The five designated ECA organisations, line by line: what each one publishes about price, speed, documents, scope and appeals

Most comparisons of Canada’s five designated ECA organisations put a price next to each name and stop. That comparison is not sound, because the five do not price the same thing: two charge per credential, three charge per application, one of the five quotes a figure that excludes 13 per cent sales tax, and two include tax in the number they publish. The published waiting times are further apart than the prices — from 15 business days to 20 weeks — and the rule about who is allowed to physically touch your transcript is the opposite at two of them.

This page summarises publicly available rules from each organisation’s own pages, read on 3 September 2026. It does not carry out or replace an assessment, it does not recommend an organisation, and it does not predict any outcome. Everything changes; check the page before you pay.

The five, as IRCC lists them

IRCC names five designated organisations — CES (University of Toronto), ICAS, WES, IQAS and ICES — and adds a second list of three designated professional bodies that are compulsory for three occupations. Its own summary of the difference between the five is one sentence: “Processing times and costs may vary by organization or professional body.” That sentence is the whole subject of this page. The full designation list and the professional-body carve-outs are covered separately in who IRCC designates for an ECA.

Price: read the unit, then read the tax line

	Published headline price	What the price covers	Stated tax treatment
CES	$241.50 per application	Since 22 September 2025, “You can now submit up to two credentials with a single application fee”	Not stated as inclusive or exclusive on the fees page
ICAS	$231 per package	Two original reports, an electronic copy, IRCC secure access	“(tax included)” printed against every fee
WES	C$264	Electronic report, one official paper report, IRCC access, storage	“Price does not include delivery fees, additional fees, or a 13% Harmonized Sales Tax (HST)”
IQAS	$260 for one credential, “$100 per credential” for each additional in the same application	Assessment certificate	Not stated; “All IQAS fees are non-refundable”
ICES	$200 CAD per educational credential	Two original hard copies, IRCC secure access, regular mail postage	Fees stated “in Canadian dollars (CAD)”

Three further charges are easy to miss because they sit on different pages:

• CES lists a separate “ECA Administration Fee” of $45, described as “A non-refundable application fee required for all ECA applications and services submitted”, and adds that if your application “is deemed out of scope to assess by CES, and cancelled, refunds will still be subject to this fee.” CES’s fee table does not say in so many words whether the $45 is inside or on top of the $241.50; we are not going to guess, and neither should any comparison site.
• IQAS charges an administration fee of $25 on top of the application fee, and courier is compulsory in the sense that a delivery fee is listed for every application: $25 within Canada, $90 international.
• ICES includes “Standard regular mail postage (no tracking)” inside the $200 and treats courier as optional: $26 within Canada, $75 US and international.

Delivery is where the tax-inclusive and tax-exclusive numbers stop being comparable at all. ICAS quotes courier at $35 in Canada, $40 to the USA and $85 international, tax included; CES quotes $65 within Canada and continental USA and $83 international, plus $21 for a certified electronic copy. A full-cost walk-through, including duplicates and third-party charges, is set out in what an ECA actually costs.

Speed: the published numbers are not measuring the same clock

	Published time for an immigration ECA	Rush
IQAS	“ECA assessments take about 15 business days”	$250; “5 to 7 business days”; a daily quota applies
CES	“40 Business Days” on the process page; “7 Business Days” where documents arrive through an approved secure digital platform; “Our current average processing time is 60 business days” on the home page	Not offered
WES	Document verification “Typically 2 weeks”, then evaluation “Typically 1 week (complex evaluations may take up to 2 weeks)”	Not offered
ICES	“The current estimated processing timeline for an ECA is 7 weeks”	“ICES does not offer any type of rush or expedited service”
ICAS	“The average processing time is 20 weeks after all required documents are received in our office”	“Rush services are not available”

Two things make these numbers less comparable than they look. First, every one of the five starts the clock when the documents are complete, not when you apply and pay — ICES says the timeline “is not necessarily counted from the date the application is submitted, but rather when all items are received”, and CES says the same in different words. Second, WES is the only one that publishes its time as two internal stages rather than one total. The detail, including the one page where an agency’s own two numbers disagree, is in ECA processing times by agency.

Documents: who is allowed to have touched the envelope

This is the sharpest published divergence between the five, and it is not a matter of interpretation.

• ICES requires that the document “has never been handled by client, client’s friend, relative or any third party”, and must be “Mailed or emailed from your educational institution directly to ICES office”.
• ICAS agrees: “Documents submitted to ICAS in a sealed envelope by an applicant or another third party are not considered to be official documents and will not be accepted in lieu of official documents.”
• CES disagrees in writing: on its country pages the accepted routes include “You can forward the original institution-sealed envelope to our office if the institution has released the official transcript to you.”
• IQAS also allows it, as a fallback: “If your issuing authority cannot mail or courier transcripts directly, you may mail or courier the sealed envelope with your official transcripts to IQAS… You cannot open the envelope.”

The same split appears in how many countries each one writes rules for. On the day we read them, ICES’s country page listed 86 countries, CES’s country tool listed 113 plus a “Country Not Listed” option, ICAS’s country selector listed 194, and the WES required-documents tool listed 223 countries and territories. This is not a quality ranking — ICES says plainly that “If your country is not listed, it does not mean we cannot assess your country” — but it does mean the odds that your country has a written, published rule differ a great deal between them. That is the subject of ECA document requirements by source country and agency.

Scope: three of the five publish a list of what they will not touch

Read these before you pay, because they are the most common reason an application is cancelled with the fee retained.

• ICES publishes the longest list, and it is explicit: trade qualifications, military training, second language training, “Professional licenses or titles such as a Chartered Accountant”, exam-based qualifications, apprenticeships, work or life experience, “Continuing education courses taken at non-recognized institutions”, non-credit professional development, and “Incomplete or provisional academic credentials”. It also sets a floor: the credential “must be at least comparable to one-year of full-time study.”
• IQAS publishes its own, differently drawn list: incomplete credentials, “anything below secondary or high school level”, non-academic credentials, “professional qualifications – for example, chartered accountant designation”, “vocational or trades training”, and “credentials obtained in Canada”.
• ICAS states that its reports “do not include in-service professional development, work experience or professional examinations”, and adds one that catches people out: “Medical specialization is beyond the scope of ICAS Assessment Reports and will not be included.”
• CES draws the line by formality: reports “include only educational credentials received through formal education completed at academic institutions. Non-formal and/or non-academic qualifications will not be assessed or included in the ECA report.”
• WES states on its ECA page that “WES does not evaluate occupational or trade qualifications”, and in its Terms and Conditions reserves a broader discretion: “WES reserves the right not to evaluate documents from certain institutions in its sole and absolute discretion.”

If you disagree with the result: four different routes and three different prices

	Route	Deadline	Fee
CES	Review by the assessor and/or peer reviewers, then a written appeal to an Appeal Panel	90 days from the report date	$199, refunded if the appeal succeeds
IQAS	One reassessment per application, decided “by an IQAS assessor who was not involved in the original decision”	Within one year of the original decision; reply within 30 business days	$200, “automatically refunded only if the reassessment results in a change”
ICAS	Written review by the Assessment and Research team, then formal appeal to the Chair of the Management Committee with an external consultant’s report	Contact within one year of the report date	$200, refunded if the appeal succeeds
ICES	“All applicants have one year to request a review of the assessment if they feel there are errors or an inaccurate result”	One year, free; “After one year there is a $75 to re-open the file”	Nil within the year
WES	We did not find a published review or appeal policy on any WES page we could open on 3 September 2026	—	—

The full comparison, including what each body says a review may and may not be used for, is in each agency’s review, reassessment and re-evaluation policy.

How to read the table above

Four cells are misread more often than the rest.

1. “Per credential” versus “per application” is a bigger difference than any headline price. If you are having one credential assessed, ICES at $200 and IQAS at $260 look like the cheapest and the dearest. If you are having two assessed, IQAS becomes $360 before fees, ICES becomes $400, and CES stays at one application fee. Work out your own number of credentials before comparing anything.
2. A tax-inclusive number and a tax-exclusive number are not the same currency. WES’s C$264 and ICAS’s $231 are not 33 dollars apart once 13 per cent HST and delivery are added to one of them and not the other.
3. “Processing time” is not “how long until I have the report.” None of the five counts the weeks or months your university takes to send documents, and none counts delivery. ICES says so directly: “processing times do not include the time it takes for the mail or courier service to deliver your final report.”
4. A published exclusion is not negotiable by paying more. IQAS states that fees “are required whether an assessment certificate is issued or not”, and ICES offers “No refunds… for cancelled ECA applications.”

What to do with this

1. Start from the body that has to accept the report, not from the price. If your occupation is architect, physician or pharmacist and you need a licence, IRCC requires a designated professional body instead, and every one of the five repeats this on its own site.
2. Read the exclusion list for the credential you actually hold before paying anything. Three of the five would decline a professional designation outright.
3. Check your country’s document rule at the agency you are considering, especially the question of who may send and who may have touched the envelope.
4. Note the review deadline and its cost before the report arrives, because two of the four published deadlines start running from the date of issue.
5. Do not treat a third-party comparison table — including this one — as current. Every number above is quoted from a page we read on 3 September 2026, and at least one of the five had a fee increase dated 1 September 2026 posted on its own news panel two days earlier.

What this page does not do

It does not tell you which organisation to use, and it does not say what any of them would report for your credential. Only the organisation you apply to can decide that, and it decides under its own policies; the reason those policies differ is set out in why two designated agencies can report the same credential differently. Paid immigration advice in Canada is a licensed activity, and nothing here is advice about an immigration application.