Registration comes first, and the twenty four months is the gate.

Saskatchewan puts more on the employer than any other province. Before you can recruit a foreign national on an employer specific work permit you must register with the Ministry of Immigration and Career Training and hold a certificate of registration, under The Immigration Services Act. Then, separately, each position you want to fill has to be approved. The employer is the first problem here, not the last one.

• Twenty four consecutive months of operation. You must have actively operated the business as the employer in Saskatchewan for no less than twenty four consecutive months. This is the central gate.
• The certificate lasts two years. Renewal runs like a fresh application, with updated information, and the ministry sends a reminder to the authorised email. Applications are processed in about ten days on average.
• A commercial work location in Saskatchewan. Inside the provincial boundaries and zoned for commercial use, or on farmland as defined by The Saskatchewan Farm Security Act. Child care centres, personal care homes, group homes, construction and home improvement businesses, schools and post secondary institutions can be exempted from that zoning requirement.
• Financial capacity, working equipment, and two registrations. Evidence that you can support the worker's full time employment for the whole contract, that any equipment the work needs is available, operational and safe, and that you are registered with the Corporate Registry and with the Ministry of Finance for provincial sales tax.
• A clean record. Registration can be refused for outstanding or patterned employment standards or occupational health and safety issues, an unsatisfactory history with foreign nationals or other employees, non compliance with the law of Saskatchewan, Canada or another province, a live ministry review, a law enforcement investigation, or non compliance with any other ministry program. Affiliated employers are looked at together.

There is a route, and it is commonly described wrongly. It is a discretionary exemption for a young business, not a second set of requirements every employer has to satisfy.

A business that has not operated for twenty four consecutive months but employs an occupation in demand in Saskatchewan may be granted an exemption on meeting specific criteria. The province lists six of them, and lists them as criteria the exemption includes rather than as an exhaustive test.

• Strategic alignment. The business aligns with the Government of Saskatchewan's strategic priorities or plans.
• Economic impact. The business has an economic impact on Saskatchewan.
• Revenue. Minimum annual revenue of $500,000.
• Location. Inside the Northern Administration District as defined in The Northern Municipalities Act, 2010, or a municipality as defined by The Municipalities Act.
• Five Canadian or permanent resident employees. At least five full time employees who are Canadian citizens or permanent residents, at the workplace where the prospective foreign worker will work. Full time means at least thirty hours of paid work a week.
• Six months of unsuccessful recruitment. Reasonable but unsuccessful efforts to fill the vacant position with Canadian citizens or permanent residents over six months before the position is offered to a foreign worker.

The certificate registers you. It does not approve anything. Each position needs an Employer Position Assessment, submitted through your ministry account, which replaced the old Job Approval Form. Guidance that still refers to a job approval letter predates the change.

• Permanent, full time and non seasonal. At least thirty hours a week, with no end date or a term of at least two years at assessment. It must be an existing employee, an existing vacancy, a role being vacated within six months, or full time contract work.
• The wage benchmark. The wage has to be fair against what Canadians and permanent residents are paid for the same role. The benchmark is the national Job Bank regional median wage for that occupation in one of Saskatchewan's six economic regions, and the offer can never be below the regional low wage. Recent graduates in priority sectors can be paid below the median but not below the regional low wage.
• Overtime and vacation, stated in the assessment. Overtime at not less than one and a half times the hourly rate after eight hours a day and forty hours a week, unless you are federally regulated or the occupation is exempt, and vacation in line with provincial law.
• An employer and employee relationship. Independent contractors, temporary agency workers, business owners including shareholders and equity holders, and their parents, spouses and children are all excluded. The position must not conflict with a collective agreement or a labour dispute.
• The certificate has to stay live throughout. If it expires or is cancelled during the assessment process the assessment is found ineligible.
• Sixty calendar days, with ten inside it. An approved assessment is valid for sixty calendar days. The candidate must validate the information in the first ten calendar days or the application closes, and must file within the sixty. A one time thirty day extension exists where the candidate has not yet been recruited, requested fifteen days before expiry. The processing service standard is six weeks.

This is where Saskatchewan is less prescriptive than its reputation, and we would rather say so than invent a rule.

Six months of reasonable but unsuccessful recruitment is a stated requirement in one place, being the exemption for a business operating under twenty four months. Beyond that the province sets out how to search, being the vacancy on SaskJobs or the federal Job Bank, SaskJobs Employer Services to reach domestic talent pools, immigrant serving agencies about workers already in the province, international sites and recruitment fairs. It also calls the wage benchmark itself the standard for ethical recruitment.

We could not source a fixed advertising period that every position assessment must satisfy, of the kind the federal labour market impact assessment imposes, so we do not state one. Where you are going through the federal assessment as well, its advertising rules apply on their own terms and are the more demanding of the two.

There is a process, it is in the Act, and both of its limbs run on twenty business days. Employers lose this because they treat the first letter as the decision.

• Notice and written representations first. Before amending, suspending or cancelling a certificate the director must give you written notice of the intended action and the reasons for it as soon as is reasonably practicable, and an opportunity to make written representations within a period the director sets. There is no oral hearing, so the written response is the whole of your case.
• Immediate action, then a hearing within twenty business days. Where the director considers it necessary to protect the public interest they may act immediately without hearing you first, but must give you an opportunity to be heard within twenty business days of doing so, and must notify you and any affected foreign national.
• A ministerial review, within twenty business days. Anyone directly affected may ask the minister to review the decision, in the form and manner the minister specifies, within twenty business days after the decision was served. The request does not stay the decision. The minister may investigate, may hear you personally or through counsel, and may confirm, reverse or vary. That decision is final.
• New information can reopen it anyway. Where the director receives new information or representations about a decision, the director may reconsider and rescind, alter or amend it, notwithstanding anything else in the Act.
• The consequences are public. A cancelled certificate ends the rights it carried, though contracts entered into before it went remain valid. The province publishes a table naming businesses whose certificate has been cancelled, the section breached and whether the cancellation is indefinite. Fines run to $750,000 for an individual and $1,250,000 for a corporation, with administrative penalties up to $200,000 and $400,000.
• A position assessment refusal is separate. That has its own second review, requested on the province's form within thirty calendar days of the ineligible decision.

Where this sits against the rest of what we do. Hiring from abroad and the labour market impact assessment where the federal assessment is engaged, hiring someone already in Canada, keeping someone whose permit expires, moving staff between offices, becoming a designated employer, and staying compliant once someone is working for you.

Saskatchewan publishes its allocation and how it intends to split it, which is unusually candid and more useful than a status label.

The province received 4,761 nominations for 2026, with at least half reserved for priority sectors including 750 places for Saskatchewan graduates, at most a quarter for the capped sectors and up to a quarter for everyone else. At 30 June 2026 the program as a whole was 55 percent used, the other sectors tier only 37 percent, and the capped tier 60 percent with its remaining room locked behind two calendar dates. The province warns that actual availability may be lower than that suggests, because applications in process are not counted in what has been used.

Every stream that is moving needs a job offer, and the two that did not have issued nothing since September 2024. That is why the employer is the first problem here. The Saskatchewan worker streams page sets out the sub categories and which of them work. This page was reviewed against saskatchewan.ca and The Immigration Services Act, SS 2024, c 14 on 21 August 2026.