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Canada will admit 380,000 new permanent residents a year in each of 2027, 2028 and 2029, under the new Immigration Levels Plan unveiled in the federal budget tabled in Ottawa on Thursday, November 5, 2026.
The plan, folded into Budget 2026, titled "Masters of Our Destiny," also holds new temporary resident arrivals — international students and foreign workers — at 370,000 a year over the same three years. Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne tabled the budget in the House of Commons on Thursday afternoon.
Budget 2026 also opens a new pathway for up to 200,000 temporary residents already living in Canada to become permanent residents by the end of 2027. Half of them would be considered through Express Entry or the Provincial Nominee Program. The budget sets aside $56.9 million over four years, starting in 2027-28, for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada to carry out the plan.
The headline numbers confirm the course set a year ago rather than change it. The 2026-2028 plan, tabled in November 2025, had already fixed permanent resident admissions at 380,000 a year — down from 395,000 in 2025 and 483,655 in 2024 — and the new plan carries that figure into 2029. The budget says the plan aims to strike "a balance" between the needs of employers, industries and communities and the country's ability to meet newcomers' needs "while avoiding undue pressures on housing, health care and social services."
The temporary resident side of the plan is where the reset is sharpest. New temporary arrivals fall from a 2025 target of 673,650 to 385,000 in 2026 and 370,000 in each of 2027, 2028 and 2029. The government has committed to reducing the share of non-permanent residents — about 3.02 million people, or 7 per cent of the population as of July 1, 2025, according to Statistics Canada — to less than 5 per cent of the population by the end of 2027. Permanent resident admissions are to stay below 1 per cent of the population beyond 2027, reaching 0.9 per cent in 2028.
The plan arrives as the immigration reset continues to divide opinion. Business leaders have pressed the government to relax the limits, saying the cuts are causing labour shortages, while Conservative critics have called for permanent resident admissions to go lower still. Prime Minister Mark Carney, in an interview with The New York Times reported on September 29, said the question now is "when do we resume some controlled increase in the population," but no increase has been announced: the 380,000 target stands.
The budget was tabled four days after the November 1 date set out in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act for the annual levels plan — November 1 fell on a Sunday this year — and it is the second year in a row the government has folded the plan into the budget instead of releasing it separately. The budget says additional details, including how the 380,000 annual admissions will be divided between economic, family and humanitarian categories, will be provided when the Immigration Minister tables the 2026 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration. No date for that report has been announced.