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Originally published: July 08, 2025 | Updated: August 28, 2026

Can I claim CRS points for Canadian Work Experience as well as Foreign experience while residing in Canada? Maybe, but it’s complicated.”

These questions stirred debate after IRCC’s interpretation of Section 73(1) of the IRPR was shared by respected immigration lawyer Steven Meurrens..

Since this blog was first published on July 08, 2025, it has generated tremendous interest, questions, and even celebration from some, who believe concurrent Canadian and foreign work experience can be claimed together. Many have read IRCC’s recent clarification to mean that this is now acceptable and will help boost CRS scores dramatically.

Let’s clear the air. While the IRCC clarification does mention there is nothing precluding both Canadian and foreign work experience from being counted simultaneously, that doesn’t mean it’s an open invitation to exploit the system. The nuance is that officer discretion remains the final determining factor.

What’s being missed in the excitement is that Ministerial Instructions 23 and 24 clearly prohibit stacking overlapping full-time jobs as two separate qualifying years. One year = one calendar year. Period. Whether Canadian or foreign, you must demonstrate a single full-time role per time frame, not two.

Now here’s the real-world issue: candidates are trying to claim 30 to 40 hours/week for a Canadian job and an additional 30 hours/week for a remote job in another country. Even if both are declared, the problem isn’t just time, it’s authenticity.

I’ve seen examples where officers have asked for extensive proof of duties, hours, communication, pay, and even photos, not just for work done in Canada but also for foreign experience. In many cases, things started falling apart when applicants couldn’t describe their day-to-day work, couldn’t produce emails, couldn’t name their supervisor, or had little to no digital footprint of the so-called remote job.

IRCC isn’t just looking at whether you had a job. They’re evaluating whether you actually performed the duties claimed, for the hours claimed, under TEER 0/1/2/3 codes. You could be asked to justify your salary (especially if you claim to be working full-time for 20,000 INR a month). They might ask whether such an arrangement was even feasible with the timezone differences.

This is where officer discretion becomes key. They are allowed to, and do, assess whether the experience makes sense contextually, whether it aligns with labor norms in the country of work, and whether it realistically fits into your timeline.

Just because people on social media are promoting it as a CRS cheat code doesn’t mean it’s going to work. The real risk is that if your experience is not credible or verifiable, you could be facing misrepresentation, a five-year ban from applying for Canadian immigration programs.

What has changed since this was written

When I wrote this in July 2025, the position was that IRCC does not automatically reject foreign work performed while you are living in Canada, and that officer discretion decides it. That is still the position. What has changed is how hard these claims are now being tested.

Over the past several months I have seen a run of procedural fairness letters on foreign experience claimed by people who were in Canada at the time, and some of them allege misrepresentation rather than simple ineligibility. The advice online has moved in two directions at once. One side says the claim is finished and should never be made. The other says make it and see what happens. Neither matches what we see on files.

We have run several of these and we are still running them. One was approved this year with no interview and no request for further documents. The rule set out in this post has not moved: one calendar year cannot be turned into two qualifying years. What can happen, and what happened on the file below, is that a Canadian role and a foreign role run through the same period and each is counted for what it is, provided the hours are real, they do not sit on top of each other, and the evidence carries both.

Weighing the payoff against the risk

Before the mechanics, chalk out the risk assessment, because the two sides of this are not equal.

On the upside, foreign work experience can lift a CRS score enough to turn a profile that never gets invited into one that does. For a lot of applicants that is the whole difference.

On the downside, this is not an ordinary refusal. If an officer concludes that experience was claimed which cannot be substantiated, the finding available to them is most likely misrepresentation, and that sits in a different category altogether. It carries a refusal, a five year inadmissibility, and a mark on your immigration history that colours every application you make afterwards, including a visitor visa. A refusal can be answered. A misrepresentation finding follows you.

So the question is not whether this will get you points. It is whether you can prove every part of it to a stranger who is deciding whether you are telling the truth. If the answer is yes, the claim is worth making and I will make it. If part of it rests on cash payments and goodwill, a handful of CRS points is not worth a five year ban.

A 2026 case study

This is a file we submitted in January 2026, anonymised.

The situation. The applicant held an Indian commerce degree with a taxation specialisation, had come to Canada and completed a postgraduate program here, and was living in Canada on a post graduation work permit. She had been continuously employed since finishing her studies in a TEER 2 role, full time, Monday to Friday, eight until four. Separately she had taken on a bookkeeping role for an employer back in India, performed remotely from Canada. That role ran at 30 hours a week spread across six days, roughly five hours a day, which meets the IRCC definition of full time in its own right. Her CRS at the time of invitation was 539, which included 50 points for foreign work experience.

The task. The foreign experience had to hold up. Without it the score does not clear the cut off, so this was not a comfortable margin with a bonus attached. It was the claim the invitation rested on, in a period when officers had started looking hard at exactly this fact pattern.

The action. We built the file so that the two roles could not be confused with each other, and so that nothing about the arrangement had to be taken on trust.

The hours came first. Her Canadian role ran a fixed weekday schedule and the Indian bookkeeping work was performed in the late evenings and at weekends, outside those hours, at about five hours a day across six days. Both roles were full time by the IRCC measure, and neither was worked on top of the other. The submission set the schedule out plainly rather than leaving an officer to work it out.

The money came second. For the Canadian role we submitted reference letters, pay documentation, T4s and banking evidence showing the salary landing in her account. For the Indian role we did the equivalent on the other side of the border: a reference letter setting out her position, duties and the remote arrangement, payroll and tax records including her Indian tax documentation, and banking evidence showing the remittance arriving from India. Money earned and money received, both traceable.

The third was plausibility. The role had to make sense as remote work, and it did. Bookkeeping is genuinely performed online, it lined up with the degree she already held in commerce and taxation, the employer had a straightforward reason to assign it to her, and she reported to a named supervisor there.

We also said the quiet part out loud. The submission told the officer what the arrangement was, why it was structured that way, and that the applicant was available for verification, further documents or direct contact with either employer.

The result. Approved. No interview, no request for further documents, no procedural fairness letter. The foreign experience was counted.

I want to be careful about what that shows. It does not mean every concurrent claim will be accepted. It means a properly evidenced one still is, in 2026, in the same period that other people are receiving letters.

What we look at before we claim it

We have handled enough of these files, the ones that were approved and the ones that landed on my desk after a procedural fairness letter, to know that the pattern is not subtle. I am not going to set out our whole approach here, but this is what we check first.

The hours have to make sense. Two roles can each be full time by the IRCC measure and still be entirely credible, provided the second sits outside the hours of the first. That is how it would be if both were real, and it shows in the documents. What does not survive scrutiny is a schedule where the same hours are worked twice, or a total that no person could actually keep.

The money has to land. A salary slip on its own proves very little, because a salary slip is a document somebody typed. I want to see the pay arriving in a bank account, for both roles, on both sides of the border, month after month. A cash salary with no trail is the common thread in most of the letters I have seen this year.

The claim has to be plausible on its face. If you tell me you supervise a shop floor in another country while you are sitting in Canada, that does not hold, and the officer will see it before I do. The work has to be work that can genuinely be done remotely, and it helps considerably when it lines up with the education and the history the rest of the profile already shows.

Miss one of those and the problem is no longer a points question. It is an officer wondering what else in the profile is not what it appears to be.

The prudent approach?

Focus on verifiable, credible, well-documented experience. Don’t attempt to pad your timeline. If you’ve got legitimate foreign experience, great, use it. If you’re in Canada and gaining Canadian experience, focus on maximizing that. You can always build foreign work experience after your time in Canada ends.

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Special thanks again to Steven Meurrens for initiating this discussion with his original post.