International Students and Canada's Youth Labour Market

Canada's international-student population has grown dramatically over the past two decades. International students have also become increasingly active participants in the Canadian labour market. At the same time, employment conditions for young Canadians have recently deteriorated, particularly for students seeking summer and entry-level work.

Are these developments connected?

This analysis examines twenty years of study-permit growth, international-student employment, youth unemployment, industry concentration, job vacancies and temporary-resident population growth.

1. From 170,000 to nearly one million study-permit holders

The scale of international education in Canada has changed dramatically over the past two decades. In 2005, approximately 170,000 people held a valid Canadian study permit at year end. During the following decade the population grew steadily, but the pace accelerated substantially during the late 2010s and early 2020s. By 2019, before the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, the year-end study-permit population had reached approximately 638,000.

After temporarily declining during the pandemic, the number climbed rapidly again. Canada's year-end study-permit population surpassed one million in 2023 before declining modestly in 2024.

This represents much more than growth in Canada's education sector. International students are predominantly young adults, and many are eligible to work while studying. As their numbers increased, the potential connection between international education and Canada's labour market therefore became increasingly important. But the number of study-permit holders should not be confused with the number of international students actually working.

That distinction becomes important when we look at employment records.

2. International students increasingly became workers as well as students

The international-student population was not merely becoming larger. Its participation in Canada's labour market was also changing. Statistics Canada research linking immigration records with T4 tax records shows a striking increase in the number of international students reporting paid employment. In 2000, approximately 21,800 international students reported T4 employment income. By 2018, that number had risen to approximately 277,400.

The increase greatly exceeded the growth of the international-student population itself. Statistics Canada found that the share of postsecondary international students reporting employment income rose from 17.6% in 2000 to 46.6% in 2018.

This distinction is essential to the analysis. A study permit is an immigration status, not an employment record. Some study-permit holders do not work, while eligible students may work without holding a separate work permit. Employment-income records therefore provide much stronger evidence of actual participation in the Canadian labour market than study-permit counts alone.

As international-student employment expanded, the kinds of jobs students were doing also changed substantially, setting up an important shift in where that employment was concentrated.

3. The kind of work changed

The growth in international-student employment was accompanied by a major shift in where students worked. At the beginning of the period, employment was much more closely connected to education. In 2000, educational services accounted for 58.3% of international students reporting paid employment. By 2018, that share had fallen to 12.6%. Accommodation and food services had instead become the largest employment industry for international students, while wholesale and retail trade had also become a major source of employment.

Approximately 25.9% of employed international students worked in accommodation and food services, while another 19.1% worked in wholesale and retail trade. Together, those two industries accounted for approximately 45% of international students reporting employment income.

This shift is important because restaurants, accommodation, retail stores and similar service businesses are also major sources of first jobs, part-time employment and summer work for young Canadians. International students and young Canadian workers were therefore increasingly participating in some of the same parts of the labour market. The overlap becomes even clearer when accommodation and food services are examined separately.

4. Moving into the entry-level labour market

The number of study-permit holders working in accommodation and food services grew rapidly during the 2010s. Statistics Canada records approximately 5,230 working study-permit holders in the industry in 2010. By 2019, the number had reached approximately 43,650. That is an increase of more than eightfold in less than a decade.

By 2019, the number of working study-permit holders in accommodation and food services was approximately 1.6 times the combined number of temporary foreign workers employed in the industry through the higher-skill and lower-skill temporary foreign worker categories examined by Statistics Canada. This provides important evidence about scale. International students had become a meaningful source of labour in an industry that is also an important source of employment for young and entry-level workers.

Statistics Canada also found substantial occupational overlap. Among non-permanent residents aged 20 to 24 who held only a study permit and had worked, approximately 58.9% were employed in sales and service occupations. Among the rest of Canada's population aged 20 to 24, the comparable share was approximately 39.6%.

The evidence therefore establishes something more specific than simply saying that international students were working in Canada. A substantial portion were working in industries and occupations that also employ large numbers of young Canadians. That establishes labour-market overlap. It does not establish that international students displaced Canadian youth from jobs.

To investigate that possibility, we need to compare this growth with what actually happened to youth unemployment over the same period.

5. What happened to youth unemployment?

The growth of international-student employment might suggest a straightforward hypothesis: if substantially more international students entered the Canadian labour market, youth unemployment should have increased as competition for jobs intensified. The historical record is not that simple. Canada's study-permit population grew dramatically during the 2000s and 2010s. Yet over much of the same period, youth unemployment did not rise.

In 2005, when approximately 170,000 people held Canadian study permits at year end, the unemployment rate among people aged 15 to 24 was approximately 12.4%. By 2019, the study-permit population had grown to approximately 638,000. Youth unemployment was lower, at approximately 10.7%.

There were also periods when youth unemployment rose substantially without a comparable increase in international students. During the 2008-2009 recession, for example, youth unemployment increased sharply even though Canada's international-student population was much smaller than it would become during the following decade.

The COVID-19 shock provides an even more dramatic example. Youth unemployment rose extraordinarily quickly in 2020 as businesses closed or reduced operations, demonstrating how strongly employment among young people can respond to changes in labour demand. More recently, the annual average youth unemployment rate increased from 10.1% in 2022 to 10.8% in 2023, 13.3% in 2024 and approximately 13.9% in 2025. These historical episodes matter because they prevent a simplistic interpretation of the recent data.

The long-run evidence does not show that increasing the number of international students automatically produces higher youth unemployment. Economic growth, recessions, job creation, population growth, wages, participation rates and changes in particular industries all affect the employment opportunities available to young people. But the national youth unemployment rate is also a very broad measure.

A more focused question is what happened to young people who were actively trying to find the kinds of temporary, summer and entry-level jobs in which international students were increasingly working.

6. Returning students tell a more focused story

Returning students provide a more targeted view of the youth labour market. Statistics Canada's summer labour-force measures identify students aged 15 to 24 who attended school full time in March and intended to return to school in the fall. This group is particularly relevant because many are looking for summer, part-time and entry-level employment. Their recent labour-market experience changed markedly after 2022.

During the summer of 2022, the May-to-August unemployment rate for returning students averaged approximately 10.4%. It then increased in each of the following three summers:

• 2023: 12.7%
• 2024: 16.5%
• 2025: 17.9%

The 2025 result was particularly notable. Statistics Canada reported that the summer unemployment rate for returning students was the highest since 2009, excluding the exceptional pandemic year of 2020. The deterioration was also visible in the underlying numbers. Between July 2022 and July 2025, the population of returning students increased by approximately 329,000.

Yet the number who were employed declined by approximately 46,000. At the same time, the number of unemployed returning students increased by approximately 117,000.

These figures describe a substantially more difficult summer labour market for students. They still do not tell us why it happened. The timing overlaps with historically high numbers of international students and a rapidly expanding temporary-resident population, but timing alone cannot establish causation. There is another major change that must be considered.

The demand for entry-level workers was also changing dramatically. To understand why 2022 represents such an important turning point, we need to look at what employers were experiencing at the time.

7. In 2022, employers were competing for workers

The summer of 2022 occurred in an unusually tight Canadian labour market. Employers were trying to fill historically high numbers of vacant positions, while unemployment was low and many service-sector businesses were still rebuilding their workforces following the pandemic. Canada's job-vacancy rate reached record levels during this period.

The pressure was especially relevant in industries such as accommodation and food services and retail trade — industries that employ large numbers of young people and, increasingly, international students.

In this environment, additional workers could help employers fill positions that might otherwise remain vacant. Against this backdrop, the federal government temporarily removed the 20-hour weekly limit on off-campus work for certain eligible international students. Beginning November 15, 2022, eligible students covered by the temporary policy could work more than 20 hours per week off campus while classes were in session. The government explicitly presented the measure as one way of helping employers address labour shortages.

This context matters when interpreting the exceptionally low unemployment rate among returning students in the summer of 2022. At that point, the central problem facing many employers was finding enough workers. International students, temporary foreign workers, young Canadians and other available workers were entering a labour market with unusually strong demand.

That situation did not last.

As the post-pandemic labour shortage eased, the number of available jobs began falling. The balance between employers looking for workers and workers looking for jobs started to shift.

8. By 2024, young workers were increasingly competing for jobs

The labour market that emerged after 2022 looked very different. Job vacancies declined substantially from their post-pandemic peak, including in industries that traditionally provide large numbers of entry-level jobs. The change becomes particularly clear when looking at positions requiring a high-school education or less. Between the second quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2025, Statistics Canada reported that vacancies in this education category fell by approximately:

• 90,400 positions in accommodation and food services, a decline of 58.9%;
• 56,800 positions in retail trade, a decline of 57.8%.

These are especially important industries for this analysis. Earlier sections showed that accommodation and food services and retail had become two of the largest sources of employment for international students. They are also industries in which young Canadians frequently seek first jobs, part-time employment and summer work. The labour market was therefore experiencing two important developments at the same time.

The supply of potential workers remained large, while the number of entry-level vacancies was falling sharply. This changes how additional labour supply should be interpreted. When employers have large numbers of unfilled positions, additional workers can be absorbed without necessarily creating substantial competition between groups of workers. When vacancies contract, the same number of workers may instead be competing for a smaller pool of available jobs.

The change was becoming visible in the experiences of young job seekers. Statistics Canada reported that in the summer of 2024, the unemployment rate for returning students averaged 16.5%, up considerably from 10.4% only two years earlier. By the summer of 2025 it had reached 17.9%.

This does not demonstrate that international students caused the increase. The decline in job vacancies itself provides a powerful explanation for why finding work became more difficult. But declining demand occurred while Canada was also experiencing unusually rapid population and labour-force growth. The question therefore becomes broader than whether international students were taking jobs from Canadian youth.

A better question is:

What happens when a rapidly expanding pool of potential workers encounters a shrinking pool of entry-level jobs?

9. More students were competing for fewer opportunities

The deterioration in the summer job market occurred while the number of Canadian students potentially looking for work was also increasing. Between July 2022 and July 2025, the population of returning students aged 15 to 24 increased by approximately 329,000. But employment did not increase with it. Over the same period, the number of employed returning students declined by approximately 46,000, while the number classified as unemployed increased by approximately 117,000.

These numbers help explain why the recent youth labour market feels so different from the worker-shortage environment of 2022. There were more returning students potentially seeking employment, but fewer of them were finding work. At the same time, as the previous section showed, vacancies in two industries particularly important to entry-level workers — accommodation and food services and retail trade — were falling sharply. The resulting pressure therefore came from both directions:

more potential workers and fewer available entry-level jobs.

This is an important qualification when considering the role of international students. Canadian students themselves were part of the increase in labour supply. International students were another part. And neither group existed in isolation from the much larger changes occurring in Canada's population and temporary workforce.

To understand the scale of those changes, the analysis has to widen beyond study permits.

10. International students were part of a much larger population surge

The rapid increase in international students occurred within a much broader expansion of Canada's non-permanent-resident population. Statistics Canada estimates that the number of non-permanent residents increased from approximately 1.3 million in the third quarter of 2021 to approximately 3.0 million in the third quarter of 2024. That represents an increase of approximately 130% in only three years.

The scale and speed of the increase were substantial. Between July 2022 and July 2023 alone, Canada's estimated non-permanent- resident population increased by approximately 698,000. Another increase of approximately 803,000 occurred between July 2023 and July 2024. But these numbers cannot simply be labelled "international students."

The non-permanent-resident population includes several groups:

• study-permit holders;
• work-permit holders;
• people holding both work and study permits;
• asylum claimants and protected persons;
• family members and other temporary residents.

This distinction is critical. International students were one source of additional potential labour during this period, but they were not the only one. Statistics Canada found that the number of temporary foreign workers had already increased from approximately 356,000 in 2011 to approximately 845,000 in 2021.

Study-permit holders with or without work permits accounted for approximately 46% of that increase, while work permits issued through the International Mobility Program accounted for another approximately 47%.

The demographic composition of the non-permanent-resident population also makes its growth particularly relevant to the labour market. Non-permanent residents are disproportionately concentrated in younger, working-age groups and have relatively high labour-force participation. The rapid expansion of this population therefore represented more than population growth alone. It substantially increased the number of potential workers in Canada.

That does not mean every non-permanent resident was working, nor that every additional worker was competing for an entry-level job. But it does mean that the post-pandemic Canadian labour market was absorbing an unusually rapid increase in potential labour supply at almost exactly the time that job vacancies began retreating from their 2022 peak. International students were an important part of that story.

They were not the whole story.

11. International education also feeds Canada's post-study workforce

International students can participate in Canada's labour market while studying, but their connection to the workforce often does not end when their studies do. For many graduates, international education can form the beginning of a multi-stage pathway:

international study → employment while studying → graduation → post-graduation work authorization → continued Canadian employment

The Post-Graduation Work Permit Program is particularly important to this transition. Statistics Canada found that the number of Post-Graduation Work Permit holders increased from approximately 33,100 in 2010 to approximately 269,700 in 2021. Post-Graduation Work Permit holders' share of International Mobility Program work-purpose permit holders increased from approximately 6% to 28% over the same period.

The connection becomes even clearer when study-related categories are considered together. Statistics Canada estimates that study-related permit holders — including people with work permits for study purposes, people who later participated in the Post-Graduation Work Permit Program, and spouses of study-permit holders — represented approximately 60% of temporary foreign workers in 2021. In 2011, the comparable share was approximately 24%.

This does not mean that 60% of temporary foreign workers in 2021 were international students currently attending school. It means that international education had become closely connected to a much larger portion of Canada's temporary workforce through study, accompanying family members and post-graduation employment. That distinction matters when considering labour supply.

If the analysis counted only people currently holding study permits, it would miss former international students who had moved into post-graduation work authorization while remaining active in the Canadian labour market. The labour-market footprint associated with international education is therefore broader — and lasts longer — than the study-permit population alone suggests.

12. Lower study-permit inflows do not immediately reduce labour supply

Canada has since moved to reduce the growth of its international-student population. But fewer new study permits do not produce an equally rapid reduction in the number of temporary residents already living, studying or working in Canada. This is the difference between a flow and a stock. A newly issued study permit adds to the flow of people entering or remaining in the international-student system.

The stock includes people who already hold valid permits. Those people may subsequently:

• continue studying;
• extend their temporary status;
• obtain another study permit;
• move to a work permit;
• enter the Post-Graduation Work Permit Program;
• become permanent residents;
• leave Canada.

Statistics Canada found this persistence clearly when it followed year-end study-permit populations over subsequent years. Among study-permit holders in the cohorts examined, approximately 78% to 85% still had non-permanent-resident status one year later. Even three years later, approximately 52% to 59% remained non-permanent residents.

Increasingly, those who remained did so under a new temporary status rather than their original study permit. Statistics Canada identifies continued study and participation in the Post-Graduation Work Permit Program as likely explanations for the relatively high retention of study-permit holders in temporary status. This helps explain an apparent contradiction in recent numbers. Between 2023 and 2024, newly issued study permits fell by approximately 24%.

Yet the year-end stock of study-permit holders declined by only approximately 4%. At the same time, the year-end stock of International Mobility Program work permit holders increased by approximately 17%, while the stock of Temporary Foreign Worker Program permit holders increased by approximately 26%.

Reducing international-student admissions can therefore slow future growth without immediately reversing the labour-supply expansion that has already occurred. There is also an important limitation to these figures. Year-end permit stocks measure valid immigration status. They do not confirm that every person holding a valid permit was physically present in Canada on December 31.

The figures should therefore be interpreted as measures of legal permit status rather than exact counts of workers physically present in Canada. Even with that qualification, the evidence demonstrates why the labour-market effects associated with a period of very high international-student and temporary-resident growth can persist after new admissions begin falling.

13. So, did international students cause higher youth unemployment?

After examining twenty years of study-permit growth, international-student employment, youth unemployment, job vacancies and temporary-resident population growth, the evidence does not support a simple yes-or-no answer. There is little support for the claim that increasing international-student numbers automatically produce higher youth unemployment. The long-term record contradicts that interpretation.

Canada's study-permit population increased substantially between 2005 and 2019, while the national youth unemployment rate was lower at the end of the period than at the beginning. Youth unemployment also rose sharply during periods such as the 2008-2009 recession and the COVID-19 pandemic for reasons clearly associated with broader economic shocks. International-student growth therefore cannot, by itself, explain movements in youth unemployment. But that is not the end of the analysis.

The evidence also shows that international students became much more significant participants in Canada's labour market. Their numbers increased dramatically. A growing share reported employment income. Their employment became increasingly concentrated in accommodation and food services, retail trade and sales and service occupations.

Those are also important sources of employment for young Canadians.

The significance of that overlap depends partly on the state of the labour market. During the worker shortages of 2022, employers were trying to fill unusually large numbers of vacant positions. Additional workers could be absorbed into a labour market in which demand for labour was exceptionally strong. After 2022, that environment changed.

Entry-level vacancies contracted sharply while the population of potential workers remained large. At the same time, unemployment among returning students increased from 10.4% in the summer of 2022 to 17.9% in 2025.

The evidence therefore supports a more nuanced conclusion. International students did not create Canada's recent youth-employment problem on their own. But they formed part of a substantially larger pool of workers participating in some of the same industries and occupations as young Canadians at a time when the number of available entry-level jobs was shrinking.

14. What the evidence supports

The strongest conclusion from these data is not that one group of workers "took" jobs from another. Labour markets are more complicated than that. Instead, the evidence points to a change in the balance between labour supply and labour demand.

Labour supply increased

Over the period examined:

• Canada's international-student population grew dramatically;
• international students became increasingly active in paid employment;
• study-related pathways expanded into post-graduation employment;
• the domestic returning-student population also grew;
• Canada's broader non-permanent-resident population increased rapidly.

Entry-level labour demand weakened

After the exceptionally tight labour market of 2022:

• job vacancies declined;
• vacancies requiring high-school education or less fell particularly sharply in accommodation and food services and retail trade;
• employment conditions became more difficult for young workers;
• returning-student unemployment increased substantially.

These developments occurred simultaneously. That matters. An increase in labour supply does not necessarily create unemployment when employers are expanding and vacancies are plentiful. But when labour demand weakens, a larger pool of potential workers can mean greater competition for the jobs that remain.

The evidence assembled here therefore supports the following interpretation:

International students became a significant additional source of labour in several industries that also employ large numbers of young Canadians. Their growth formed part of a much broader expansion of Canada's labour supply. When entry-level labour demand weakened sharply after 2022, a larger pool of potential workers was seeking opportunities in a labour market with substantially fewer entry-level vacancies.

This conclusion is deliberately narrower than saying international students caused the increase in youth unemployment. The available descriptive statistics can establish scale, timing and labour-market overlap. They cannot establish how much unemployment one group of workers caused another.

15. What we still cannot know from these data

This analysis is descriptive rather than causal. The datasets can show how Canada's international-student population, temporary-resident population, employment patterns, job vacancies and youth labour-market outcomes changed over time. They cannot tell us what would have happened under a different immigration or labour-market policy. In particular, the available evidence cannot determine:

• how many young Canadians, if any, were directly displaced from employment by international students;

• what Canada's youth unemployment rate would have been if fewer international students had been permitted to work;

• what employers would have done if additional sources of labour had not been available;

• whether employers would instead have increased wages, reduced operating hours, automated tasks, changed hiring requirements or left positions vacant;

• how much of the post-2022 increase in labour-market competition resulted from international students rather than other temporary residents, permanent immigration, domestic population growth or weaker labour demand;

• whether the relationship differs significantly between provinces, cities, age groups or individual industries.

Answering those questions would require a different kind of research. A causal analysis might compare regions or industries with different levels of exposure to international-student employment while controlling for economic growth, population change, wages, industry composition and other factors. That is beyond the purpose of this Explorer. The goal here is narrower: to establish what the available public data actually show.

And those data reveal a significant transformation. Over two decades, international education evolved from being primarily an education story into something that was also increasingly connected to Canada's labour market. For much of that period, the Canadian economy absorbed that growth without a corresponding increase in youth unemployment. The period after 2022 was different.

The evidence presented here points to a more consequential conclusion. The rapid growth in international students participating in Canada's labour market placed additional competitive pressure on employment opportunities for Canadian youth, particularly in entry-level industries where both groups were increasingly concentrated.

That pressure became more significant after 2022. The population of young people seeking work was growing while job vacancies in accommodation and food services and retail were falling sharply. At the same time, Canada had a historically large population of study-permit holders and other temporary residents participating in, or potentially available to, the labour market.

It is therefore difficult to argue that this additional labour supply had no negative effect on employment prospects for Canadian youth. More workers competing within a shrinking entry-level job market changes the conditions faced by job seekers, and the evidence presented here indicates that international students were a significant part of that expanded labour supply.

The magnitude of the effect cannot be isolated from these descriptive data alone. Weaker hiring, changing consumer demand, growth in the Canadian youth population, other temporary-worker programs and broader economic conditions also contributed.

The evidence therefore does not support the claim that international students alone caused Canada's deterioration in youth employment. It does, however, support a more measured but still important conclusion:

the rapid expansion of international-student participation in the labour market was one contributing factor that increased competition for employment at a time when entry-level opportunities were becoming substantially less plentiful.