Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) has alerted employers that the LMIA Online portal will be offline from 20:00 ET on 12 June until 10:00 ET on 13 June 2026 for scheduled maintenance. The notice appears on the portal’s login page and advises users to plan submissions accordingly. The temporary closure coincides with the height of summer recruitment for hospitality, agriculture and tourism roles that rely heavily on the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP). Because a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) is a prerequisite for most employer-specific work permits, any outage can ripple through onboarding timelines. Companies with offers expiring this weekend risk missing internal start-date targets if applications are not uploaded before the blackout. ESDC warns that incomplete filings returned for correction may lose their place in the processing queue, further extending wait times that already average nine weeks for high-wage streams. Global mobility teams should download draft PDFs and gather signatures in advance, then file as soon as the system reopens. For critical hires, employers might explore LMIA-exempt categories such as intra-company transferees (C12) or the Francophone Mobility stream. ESDC schedules maintenance monthly, but many employers remain unaware until they encounter an error screen. HR departments are encouraged to sign up for portal bulletins and distribute outage calendars to hiring managers to avoid last-minute surprises.
Source: ESDC – LMIA Online portal notice
