent Resident Portal account for you, and you confirm your status. Then, once you become a permanent resident, your electronic confirmation of permanent residence is made available in the portal, and you upload a photo so your first PR card can be produced.

Two details in that page are easy to skim past and expensive to miss.

The page tells you not to create your own PR Portal account, because IRCC creates it and a self-made account can delay the process. And it tells you to inform IRCC if you leave Canada before you are granted permanent resident status, which only makes sense if there is a period after approval during which you are not yet a permanent resident. There is, and that gap is where people get hurt. If your work permit expires inside it, you are out of status and out of work while holding an approval letter. Our guide to leaving Canada while waiting for PR covers the travel side of the same gap, and the electronic confirmation of permanent residence is proof of a status you already hold, not the thing that grants it. For applicants finalised abroad, the confirmation of permanent residence and a permanent resident visa travel with you, and you become a permanent resident on landing.

How long does the gap last?

IRCC publishes a figure for the last leg of the gap and nothing at all for the rest of it, and the figure it does publish sits on a page most applicants never reach. IRCC's Confirm your permanent residence from within Canada page, last modified April 9, 2026, says that once you have confirmed you are in Canada, "we'll upload your e-COPR to your portal account. This can take up to a few weeks."

What is genuinely not published is the rest of it: how long after you pay before IRCC first contacts you, and how long between that contact and the confirmation of your status. The processing times tool measures something different, stating that a processing time "starts the day we receive your complete application and ends when we make a decision," so it is an end to end program estimate rather than a stage by stage breakdown. Treat anything more granular than the few weeks figure above as an estimate from other applicants, not from IRCC.

It is also worth knowing that the shorthand you will meet in forums, "IP2" and "PPR," appears nowhere in IRCC's published guidance on this stage. Those are applicant labels for stages IRCC describes in plain words. When you ask a question using them, you may get an answer about a process IRCC does not describe that way, which is a good reason to measure your own file against the published steps instead. Our post on what IRCC decision made actually means covers the same translation problem one stage earlier, and after biometrics, what is next for Canada PR maps the stages before this one.

Can you get the right of permanent residence fee back?

Yes, and this is the part most summaries get wrong by framing it as a favour. Section 303(4) of the Regulations makes it an obligation rather than a discretion: if the person does not acquire permanent resident status, the fee "shall be repaid by the Minister to the person who paid it." IRCC's refund instruction says refunds are granted in all cases where the fee has been paid and the applicant has not become a permanent resident.

Situation	What happens to the $600
Application refused, no appeal filed	Refunded, and the refund is started by the case processing centre or visa office without you asking. The instruction is to initiate it as soon as the refusal letter is sent
Application refused, appeal filed	Held until the appeal is decided. In the family class, a refund after an unsuccessful appeal comes only on the sponsor's written request, so do not wait for it to arrive on its own
Application withdrawn	The right of permanent residence fee is refunded. The processing fee is not
Sponsorship withdrawn (family class)	Refunded at any stage, once the visa office confirms no visa was issued
Permanent resident visa issued but never used	Refunded after the visa is returned to the issuing office
You become a permanent resident	Not refunded. This is what the fee paid for

Source: IRCC right of permanent residence fee refund instruction and Withdraw or cancel your application. Verified October 2026.

The split on withdrawal is worth repeating because it surprises people. IRCC's page on asking for a refund, last modified September 21, 2026, gives a closed list: once processing has started, "only these fees can be refunded," and the list names the right of permanent residence fee, the right of citizenship fee, the open work permit holder fee for LMIA exempt workers and the employer compliance fee. The application processing fee is not on it. The withdrawal page, last modified April 2, 2026, says the same thing from the other direction. The internal Express Entry procedure describes the same split from the officer's side, retaining processing fees and refunding the right of permanent residence fee, and its refusal workflow has a dedicated step to refund the fee for the principal applicant and spouse. If you are weighing a withdrawal, our post on how to withdraw an application from IRCC covers the mechanics.

One honest caveat on how the money comes back. The withdrawal page says that if you applied and paid online, IRCC issues refunds for eligible fees automatically, and that if you did not, you may need to request the refund yourself. IRCC's refund instruction page describes a manual, officer-initiated process and refers to FOSS, CPS and CAIPS, systems IRCC has not used for years, and it was last modified on October 16, 2017. Where the two differ, the 2026 page governs. If you paid online and nothing arrives, the official guidance does not set a timeframe, so ask through the IRCC web form rather than assuming it is in progress.

What goes wrong

Three failure modes, all of them documented rather than guessed.

• The payment is not on the file. IRCC's own permanent residence training material includes a scenario in which an applicant "did not initially pay the RPRF, but has the HPM receipt to prove he did pay it," and the officer has to work from the receipt. An internal intake manual has the reviewer confirm that the payment line balance reads $0.00 and that each dependant sits on the correct fee line. Keep the receipt, and keep it findable.

• Wrong fee line for a child. The same manual checks that dependants under 22 are on the right line and treats anything left over as an overpayment to be routed separately. A child placed on an adult line creates a balance problem that has to be unpicked before the file moves.

• The approval letter read as a finish line. The landing-stage refusal grounds above are the formal version. The practical version is the person who stops renewing a work permit after approval, or who changes job, employer or relationship status in the gap, and finds that the class they qualified under no longer describes them.

Before you pay, have these ready:

• The request letter, with its stated deadline, saved somewhere you can find it

• A payment receipt you can produce later, separate from the portal

• Confirmation that each person in the application is on the correct fee line

• A plan for your temporary status that runs past your expected confirmation date, not up to it

Frequently asked questions about the right of permanent residence fee

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Related Posts

• IRCC Fees 2026: Complete Canada Immigration Fee List by Application Type: Every current government fee by stream, so you can budget the whole application rather than one line of it.

• What Is eCOPR? The Electronic Confirmation of Permanent Residence Explained: The document that arrives after your status is confirmed, and why it is proof rather than the grant itself.

• How to Withdraw Application from IRCC: The written-withdrawal process, and which fees come back to you if you stop a permanent residence application.

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Why work with Ansari Immigration

Flat, transparent fees quoted upfront, with government fees like the $600 right of permanent residence fee always shown separately. Every file is handled personally by the firm's licensed RCIC, regulated by CICC, start to finish: all forms, IRCC correspondence, webforms and follow-ups, with direct access to your consultant throughout. Document-expiry reminders continue even after your file closes.

If a request letter has landed and you are not sure what your deadline really is, that is a 30 minute question. And if you have been through this stage already, tell us in the comments how long it took from paying to confirmation, keeping it general, and for advice on your own file use a consultation.

Book a consultation with Ansari Immigration ($80, 30 minutes)

Written by Amir Ansari, RCIC, Ansari Immigration, Vancouver.

This article is for general information only. It is not legal advice. Program criteria, requirements, processing times, and selection approaches can change without notice. Always confirm details on official government websites or consult a licensed Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant (RCIC) for advice specific to your situation.