Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program (OINP) Points Calculator

Introduction: what the OINP points grid actually measures

The Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program does not rank people. It ranks registrations. A candidate who wants to be considered fills in an expression of interest, the program turns that registration into a number using a published grid of scoring factors, and from time to time it invites the highest-scoring registrations in a pool to apply. Everything on this page is about that middle step: the arithmetic that turns a set of declared facts into a score. It is a small, completely transparent piece of a much larger process, and it is the piece most often guessed at.

Ontario redesigned the program in June 2026. The eight streams that had existed for years, including the Employer Job Offer streams, the Master's and PhD Graduate streams, and the Express Entry Human Capital Priorities stream, were closed, and the expression of interest system that served them stopped accepting registrations. In their place the province opened the Ontario Workforce Priority stream, which has its own published points grid. That newer grid is what this calculator models, because a calculator built on a retired grid teaches the wrong arithmetic.

Two ideas are worth separating before you touch the form. The first is scoring factors, which are the eleven items below that produce a number. The second is stream criteria, which are the minimum requirements a registration must satisfy before it can become an application at all: a minimum language level tied to the TEER category of the job offer, a minimum level of education, a minimum quantity of work experience, and a wage that meets or exceeds the median for that occupation in that region of Ontario. The program says plainly that scoring factors are not the same as stream criteria. A registration can score well and still fail a criterion, and the score does nothing to repair that. This calculator computes only the first idea and deliberately refuses to comment on the second.

The reason the arithmetic is worth studying is that the grid is banded, not linear. Points arrive in steps at published thresholds, so a change of one dollar an hour is worth either nothing at all or three points, depending entirely on which side of a boundary it lands. The same is true of months of experience, of language benchmarks, and of geography. Understanding where the steps sit is the difference between an informed conversation and a guess, and it is the only thing this page tries to teach.

Formula for the Ontario Workforce Priority points score

The total score is a plain sum of eleven independently banded factors. The program groups them into four families, and it is useful to keep the families separate because they behave very differently: the employment family is where most of the points live, while the regional family is a single factor that is worth more than most people expect.

The employment and labour market family carries six of the eleven factors, and together they account for 70 of the 130 points available to a candidate applying with a job offer:

Here T is the NOC TEER category of the job offer, B is the NOC broad occupational category, W is the hourly wage band, X is Ontario work experience, H is the Canadian earnings history band, and L is legal status in Canada. Every one of those letters is a step function rather than a continuous quantity. The wage factor is the clearest illustration, because it is the factor people most often assume is proportional:

The Ontario work experience factor X is the one place where the grid switches tables rather than simply switching bands. If you have spent six months or more in the position named in your job offer, the program scores the months in that position and pays 12, 15 or 18 points. If you have spent less than six months in it, the program instead scores general Ontario work experience and pays 6, 9 or 12 points. The two tables are alternatives, never a sum:

Because every factor is a step, the useful question is never “how many points is this worth” in the abstract. It is “how far am I from the next threshold, and what does crossing it cost me”. That marginal view is what the game further down the page is built around. If an improvement raises the score by and takes months of effort, its efficiency is simply:

Ranking candidate improvements by that ratio produces some genuinely counter-intuitive results, and they fall straight out of the published numbers rather than out of anyone's opinion. Trading a Toronto job offer for the same job in Northern Ontario is worth 15 points. Adding a bachelor's degree on top of a college diploma is worth exactly one point, because the grid pays 5 for a college credential and 6 for a bachelor's. The grid rewards where you work and how well you communicate far more than it rewards stacking further academic credentials.

The published scoring tables in full

These are the eleven scoring factors and their point values as published by the Government of Ontario for the Ontario Workforce Priority stream. The calculator uses exactly these numbers and nothing else.

Adding the maxima of the eleven factors that a job offer candidate is scored on gives 70 employment points, 20 education points, 25 language points and 15 regional points, for a ceiling of 130. Self-employed physicians are assessed on a different subset, so their ceiling is not the same number, and this calculator does not attempt to model that route.

How to use this OINP points calculator

Enter what is documented today rather than what you expect to be true later, because the program scores a registration as it stands on the day it is registered. Every field below maps to exactly one row of the table above, so if a result surprises you, you can find the row that caused it.

1. Job offer NOC TEER category and broad occupational category both come from the five-digit National Occupational Classification code of the position offered. The TEER is the second digit; the broad category is the first.
2. Job offer hourly wage is the gross hourly rate in the offer. Enter a salaried offer as its hourly equivalent. The bands step at $20, $25, $30, $35 and $40.
3. Months in the position offered decides which work experience table applies. Enter zero if you are not currently working in that position.
4. Total months worked in Ontario is only read when the previous field is under six, which is exactly when the program switches to the general Ontario experience table.
5. Highest Canadian earnings in a single year is the best single calendar year shown on a Canada Revenue Agency notice of assessment. Leave it at zero if you have no Canadian earnings history.
6. Legal status in Canada, highest level of education, number of Canadian education credentials, official language ability, knowledge of official languages and region of work each select a single published band.
7. Press Calculate points. The panel returns every factor, the points it contributed, the four family subtotals, and the total out of 130.

The most useful way to work is to change one field at a time and watch which change actually moves the number. Because the grid is banded, most single-field changes move it by nothing at all, and the handful that move it a lot are the ones worth a real conversation.

Worked example: a TEER 1 analyst in Southwestern Ontario

Consider a candidate holding a job offer as a financial analyst, NOC 11101, which sits in broad occupational category 1 with a TEER of 1. Suppose the offer pays $36.50 an hour in London, Ontario, the candidate has been in the position for 14 months on a valid work permit, earned $62,000 in their best Canadian year, holds a bachelor's degree from abroad plus one Ontario college certificate, and tests at CLB 8 in English with no French. Every one of those facts maps to exactly one band:

The eleven rows add to 94: employment contributes 9 + 4 + 12 + 15 + 6 + 10 = 56, education contributes 6 + 5 = 11, language contributes 12 + 5 = 17, and the region contributes 10. Those are the default values in the form, so pressing Calculate points reproduces this example exactly.

Now test the banding. Raising the wage from $36.50 to $39.90 an hour, a real raise of over three dollars, changes the score by zero, because both figures sit inside the $35 to $39.99 band. Raising it to $40.00 instead, a gain of ten cents from $39.90, adds three points. Meanwhile, taking the same job in Thunder Bay rather than London moves the region factor from 10 to 15 and adds five points on its own, and pushing English from CLB 8 to CLB 9 adds three more. The single largest change available to this candidate is not a raise and not another degree: a second official language at CLB 6 would move the knowledge factor from 5 to 10, and relocating to Northern Ontario would add another 5, together worth ten points for no change in employer at all.

Limitations and assumptions behind this OINP estimate

This section matters more than the number. The calculator implements one published table and nothing else, and there are at least six things it deliberately does not do.

First, it does not assess eligibility. It never checks a stream criterion, so it cannot tell you whether your language level clears the minimum for your TEER category, whether your education meets the required floor, whether you have the required six or nine months of experience, or whether the offered wage meets or exceeds the median wage for that occupation in that region of Ontario. A score of 120 on this page is fully compatible with an application that cannot be submitted.

Second, it does not verify anything. Points claimed for language must rest on an approved test taken within two years of the application. Foreign credentials need an educational credential assessment from a designated organisation that is less than five years old at submission, and the assessing organisation must be authorised to share the report with the OINP directly. Earnings history must be evidenced by a Canada Revenue Agency notice of assessment. The form here accepts whatever you type.

Third, it models only the job offer route. Self-employed physicians registering under the same stream are scored on a different subset of factors, and the arithmetic here does not apply to them.

Fourth, a score is not a cutoff. The program invites the highest-ranked registrations in a pool from time to time, sometimes generally and sometimes on a targeted basis. The number required to be invited is not fixed, is not published in advance, and depends entirely on who else is in the pool at that moment and what the province is prioritising. Nothing on this page should be read as a threshold.

Fifth, the grid itself changes. The eight streams that preceded the Ontario Workforce Priority stream were retired in June 2026 along with their entire scoring system, which is a useful reminder that a points grid is policy, not physics. Confirm the current tables on the Government of Ontario site before relying on any figure here.

Sixth, and most importantly, this is arithmetic, not advice. Immigration outcomes turn on documents, timing, status, and individual circumstances that no calculator can see. Where the stakes are real, the people qualified to help are immigration lawyers and consultants licensed by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, working from the official guidance rather than from a web page.

Sources checked for the OINP points grid

Sources. Every point value on this page was taken from the Government of Ontario's published scoring tables for the Ontario Workforce Priority stream, which lists the scoring factors for NOC TEER, broad occupational category, hourly wage, Ontario work experience, earnings history, legal status, education, Canadian credentials, official language ability, knowledge of official languages and regional location of work, and which states that scoring factors are not the same as stream criteria. The June 2026 closure of the eight former streams and of their expression of interest system is recorded in the 2026 Ontario Immigrant Nominee Program updates and in the archived OINP expression of interest system pages. Document requirements quoted in the limitations section, including the two-year language test window, the five-year limit on an educational credential assessment and the notice of assessment evidence for earnings history, come from the Ontario Workforce Priority stream applicant checklist. General program structure and the application process are described on the OINP application process page.

OINP points: frequently asked questions

These questions come up whenever a simple score is mistaken for a decision, which is the failure mode this page is designed to avoid.