What changed
- Intake to the Home Care Worker Immigration pilots is paused, and no reopening date has been published.
- The March 2026 reopening that had been expected will not happen.
- Applications already filed continue to be processed. The pause is on intake, not on processing.
The notice
The department's notice of 19 December 2025 says intake is paused until further notice, and that the pilots will not reopen in March 2026 as had been expected.
The programme pages read that the pilots are closed while existing applications are processed. No reopening date has been published.
The March date matters because it had been relied on. People held off applying elsewhere, and kept arrangements in place, on the basis of a reopening that is no longer coming.
Should I keep waiting for the pilots to reopen?
Waiting is a decision, and with no published date it is a decision without a horizon. A plan that depends on the pilots reopening is a plan with no timeline attached to it.
A pause is also not a promise. Programmes that pause intake sometimes reopen with different criteria, sometimes reopen with a cap, and sometimes do not reopen at all. None of those outcomes has been announced here, so none of them should be assumed.
That does not make waiting wrong. It makes it something to choose deliberately rather than by default, and worth setting against whatever else a person qualifies for now.
Applications already submitted
A file already in the queue is being processed. The pause is on intake, which is a different thing from a stop on processing.
The caregiver page on this site sets out what the pilots asked for, what the pause covers, and what the alternatives look like for somebody who was about to apply.
Every caregiver route to residence is closed
The paused pilots are the current headline. The rest of the caregiver programmes are worth checking before anyone decides to wait, and IRCC's own caregivers page lists them with the date each one stopped taking applications.
The Home Child Care Provider Pilot and the Home Support Worker Pilot both took their last applications on 17 June 2024. The Caring for Children Pilot and the Caring for People with High Medical Needs Pilot both closed on 17 June 2019. The Interim Pathway for Caregivers closed on 8 October 2019. The Live-in Caregiver Program is closed to anybody who did not already hold a permit under it based on a labour market impact assessment submitted before December 2014.
Six programmes closed and a seventh paused. That is the position for somebody deciding whether to wait, and it is why the alternatives below are work permit routes rather than another residence pilot.
If you were about to apply
The work has not disappeared, only this route to it. Care work is still done in Canada by people on employer specific permits and through provincial nomination, and those routes did not close because the pilots paused.
Whether any of them fits depends on the employer, the province, and the language and experience a person already has. That is worth checking now rather than after a reopening that has no date attached to it, because the alternatives have their own queues and those queues do not wait for this one.
The detail sits on Caregiver immigration, which is kept current as the rules move.
