An immigration eligibility calculator takes the facts you type in and checks them against a country's published immigration rules. Its accuracy has two halves, and only one belongs to the tool. The rules half can be exact: published criteria are arithmetic and conditions, and a tool that encodes them correctly applies them the same way every time. The facts half is yours, and a calculator only ever knows what you typed: it cannot see your degree certificate, your bank letters or your police record. So a well-built calculator tells you precisely where your answers sit against today's published rules. It cannot tell you what an officer will decide.

Who this is for

You are early in a move abroad, you have found a points calculator or an eligibility checker, and you want to know how much weight to put on the number it gave you. This page explains what any such tool can and cannot do, then how ours is built, so you can judge it rather than trust it.

What a calculator can genuinely do

Three things, and they are worth having.

It applies published rules consistently: the same answers produce the same result, whoever runs them. That sounds unremarkable until you have asked one question of three people.

It does arithmetic that is easy to get wrong by hand. Canada's Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) criteria, the score IRCC uses to rank skilled candidates, run to several interacting tables, and every factor changes value depending on whether a partner comes with you. New Zealand's Skilled Migrant Category (SMC) awards points for qualifications, occupational registration, income or New Zealand work experience, and you claim from one of those, not all.

It compares many routes against one set of answers, which is the genuinely hard part by hand, because each government page describes its own programme and none tells you which others you also fit.

What no calculator can do

It cannot verify your documents. Whether your qualification is assessed as equivalent, whether your bank letter shows what the officer needs, whether your employer's letter proves the duties you claim: none of that is knowable from a form. A calculator reads your claim about yourself.

It cannot weigh discretion. Many decisions rest on an officer's judgement about genuineness, intent or credibility. There is no points value for that.

It cannot predict a future selection round. Both countries invite candidates in rounds (Canada calls them draws), and the score needed moves from round to round. Any tool that tells you what next month's cut-off will be is guessing.

It cannot promise you an outcome. IRCC says it plainly on its own fraud page: "No one can guarantee you a job or a visa to Canada." Anyone selling a guaranteed visa is selling something that does not exist, and our guide to spotting immigration scams covers the other warning signs.

Where our rules come from, and how you can tell

Our rules are written from the official government requirement pages, the same ones linked above, and nowhere else. They are stored as dated rule sets rather than baked into the site, so when a rule changes we publish a new dated version, and every report records which version was applied to it, one requirement row at a time.

Our guides carry the same discipline. On a guide you will find a line reading "Checked against official sources on" with a date: the day a person opened those pages and confirmed what they say. A guide with no such line has not been re-checked since it was written, and says so by staying silent rather than by showing a date nobody earned.

Will the free calculator agree with the paid report?

Yes, deliberately. The free CRS calculator and the free SMC points calculator run the same scoring code the full report runs, so the score on the free page is the score the report shows for the same answers. If you want the numbers explained first, our guides to how the CRS score works and to the Skilled Migrant Category walk through them.

What the free tools deliberately do not do is tell you whether you meet a programme's requirements. A free page asks a handful of questions; a programme's rules read far more facts. So the calculators show the computation and name what they did not ask, rather than handing you a verdict they are not entitled to give.

There is no single yes or no on the report

The report never reduces you to one word. Every requirement of every route appears beside your own answer, with a plain state:

• Confirmed from your answers. We could check it, and it passes.
• Still to confirm. Nothing you told us settles this yet. You have not failed it; you can still arrange it or evidence it.
• Met on what you told us. It passes on your own word, which nobody has checked, so be ready to evidence it.
• Met on a stated assumption. It passes on an assumption we make and write down, not on anything you told us.
• Below the requirement, from what we have. A number was worked out and falls short. Also not a failure: it is a gap you can close.
• Not met. A fixed requirement more information cannot change, such as a programme that has stopped accepting applications.

Only the last of those is treated as bad news, because only the last of them is.

What we assume, and what we never asked

Some facts we deliberately do not ask about, because asking would mean a longer questionnaire for something most people at this stage cannot answer. Where a requirement passes on one of those, the report writes the assumption down instead of showing a green tick. The clearest example is work authorisation: where a Canadian route requires your Canadian work to have been authorised, our assessment assumes it was and says so, because if you did not hold a valid work permit your actual eligibility may differ. The step asking you to check it stays on your checklist, precisely because the pass rests on an assumption rather than evidence.

When a route is ruled out on facts we never collected, the report does not present that as a verdict either: it says the pathway was ruled out on things we did not ask you about, so it is not a judgement about you. The same runs the other way when the gap is ours. New Zealand publishes some lists using a different job-coding system from ours, so where a published job cannot be matched the report says the list could not be matched, rather than telling you your job does not qualify.

Why fixed rules rather than an AI chatbot

A chatbot generates plausible-sounding text, and it can be confidently wrong without telling you. We do not use AI to evaluate your profile. Your report is computed by a rules engine built from official government criteria, with two consequences you can check: the same answers always produce the same result, and every conclusion traces back to a published rule rather than a sentence a model invented.

Routes we deliberately do not assess

Some routes are not a matter of points or criteria at all. Refugee protection, protection where there is family violence, adoption and the temporary measures a government opens during a crisis all turn on circumstances and on a legal process, so our questionnaire and report do not assess them. We say so rather than quietly returning "not eligible", and we wrote a free guide to each. The routes we do not assess lists them.

The limits that remain

Laws change, sometimes at short notice. Thresholds, funds amounts and wage figures move, which is why we link the official page beside each rather than printing a number and letting it rot. We cannot see your documents. And nothing on this site decides anything: only the immigration authority you apply to does that, and our country pages for Canada and New Zealand say so beside every result.

What this means for your report

Three things you can rely on. The rules we check you against are the published government ones, and each report records the dated version it applied. The score on the free calculator is the score the report shows, because it is the same calculation. And where a pass rests on an assumption, or a route was ruled out on something we never asked, the report says so in plain words instead of hiding it in a verdict.

One thing you cannot rely on: a promise. We do not tell you that you qualify, and we do not tell you that you will be approved. Nobody honest will.

Next step

To see the machinery for yourself, answer the free questionnaire: it compares your answers against every route in the countries you pick, in one pass rather than one government page at a time. The questions are free, the eligibility summary at the end is free, and payment unlocks the full report with the requirement rows and checklist steps behind each one.