The Federal Court of Canada closed 17,238 immigration and refugee proceedings in 2025, down from 22,151 the year before, according to the quarterly activity summaries the court publishes on its own website. That is a drop of 22.2 per cent in files disposed of, and it came in the same calendar year that new immigration filings rose to 28,465 from 24,667, an increase of 15.4 per cent.
The rise in filings has been described publicly, including by Chief Justice Paul Crampton, who has called the volume extraordinary. The fall in output has not. Read together, the two figures account for what happened to the backlog. Immigration and refugee files pending before the court stood at 11,916 on Dec. 31, 2024, according to the court’s statistics for that quarter. A year later the same table put the figure at 23,099, an increase of 93.8 per cent. By June 30, 2026, the most recent period the court has published, it was 28,366, or 138 per cent above the December 2024 level in 18 months.
The court’s published tables do not explain why dispositions fell, and the court does not publish a reason alongside the numbers. What the tables do show is that the decline was not matched anywhere else on the docket. Across all subject matters the court disposed of 24,519 proceedings in 2024 and 20,315 in 2025. Almost the entire difference of 4,204 files is accounted for by the 4,913-file drop on the immigration side.
Immigration now crowds out everything else the Federal Court does. Immigration and refugee matters were 76.3 per cent of all files pending before the court at the end of 2024, 82.2 per cent at the end of 2025 and 83.5 per cent as of June 30, 2026. On that date the court had 33,956 files pending in total, of which 28,366 were immigration. Every other category the court hears, Aboriginal law, admiralty, citizenship, Crown litigation, intellectual property, general judicial review and statutory appeals, came to 5,590 files combined.
A second figure in the same tables is easy to miss. Immigration matters reach the Federal Court as applications for leave and judicial review, which means a judge must first grant leave before the case is heard on its merits. The court granted leave in 2,261 immigration applications in 2024, 2,031 in 2025 and 964 in the first six months of 2026. Measured against dispositions the rate is steady, at 10.2 per cent in 2024, 11.8 per cent in 2025 and 11.0 per cent in the first half of 2026, so the court has not become measurably harder to get past. Measured against filings it is 9.2 per cent, 7.1 per cent and 6.9 per cent. Roughly nine in 10 people who file never reach a hearing on the substance of their case.
Filings themselves have now levelled off. The court recorded 14,053 new immigration proceedings in the first half of 2026, which annualizes to about 28,100 and is essentially flat against 2025. The pile still grew, because the court closed only 8,737 of them in the same six months, adding 5,316 files in half a year.
Cross-referenced against the department whose decisions generate most of these cases, the picture is of two queues feeding each other. Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada reported 1.54 million applications not yet finalized as of June 30, 2026, the same date as the court’s latest statistics. Of those, 249,555 economic permanent residence applications, 163,780 family applications and 299,460 protection applications were outstanding. IRCC states that 23 per cent, 41 per cent and 45 per cent of those categories respectively are not being processed at all but are waiting for space under the annual levels plan. On the department’s own figures that is roughly 259,000 permanent residence applications sitting by design rather than by delay.
One thing the court’s statistics cannot show is how many of its immigration files are applications to compel a decision rather than to overturn one. The published tables break immigration into exactly three lines, actions, applications for leave in refugee cases and applications for leave in non-refugee cases. There is no separate entry for delay or mandamus cases, so the category that immigration counsel most often describe as growing cannot be traced in the court’s own numbers.
Sources: Federal Court of Canada, Statistics (December 31, 2024), Statistics (December 31, 2025), Statistics (March 31, 2026) and Statistics (June 30, 2026); Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Inside IRCC’s application processing system, data as of June 30, 2026. Percentage changes and the 259,000 figure are calculated from the published figures.
