TCF Canada re-evaluation: what it costs, what it risks, and the deadline that closes it
The TCF is the one French test for Canadian immigration with a real paid re-marking of your writing and speaking. It is also the one where the score can come back lower, where the fee is never refunded, and where Canadian test centres have announced the route is closing for exams taken from 1 September 2026. Here is the process, the real prices, and an honest read on the odds.
Read this first: the route closes for exams taken from 1 September 2026
In July 2026, four independent official test centres published the same notice, relaying an instruction from France Éducation international: score review requests will no longer be accepted for TCF exams taken on or after 1 September 2026, while the system is modernised, with service expected to resume in autumn 2027. Alliance Française Ottawa, Concordia, Alliance Française Vancouver and Alliance Française San Francisco all say the same thing in near-identical wording.
The eligibility test is your exam date, not the date your results arrive. Sit the TCF on 2 September and there is no re-marking route at all, however your writing and speaking come back. If you already tested on or before 31 August 2026 and you are inside the one month window, you still have the option, but you should move now rather than wait for the deadline.
This is corroborated across four official centres, but we could not confirm it on a page hosted by France Éducation international itself, which blocks automated access. Verify with your own test centre before you plan around it.
The short answer
A TCF re-evaluation, officially a demande de recorrection, is a fresh marking of your expression écrite or expression orale by France Éducation international. You request it through the test centre where you sat the exam, in writing and in French, within about a month of your results, with one form and one fee per section. Canadian centres charge roughly CAD $90 to $200 per section, the fee is never refunded, and the answer takes four to six weeks. The catch that decides most cases: the revised score can be lower than the original, and it replaces it. Request one only when a human marked section is a clear outlier and the rest of your report can survive a bad outcome.
The rules at a glance
These come from the France Éducation international candidate manual for the TCF and from the published re-evaluation policies of accredited Canadian test centres. Fees, paperwork and deadlines are applied by the centre, so the details below can vary slightly depending on where you tested.
Writing and speaking only
Only expression écrite and expression orale can be re-marked. The two comprehension sections are optically scanned multiple choice, and France Éducation international states they never give rise to a score revision.
About one month to ask
The published window is one month after the certificates reach the test centre. Canadian centres word it as 30 days from the issue or receipt of your results.
Four to six weeks for an answer
Centres quote four to six weeks from the day the complete file reaches France Éducation international, and the exam owner allows up to a month and a half.
Never refunded
Alliance Française Ottawa states the fee is non-refundable regardless of whether the result is unchanged, revised upward, or revised downward. No official source anywhere promises a refund on an increase.
Your score can go down
This is the crucial difference from a CELPIP re-evaluation. The exam owner states the level may be lowered, and the new result is the one that counts. Your original attestation stops being valid.
One form and one fee per section
Writing and speaking are separate requests: two forms, two charges. Asking for both roughly doubles what you pay.
How to request a re-evaluation, step by step
There is no online portal for this. It is email, a PDF form and a payment, all through your own test centre, and the paperwork requirements are stricter than most candidates expect.
- 1
Contact the centre where you sat the exam
Re-evaluation runs through your test centre, not through France Éducation international directly and not through any candidate portal. Centres only handle their own candidates: Alliance Française Ottawa states plainly that it only processes requests from people who took the TCF at its Ottawa centre. Find the email address for exams on your centre's TCF page and ask for the re-evaluation form.
- 2
Decide which sections, knowing each one costs separately
Only expression écrite and expression orale are eligible. If you want both, you complete two distinct forms and pay two distinct charges. Requesting the section you are least confident about is rarely the right instinct; request the one where your result is most out of line with the rest of your report.
- 3
Complete the form in French, by hand where required
The request must be made in writing and in French. Centre requirements are strict and vary: Concordia, for example, states that the form needs a handwritten signature and that electronic signatures and initials are not accepted. A form rejected on a technicality burns days you do not have inside a 30 day window.
- 4
Pay the centre and send the complete file
Fees are set by each centre, not by France Éducation international, and range from about CAD $90 to CAD $200 per section in Canada. Pay first, then email the receipt with the completed form, following the subject line format your centre asks for.
- 5
Wait four to six weeks, and keep moving in parallel
The clock starts when the complete file reaches France Éducation international, not when you email your centre. If the score changes, a new attestation is issued and it supersedes the original, which then can no longer be used. If nothing changes, you have lost the fee and a month and a half.
What Canadian centres charge
France Éducation international lets each centre set and bill this fee, which is why the same service costs more than twice as much depending on where you tested. These are the published prices we could verify in July 2026, all per section.
Several centres publish nothing at all. We found no re-evaluation policy on the pages of Alliance Française Toronto, Edmonton or Manitoba. If you tested at one of those, you have to email and ask, and you should do it immediately rather than at the end of your window. Prices change, so treat this table as a guide and confirm with your centre.
How likely is a TCF re-evaluation to change anything?
Nobody publishes a success rate, and the honest answer is that the marking process is built specifically to make a change unlikely.
Your writing and speaking were already double marked, blind
The candidate manual states that every expression écrite script and every expression orale recording is corrected twice, by trained and accredited correctors working from standardised grids. Newer editions add that the two assessments are completely independent and double blind, and that where a significant gap appears between the two correctors, a third correction is carried out automatically. For the oral, the first assessment is the examiner in the room and the second is an independent corrector working from the recording. A re-evaluation is asking for a fourth opinion on a performance that has already had two or three.
The comprehension sections are simply not eligible
Compréhension orale and compréhension écrite are multiple choice, read by optical scanner. The published position is that the system permits no error and therefore never gives rise to a revision of those scores. If your problem is a listening or reading score, a re-evaluation is not the tool. Preparation and another sitting is.
Ignore the percentages you will see quoted elsewhere
Several prep-course marketing pages quote precise-sounding statistics, such as a specific share of appeals resulting in a lower mark, and attribute them to France Éducation international. We could not find any primary source for those numbers, and the same pages also publish a seven day deadline and a euro fee that every official source contradicts. Treat them as invented. Publicly shared first-hand outcomes for TCF Canada re-evaluations are genuinely scarce, and the ones that do exist include no change results as well as increases.
When a re-evaluation makes sense, and when it does not
Request it when
- Your expression écrite or expression orale result is a clear outlier: several points below your other abilities, or far below what you scored on previous sittings and practice tests.
- You are one NCLC level short of the threshold that decides your file, most often NCLC 7 for the French-language bonus or NCLC 9 for skill transferability.
- You performed fully: you spoke for the whole time in every task, respected the word counts, and stayed on topic. There is no obvious gap for a second corrector to find.
- Your other three abilities are comfortably above the level you need, so a downward revision on the section you are challenging would not sink the file on its own.
- You sat the exam on or before 31 August 2026, you are inside the one month window, and you can afford six weeks of waiting on top of that.
Skip it when
- The weak section is compréhension orale or compréhension écrite. Those are machine scored and are never re-marked.
- You need two levels. Re-marking moves a borderline judgement by a notch at most; it does not rewrite a performance.
- Your report is already marginal across the board. A single re-marked section will not carry it, and a full retake gives you four fresh scores for roughly the price of two re-evaluations.
- You already submitted the original attestation somewhere that matters. If the score is revised, the original stops being valid, and you have to update everything downstream.
- You have a deadline inside six weeks. The re-evaluation timeline is slower than simply sitting the test again after the minimum waiting period.
Re-evaluation vs retaking TCF Canada
Two re-evaluations cost most of a full retake, and only the retake gives you four fresh scores with no downside. That maths decides more cases than anything else on this page.
| Re-evaluation | Retake | |
|---|---|---|
| What it can change | One human marked section, up or down. Comprehension scores are untouchable. | All four abilities, since TCF Canada sections cannot be taken separately |
| Cost | About CAD $90 to $200 per section, never refunded. Both sections roughly doubles it. | About CAD $390 to $400 for the full test at Canadian centres |
| Time to a result | Four to six weeks after the complete file reaches France Éducation international | A minimum waiting period between sittings, then results in roughly two to four weeks |
| Risk | Real. The revised score can be lower, and it replaces the original, which stops being valid. | Your existing attestation stays valid for its full two years whatever the new one says |
| Best when | One human marked section is a clear outlier and everything else is already where you need it | More than one ability is short, the problem is comprehension, or you need certainty rather than a coin flip |
Check the level you are actually challenging
Before you pay for anything, confirm what your scores mean. TCF Canada reports the two comprehension sections on a calibrated 0 to 699 scale and the two expression sections as a mark out of 20 with a CEFR level. They are not the same scale, which trips up a lot of candidates. Listening and reading also have slightly different thresholds despite sharing a scale. These are the equivalencies IRCC publishes for Express Entry.
| NCLC / CLB | SpeakingExpression orale, /20 | WritingExpression écrite, /20 | ListeningCompréhension orale, /699 | ReadingCompréhension écrite, /699 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 and above | 16–20 | 16–20 | 549–699 | 549–699 |
| 9 | 14–15 | 14–15 | 523–548 | 524–548 |
| 8 | 12–13 | 12–13 | 503–522 | 499–523 |
| 7 | 10–11 | 10–11 | 458–502 | 453–498 |
| 6 | 7–9 | 7–9 | 398–457 | 406–452 |
| 5 | 6 | 6 | 369–397 | 375–405 |
| 4 | 4–5 | 4–5 | 331–368 | 342–374 |
NCLC 7 in all four abilities is the threshold for the additional French-language points that drive French-language Express Entry draws, and NCLC 9 is where skill transferability combinations open up. Price your situation before you decide: convert your attestation with the CLB converter, see what one more level does in the CRS calculator, and check recent cutoffs in the Express Entry draw history.
How the other tests compare
TEF re-evaluation
The TEF has no re-marking at all, at any price. Its only route is a free appeal for serious exam-day anomalies, and winning it cancels the certificate you already hold.
CELPIP re-evaluation
The friendliest policy of the three: a paid re-rating of writing and speaking, with the fee refunded when a level increases and an outcome in one to two weeks.
Still deciding which exam to sit? Compare all of them in the Express Entry language test guide.
TCF re-evaluation FAQ
Does TCF Canada have a re-evaluation?
Yes. France Éducation international allows a demande de recorrection, a genuine second marking of the expression écrite and expression orale sections. This is what makes the TCF different from the TEF, which offers no re-marking at all. However, Canadian test centres have announced that requests will no longer be accepted for TCF exams taken on or after 1 September 2026.
How much does a TCF re-evaluation cost?
The fee is set by your test centre, not by France Éducation international. In Canada it currently runs from about CAD $90 at Concordia to CAD $200 at UQTR, with Alliance Française Ottawa at $100 and Vancouver at $110, all per section. Writing and speaking are separate requests with separate charges, so asking for both roughly doubles the total. Confirm the price with your own centre, since several Canadian centres publish no re-evaluation policy at all.
Is the TCF re-evaluation fee refunded if my score goes up?
No official source says it is. Alliance Française Ottawa states the opposite in plain terms: the fee is non-refundable regardless of whether the results stay the same, go up, or go down. Budget for the fee as a sunk cost. This is a real difference from the CELPIP re-evaluation, where the fee is refunded when a level increases.
Can my TCF score go down after a re-evaluation?
Yes, and this is the single most important thing to understand. France Éducation international states that the level may be lowered, and Alliance Française Ottawa warns that a re-evaluation may result in a higher or lower score. The revised result is the one that counts from then on, and the original attestation is no longer valid once results are modified. Do not request a re-evaluation of a score you can actually live with.
Which TCF sections can be re-evaluated?
Only expression écrite and expression orale, the two sections marked by human correctors. The comprehension sections are multiple choice read by optical scanner, and France Éducation international states that the system permits no error and therefore never gives rise to a revision of those scores.
How do I request a TCF re-evaluation?
Through the test centre where you sat the exam. The centre gives you the form, takes the payment, and forwards the file to France Éducation international, which does the actual re-marking. There is no online portal. The request must be in writing and in French, one form per section, and some centres require a handwritten signature. Centres only handle their own candidates, so contact the exact centre where you tested.
What is the deadline for a TCF re-evaluation?
The published rule is one month after the attestations are sent to the test centres. Canadian centres word it as within 30 days of your results certificate being issued or received. If you see a claim that you have only seven days, ignore it: no official source supports it.
How long does a TCF re-evaluation take?
Canadian centres quote four to six weeks from the date the complete file is sent to France Éducation international, and the exam owner allows up to a month and a half from receiving the form. The clock does not start when you email your centre, so send a complete file the first time.
What are my chances of the score actually changing?
Nobody publishes a success rate, and any page quoting a precise percentage is repeating an unsourced figure that circulates on prep-course marketing sites. What can be said honestly is that the odds are structurally against a change: every expression écrite and expression orale is already double marked, independently and blind, before you receive it, and where the two correctors disagree significantly a third marking is carried out automatically. A re-evaluation is asking for a fourth opinion on a performance that already had two or three.
Is the TCF re-evaluation really being suspended?
That is what four independent official test centres, including Alliance Française Ottawa, Concordia, Alliance Française Vancouver and Alliance Française San Francisco, published in July 2026 while relaying a notice from France Éducation international. They state that requests will not be accepted for exams taken on or after 1 September 2026, that the suspension is for modernising the system, and that service is expected to resume in autumn 2027. Eligibility is keyed to your exam date, not your results date. Confirm with your own centre before making plans around it.
How soon can I retake TCF Canada?
Official sources disagree, so check with your centre. France Éducation international's candidate rights page and several Canadian centres publish a 20 day minimum between two sittings of the same version, while an older candidate manual and some centres still publish 30 days. Either way it is faster than waiting out a re-evaluation.
Can I retake just one TCF section?
Not for TCF Canada. Its four sections are compulsory and cannot be taken separately, and you sit them all on the same day. TCF Québec is modular, which is where most of the confusion comes from. A full TCF Canada retake costs about CAD $390 to $400 at Canadian centres.
How long are TCF results valid for Express Entry?
Two years from the date the results are issued. IRCC requires your results to be less than two years old both when you complete your Express Entry profile and when you submit your application for permanent residence.
Should I re-evaluate the TCF or switch to the TEF?
Switching tests does not give you a review route, because the TEF has no re-marking at all. Its only mechanism is a free appeal for serious exam-day anomalies, whose remedy is a re-sit rather than a new mark. Choose between the two French tests on which format suits you, not on which one you could appeal.
Centre fees, deadlines and the suspension dates above reflect what France Éducation international and accredited Canadian test centres published as of July 2026. Policies change; confirm the current rules with your own test centre before you pay anything.
Free immigration tools
Planning for Canada? These quick tools help you check where you stand.
A re-mark is a coin flip. Preparation is not.
Realistic TCF Canada mock exams with instant AI feedback on your expression écrite and expression orale, scored the way correctors score. Know your real level before you spend a dollar on a re-evaluation. Free to start.
