Got a degree, diploma, or certificate from outside Canada? Here’s the short version: your foreign credential doesn’t earn CRS points by itself. It has to go through an Educational Credential Assessment (ECA), which assesses your credential and gives you a Canadian equivalency — and that equivalency wording is what determines your CRS education category.
This page walks through exactly how that works.
Table of contents
- What is an ECA (and what it isn’t)
- Who needs an ECA
- How long an ECA is valid
- Which credential(s) to get assessed
- Foreign credential → Canadian equivalency → CRS category
- Multiple ECAs / two or more credentials
- Designated organizations & professional bodies
- Common ambiguous cases
- Canadian vs. foreign education
- Worked examples
- Get your exact points: CRS Points Grid
- See your full score: CRS Calculator
- FAQ
- Official sources
Quick answer: the 3-step path
- Get an ECA for your foreign credential from an organization designated by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC).
- Read the “Canadian equivalency” wording on your ECA report — this is the phrase that matters, not the name of your original degree.
- Match that wording to a CRS education category, then look up the exact points for that category on the CRS Points Grid.
Everything below explains each step in detail.
What is an ECA (and what it isn’t)
An Educational Credential Assessment (ECA) is a report that verifies your foreign degree, diploma, or certificate is valid and tells you what it’s equal to in Canadian terms.
You need it for immigration purposes specifically. There are other types of ECA (for job licensing, for example), but only an ECA obtained for immigration and issued by an IRCC-designated organization can be used in your Express Entry profile.
An ECA report can help when you’re job hunting, but it does not:
- guarantee you a job in your field, or at any particular level
- give you a licence to practise in a regulated profession
If your intended job is regulated (nursing, engineering, teaching, and many trades, for example), you’ll still need to go through the licensing body in the province or territory where you plan to work — separately from your ECA.
Who needs an ECA
You need an ECA if your education was completed outside Canada, and you want to:
- qualify as the principal applicant under the Federal Skilled Worker Program, or
- claim CRS points for that foreign education
You can also claim points for your spouse or common-law partner’s foreign education, if they’re immigrating with you — the same ECA rules apply to their credentials.
You do not need an ECA for a credential earned in Canada.
To earn points, your ECA must show that your completed foreign credential is equal to a completed Canadian secondary school (high school) or post-secondary credential.
How long an ECA is valid
Your ECA report must be less than 5 years old at two points in time:
- when you complete your Express Entry profile, and
- when you submit your application
If you’re invited to apply, make sure your ECA will still be valid by the time you actually submit. If you’re still waiting in the pool, make sure it’ll stay valid for as long as you expect to be there.
If your ECA is going to expire before you can use it, contact the organization that issued it — it may be possible to have it reissued, depending on the organization. Applying with an expired ECA will result in your application being refused.
Which credential(s) to get assessed
In most cases, you only need to assess your highest level of education. For example, if you have a Master’s degree, you only need an ECA for that — not for the Bachelor’s degree that came before it.
There are two situations where this changes:
- You want credit for two or more credentials. You’ll need a separate ECA for each one you want counted (see Multiple ECAs below).
- Your post-secondary credential doesn’t equal a Canadian credential. In that case, you can instead get your secondary school credential assessed, to at least earn points for completed secondary education.
Foreign credential → Canadian equivalency → CRS category
This is the step most people get stuck on, so it’s worth being precise about it.
Your ECA report does not assign you CRS points directly. It gives you a Canadian equivalency phrase — something like “Bachelor’s degree (four years)” or “Two-year diploma.” That phrase is what you then match to one of the official CRS education categories to know how your education will be scored.
A few representative examples of how this mapping works:
- An ECA equivalency of “Bachelor’s degree” or a three-year-or-longer program maps to the CRS “Bachelor’s degree OR a three-year-or-longer program” category.
- An ECA equivalency of “Master’s degree” maps to the CRS “Master’s degree, OR professional degree needed to practise in a licensed profession” category.
- Two separately assessed credentials, where at least one is from a program of 3 or more years, can map to the CRS “two or more certificates, diplomas, or degrees” category (see Multiple ECAs below for the exact conditions).
These examples are for orientation only. For the complete list of CRS education categories and their exact point values — including how education combines with your age, language scores, and work experience into a full CRS score — use the CRS Points Grid.
The “professional degree” category is narrower than it sounds
This is the part where a lot of people trip up. The CRS “professional degree” tier is not a catch-all for any advanced or professional-sounding degree. According to IRCC’s own CRS criteria, a professional degree only qualifies for this tier if the degree program was in one of these seven fields:
- medicine
- veterinary medicine
- dentistry
- optometry
- law
- chiropractic medicine
- pharmacy
The CRS professional-degree category is limited to the seven fields listed above. A degree outside those seven fields does not qualify for the professional-degree tier simply because it is advanced, specialized, or professional-sounding.
Important distinction: don’t confuse this with a separate rule about who has to use which ECA organization. Whether your occupation (architect, physician, pharmacist) requires a specific designated professional body to issue your ECA is a completely different question from whether your degree qualifies for the CRS “professional degree” scoring category. We cover the ECA-organization rule separately in the Designated organizations section below — don’t mix the two up.
Multiple ECAs / “two or more credentials”
Having two credentials doesn’t automatically mean more CRS points. The rule is specific:
To qualify for the “two or more certificates, diplomas, or degrees” CRS education category, you need:
- a valid ECA for each credential you want counted, and
- at least one of those credentials must be from a program of 3 or more years
The order in which you completed the credentials doesn’t matter — it doesn’t need to be your first credential or your most recent one that meets the 3-year threshold.
A few things worth being clear on:
- Two short credentials don’t qualify on their own. Two one-year certificates, for example, don’t meet this category — neither one is a 3-year-or-longer program.
- Each credential needs its own ECA. You can’t submit one ECA covering two different credentials and expect it to count as “two or more.”
- A credential that hasn’t been assessed can’t be used. A foreign credential that hasn’t been assessed cannot be used to claim CRS education points for that credential.
- In your Express Entry profile, each credential is entered as its own separate entry in the Education History section.
When comparing your reports, focus on the Canadian equivalency wording on each one — that’s what tells you whether the 3-year condition is met, not the name of your original degree.
Designated organizations & professional bodies
You can’t self-assess your own credentials, and not just any evaluation service will do. Your ECA has to come from an organization or professional body specifically designated by IRCC.
The five general designated organizations
Any of these can assess most foreign credentials, and all five are equally valid for Express Entry — there’s no requirement to use the one nearest you, and IRCC does not rank them as better or worse than one another:
| Organization | Designated |
|---|---|
| Comparative Education Service – University of Toronto (CES) | April 17, 2013 |
| International Credential Assessment Service of Canada (ICAS) | April 17, 2013 |
| World Education Services (WES) | April 17, 2013 |
| International Qualifications Assessment Service (IQAS) | August 6, 2015 |
| International Credential Evaluation Service – BCIT (ICES) | August 6, 2015 |
Processing times and costs vary by organization, but these details change often and aren’t the focus of this page — check directly with the organization you choose for current pricing and timelines.
Designated professional bodies (occupation-specific requirement)
For a small number of regulated occupations, you’re required to use a specific professional body instead of a general organization — but only if your intended occupation requires a licence to practise:
| If your primary occupation is… | You must use… |
|---|---|
| Architect (NOC 21200), and you need a licence to practise | Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB) — designated May 20, 2024 |
| Specialist or family physician (NOC 31100, 31101, or 31102) | Medical Council of Canada (MCC) — designated April 17, 2013, for your primary medical diploma |
| Pharmacist (NOC 31120), and you need a licence to practise | Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada (PEBC) — designated January 6, 2014 |
If your occupation is one of these but you don’t need a licence to practise it (for example, working as a construction project manager rather than a licensed architect), a general designated organization can still assess your credentials.
Note on architects: if your primary occupation is architect and you already have a valid ECA issued by another designated organization before October 31, 2024, IRCC will still accept it.
Remember: this occupation-based requirement is about who is allowed to issue your ECA. It has nothing to do with whether your degree qualifies for the CRS “professional degree” scoring category described earlier — a physician’s medical degree may qualify for both, but the two rules are answering different questions.
Common ambiguous cases and exceptions
- Two ECAs don’t automatically combine into the higher tier. Always check whether at least one of the two assessed credentials is a 3-year-or-longer program before assuming you qualify for the “two or more” category.
- Technical or non-university diplomas can be evaluated more conservatively than expected. Depending on documentation and the issuing institution, some post-secondary programs get assessed at a lower Canadian equivalency than the applicant anticipated. If your equivalency comes back lower than expected, review it carefully — it determines your CRS category regardless of how the original credential is usually described.
- A “professional-sounding” degree outside the seven listed fields does not receive the professional-degree tier, no matter how advanced or specialized it is. It’s scored under the standard Bachelor’s, Master’s, or applicable tier instead.
- Secondary-school fallback: if your post-secondary credential doesn’t equal a Canadian credential, assessing your secondary credential instead can still earn you points at the secondary-school level.
Canadian vs. foreign education
If your credential was earned in Canada, you don’t need an ECA for it at all — Canadian credentials are already recognized directly in your Express Entry profile. The ECA requirement exists specifically to translate foreign education into a Canadian-equivalent standard that IRCC can score consistently.
If you have a mix of Canadian and foreign education, only the foreign portion needs an ECA; your Canadian credential is entered and assessed separately in your profile without one.
Worked examples
These examples illustrate how the mapping process works. They describe general patterns supported by the rules above — always base your own claim on your actual ECA report’s equivalency wording, not on assumptions from an example.
1. A single foreign Bachelor’s degree, one ECA
A four-year foreign Bachelor’s degree, assessed and confirmed as equivalent to a Canadian “Bachelor’s degree (four years),” would fall under the Bachelor’s degree / three-or-more-year program CRS category. Only one ECA is needed since it’s the applicant’s highest credential.
2. Two foreign post-secondary credentials, two ECAs
An applicant with a 3-year diploma and a separate 1-year post-diploma certificate gets both assessed individually. Because at least one of the two credentials is from a program of 3 or more years, and each has its own valid ECA, this combination can qualify for the “two or more certificates, diplomas, or degrees” category — rather than being scored on just the stronger of the two credentials alone.
3. A foreign Master’s degree, one ECA
An applicant with a foreign Master’s degree only needs to assess that degree, not any earlier Bachelor’s degree. If confirmed as equivalent to a Canadian Master’s degree, it falls under the Master’s/professional-degree CRS category.
4. A credential that doesn’t reach the expected tier
An applicant expects their foreign technical diploma to be assessed as a 3-year-or-longer credential, but the ECA instead evaluates it as equivalent to a Canadian “two-year program.” In that case, the credential is scored at the two-year tier, not the higher tier the applicant assumed — a reminder to base planning on the actual equivalency wording, not on assumptions about the original program’s length or reputation.
5. A professional-sounding degree that doesn’t qualify for the professional-degree tier
An applicant with an advanced foreign engineering or business degree might assume it qualifies for the CRS “professional degree” category because it required years of specialized study. It doesn’t — engineering and business aren’t among the seven fields (medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, optometry, law, chiropractic medicine, pharmacy) that qualify for that tier. The degree is still valuable and scores under the ordinary Bachelor’s or Master’s category based on its equivalency, just not at the professional-degree tier.
Get your exact points: CRS Points Grid
Once you know which CRS education category applies to your ECA result, the CRS Points Grid is where you’ll find the exact point value for every CRS category — not just education, but every scoring factor in the system. This page focuses on getting you to the right category; the Points Grid is the definitive source for the complete table and the exact numbers.
See your full score: CRS Calculator
Once you know your education category and points, plug everything into the CRS Calculator to see your complete Express Entry score, combining education with age, language ability, work experience, and any additional factors that apply to you.
FAQ
Do I need an ECA if I studied in Canada?
No. Canadian degrees, diplomas, and certificates don’t require an ECA.
How long does an ECA last?
It must be less than 5 years old both when you complete your Express Entry profile and when you submit your application.
Can I get points for two foreign degrees?
Only if you get a separate ECA for each one and at least one of them is from a program of 3 or more years. Two short credentials on their own don’t qualify for the “two or more” category.
Does my spouse’s foreign education count?
Yes — if your spouse or common-law partner is immigrating with you, their foreign education can also be assessed and contribute points, using the same ECA rules.
Is a law or medical degree always a “professional degree” for CRS purposes?
Only if it’s in one of seven specific fields: medicine, veterinary medicine, dentistry, optometry, law, chiropractic medicine, or pharmacy. Degrees outside these fields don’t qualify for this tier, no matter how advanced they are.
Which ECA organization should I choose?
Any of the five general designated organizations (WES, IQAS, ICAS, CES, or ICES) is valid for Express Entry — IRCC doesn’t rank or recommend one over another. Certain regulated occupations (architect, physician, pharmacist) require a specific professional body instead, if a licence to practise is needed.
Where do I find my exact CRS education points?
Once you know your CRS education category from your ECA’s equivalency wording, look up the exact point value on the CRS Points Grid.