Post-Study Work Visas: How Long You Actually Get, by Country

The post-study work visa has become the single number students fixate on most, and for good reason — it's genuinely the bridge between a degree and a career abroad. But comparing raw months without the conditions attached to them is how students pick a destination for the wrong reasons. Here's what each major country actually offers right now, not the version that was true two years ago.

Raw duration is the number everyone compares first, and it's genuinely useful — but it hides two things that matter more for anyone actually planning a career, not just a gap year abroad.

Does the work count toward something. In Canada, essentially all PGWP-period work counts as Canadian experience feeding directly into Express Entry, the points-based permanent residency system. In the UK, by contrast, time on the Graduate Route does not count toward Indefinite Leave to Remain at all — you have to switch onto a Skilled Worker visa first, which carries its own salary threshold, currently around £38,700, that a meaningful share of graduate-level jobs don't clear. Germany's job-seeker period has the same disconnect: the 18 months buys you time to find a job, but the clock toward actual settlement only starts once you're on a Blue Card, not during the search itself.

Whether a job is required to get the visa at all. Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Germany's job-seeker visa all grant open work authorization with no job offer required — you graduate, apply, and search freely. The US is structurally different: OPT requires you to be actively employed or job-seeking within specific windows, and progression beyond it depends on an employer sponsoring you into the H-1B lottery, which is a genuinely different risk profile than the open-search model most other destinations offer.

Australia got noticeably more expensive and more restrictive. The fee increase to AUD $4,600 makes the Subclass 485 the most expensive post-study work visa among major destinations, and the tightened age ceiling and higher English bar both narrow who qualifies compared to even a year ago. Anyone budgeting a full Australia plan needs to price this in as a hard cost, not an afterthought at the end.

Canada added a language gate but kept the core offer stable. IRCC froze the list of PGWP-eligible programs for the full year in 2026, which is genuinely good news for planning after several years of frequent, disruptive changes — but the CLB 7 English/French requirement, in place since November 2024, means students now need to clear a real language bar before applying, not just meet it implicitly through having studied in English.

The UK's deadline is the one with a real countdown attached. Applications submitted by 31 December 2026 still secure the full 2-year Graduate Route; anyone whose course starts from January 2027 gets 18 months. This is the single most time-sensitive fact in this whole comparison.

Duration matters, but it's the third question, not the first. The first is whether you actually want to settle long-term or just gain a few years of international experience — Canada's PGWP-to-Express Entry pipeline is built for the former; the UK and US routes require a deliberate additional step (Skilled Worker sponsorship, H-1B) that isn't guaranteed. The second is whether your specific field has real hiring demand in that market — a generous visa window is worth little against a job market that isn't hiring your specialization. Only once those two are answered does raw visa length become the deciding factor between otherwise-comparable options.

Across the students we place every year, the pattern holds: the ones who chose their destination around the post-study pathway, not just the number, are consistently the ones who look back satisfied with the decision three years later — regardless of which country they picked.