CEC Eligibility Checker

The Canadian Experience Class (CEC) is one of three federal Express Entry programmes, alongside the Federal Skilled Worker Programme and the Federal Skilled Trades Programme. CEC is designed for people who already have Canadian skilled work experience and want to transition to permanent residence. Unlike the other two programmes, CEC has no education requirement — but it does require qualifying work experience, a qualifying job type, and a minimum language level.

Eligibility is a pass/fail check, not a scored calculation. You either meet all the core requirements or you don't. Once you do, you enter the Express Entry pool alongside candidates from the other programmes, and everyone is ranked using the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS). Your CRS score — not your CEC eligibility — determines whether you receive an invitation to apply for permanent residence in a given round of invitations.

The four questions above walk through each requirement in turn: the number of hours of Canadian work experience, the NOC TEER category of the job, whether the work was paid and legal, and your language level. Because language requirements differ by TEER category (CLB 7 for TEER 0/1, CLB 5 for TEER 2/3), the checker asks for your lowest CLB ability score — since all four abilities must clear the bar, the lowest one is the binding constraint.