Ontario's Workforce Priority Stream awards up to 15 points for where the job is. Not where you live — where you will physically work.
The ladder has six bands, and this is the whole of it:
- Northern Ontario — 15 points
- Eastern Ontario — 10
- Central Ontario, outside the GTA — 10
- Southwestern Ontario — 10
- Inside the GTA, but not Toronto — 5
- City of Toronto — 0
Fifteen points out of a possible 130, decided by a postcode. The same person, the same employer, the same offer letter, moved from Sudbury to Toronto, is fifteen points worse off before anything else about them is considered.
Why this is the factor people get wrong
Most scoring factors are about you: your language test, your degree, your years of experience. You cannot change them this month. Location is the one substantial factor that is a *decision*, and it is the one nobody weighs, because the job search happens in a completely different mental compartment from the points calculation.
The person taking a Toronto offer over a Barrie offer for two dollars an hour more is making a trade they have not been shown. Two dollars an hour is real money. So is ten points.
The boundary is not where you think
Two traps, both common enough to be worth stating plainly.
Amalgamated Toronto still scores zero. North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke, East York and York are not adjacent municipalities that happen to be near Toronto. They were amalgamated into the City of Toronto in 1998 and they are Toronto for this purpose. A job in Scarborough scores what a job on Bay Street scores: nothing. This is the single most-missed case in the factor, because the names survived the merger and still read like separate towns.
"Inside the GTA" is worth 5, not 10. Durham, Halton, Peel and York Region are the GTA-but-not-Toronto band. Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Oshawa, Oakville — all 5. That is half of what the same job earns in London, Kingston or Barrie, and a third of what it earns in Thunder Bay.
So the real cliff is not at Toronto's border. It is at the GTA's:
| Where the job is | Points | |---|---| | Thunder Bay, Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins | 15 | | Ottawa, Kingston, Peterborough, London, Windsor, Hamilton, Barrie, Waterloo | 10 | | Mississauga, Brampton, Markham, Oshawa, Oakville | 5 | | Toronto — including Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke | 0 |
Ontario defines these bands by census division, not by what a place is called. Three names denote both a census division and an unrelated town, and they land in different bands: Perth County is southwestern, but the town of Perth is in Lanark, which is eastern. Simcoe County is central; the town of Simcoe is in Haldimand-Norfolk, which is southwestern. Durham Region is inside the GTA; the town of Durham is in Grey County, which is central. Resolve the census division before you resolve the points.
What fifteen points is actually worth
Ontario does not publish a cut-off, and anyone quoting you one is guessing — draw thresholds move every round. So the honest way to size this is against the grid itself, not against an invented pass mark.
Fifteen points is more than this stream awards for hourly wage at the very top of its scale. It is more than language ability at CLB 9. It equals the entire gap between a doctorate and a college certificate, twice over. On a 130-point grid, it is roughly one point in nine.
It is also the only one of those you can change by taking a different offer.
What to do about it
Not "refuse Toronto jobs". People take the work that exists, and a job in Toronto beats no job anywhere.
- Price the offer in points as well as dollars before you accept. A $3/hour raise to move into Toronto is a real cost you can now put a number on.
- Check the census division, not the city name. Especially for anywhere with a county-and-town name collision.
- Remember the amalgamated five. If the office is in Scarborough or North York, the job is in Toronto for scoring purposes no matter what the address says.
- Score it both ways before deciding. That is exactly what the calculator is for, and it takes about a minute.
Sources
Point values read from the Ontario Workforce Priority Stream scoring tables on ontario.ca, verified 2026-07-30 and cross-checked against CIC News and Moving2Canada, which agree. The six-band regionalization table and the census-division mapping are Ontario's own; the amalgamation note reflects the 1998 creation of the City of Toronto.
Every point value on this page is generated from the same machine-readable copy of the grid that drives the calculator, so the two cannot disagree. Where ontario.ca disagrees with either, ontario.ca is right — tell us and it gets fixed.