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The Alberta Advantage Immigration Program, usually shortened to AAIP, is the province of Alberta's own immigration program. Alberta uses it to put forward people it wants as permanent residents: workers who can fill jobs the province cannot fill locally, and people who plan to buy or start a business there. If someone has told you to "look at Alberta" or to "get a provincial nomination", this is the program they mean.
You are already working in Alberta on a work permit, or you have an Express Entry profile and wonder whether Alberta might pick you, or you are thinking about a business or a farm in the province. It is also for anyone comparing provinces: Saskatchewan's program has its own post, and the Canada hub lists every route our report assesses.
Most Canadian provinces run a Provincial Nominee Program, a way of choosing immigrants who match local needs. Our post on the Provincial Nominee Program covers how the system works across Canada; this one is only about Alberta.
Alberta's official page describes the AAIP as "an economic immigration program that nominates people for permanent residence in Alberta" (Alberta Advantage Immigration Program). Permanent residence is the status that lets you live and work anywhere in Canada without a time limit. Nominates means Alberta puts your name forward: a nomination is not permanent residence by itself. The same page says that Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC, the federal immigration department) handles the permanent residence application and that the Government of Canada makes the final decision. The province chooses you; the country approves you.
A nomination helps in one of two ways:
Alberta's official page lists four worker streams.
Alberta describes this stream as being for "temporary foreign workers who are already working full-time in Alberta and have a full-time job offer from an Alberta employer in an eligible occupation" (Alberta Opportunity Stream).
Your work permit matters here. Alberta says you need a positive Labour Market Impact Assessment (an LMIA, a federal document your employer obtains to show no Canadian was available for the job) or one of the accepted LMIA-exempt work permits. The stream then checks your residency and work permit type, your occupation, your language level, your education, your Alberta job offer and your work experience. You apply on your own through the AAIP portal.
This stream lets Alberta, in its own words, "nominate a limited number of qualified candidates" from IRCC's Express Entry system (Alberta Express Entry Stream). You need an active Express Entry profile and a CRS score of at least 300 (eligibility page).
The other condition is your occupation. Your main occupation in your Express Entry profile must belong to one of the stream's named pathways or to a provincial priority. As of this post, Alberta names three pathways, the Dedicated Health Care Pathway, the Accelerated Tech Pathway and the Law Enforcement Pathway, and three priority sectors: construction, agriculture and aviation. A job offer from Alberta is not always required, but if you are invited because you hold one, you and your employer must meet Alberta's job offer requirements. Alberta warns that its priorities and selection approaches "are subject to change without prior notice".
Alberta describes this stream as a "community-driven approach" to attracting newcomers to rural Alberta (Rural Renewal Stream). A rural community must first apply to Alberta to become "designated". Once designated, it can work with local employers to recruit workers and endorse them. An endorsement is a letter from the community saying it supports you and your job there, and without one you cannot apply under this stream.
This stream is for workers in Alberta's tourism and hospitality industry. Which employers and occupations count is set out on the stream's official page (Tourism and Hospitality Stream).
Alberta's official page lists four streams for people who will own a business rather than hold a job (Alberta Advantage Immigration Program):
For the worker streams, you do not simply apply. You first submit an expression of interest: a profile in Alberta's portal that says who you are and which stream interests you. Alberta then holds draws, meaning it picks people from that pool and sends them an invitation to apply.
Alberta's processing page is candid about how this works (AAIP processing information):
The number of people Alberta can nominate each year is set by the federal government. Alberta publishes its current allocation, and how much of it has been used, on the same processing page. We link the figure rather than print it because it changes through the year.
Alberta's priorities are consistent across its pages. It wants a job offer from an Alberta employer for most worker streams (see whether you need a job offer). It values work experience in the province. And it prioritises occupations in sectors it has named: for 2026, the processing page says Alberta will prioritise draws and nominations for occupations in health care, technology, construction, manufacturing, aviation and agriculture, and for communities designated under the Rural Renewal Stream.
Your occupation is described using Canada's NOC system, and its TEER level (a scale of how much training the job needs) decides which streams and language levels apply to you. Our post on NOC codes and TEER levels explains how to find yours.
Our report assesses each of Alberta's eight streams as its own Canada pathway and shows, for each one, the requirements it checks beside your answers. Depending on the stream, those are your work permit and its kind, a full-time job offer from an Alberta employer, your work experience in Alberta, elsewhere in Canada or abroad and how recent it is, your occupation's TEER level and whether it sits on the stream's ineligible list, your language test level, and whether your education has been assessed as at least equal to Canadian high school. For the Alberta Express Entry Stream it checks for an Express Entry profile with the minimum score and an occupation in a priority pathway or sector. For the Rural Renewal Stream it checks for the community endorsement. For the entrepreneur streams it checks for a business plan, your net worth and planned investment, your ownership share and, where a stream needs one, a community support letter, an Alberta credential with a post-graduation work permit, a foreign degree with a letter from a designated agency, or farm equity and farm management experience.
The report separates what you already have from what you would still need to obtain, so a missing job offer or test result appears as a step rather than a dead end. It does not tell you whether Alberta will invite you; nobody outside the program can.
Answer our free questionnaire and you will see a free summary of your results, with every Alberta stream and every other Canadian route we assess laid out beside your answers. Start the questionnaire for Canada.
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