Last verified: 4 September 2026
The University of Waterloo gives most of its international entrance money out automatically, without any scholarship form. The single exception, and also the largest award on offer, is the one that most applicants never hear about until the deadline has passed.
The whole picture in one place
Read this section and you have the substance of the post. Everything after it exists to tell you which parts apply to you and what to do about them.
Waterloo runs five separate pots of money for international undergraduates, and which faculty you apply to matters far more than how good your application essay is. The base award, worth $10,000, lands on almost everyone who qualifies without being requested. Mathematics applicants get access to a second automatic pot that runs into tens of thousands. Science applicants get access to the biggest awards on the list, worth up to $80,000 across a degree, but only if they submit a separate application on the faculty’s own deadline. Every other faculty is left with the base award plus the grade based President’s and Merit scholarships. Nothing here is described by Waterloo as a full ride, and your practical deadline is the admission deadline of 1 February 2027, or 15 January 2027 if you are applying to Engineering.
The five pots, in plain terms:
- The $10,000 International Student Entrance Scholarship. Automatic. First year only. Paid in two halves.
- Faculty of Mathematics Global Scholarships. Up to ten awards, $12,000 to $40,000. Automatic.
- Faculty of Mathematics International Awards for India. Up to fifteen awards, $20,000 to $40,000. Automatic, Indian students only.
- Faculty of Science International Student Scholarships. Fifteen awards, $25,000 to $80,000. Application required, and this is the one people miss.
- Scholarships for Black students. $1,200 to $40,000. Application required.
Sitting alongside those are the President’s and Merit scholarships, awarded on admission average alone and open to international students.
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Start here: find your own route
Waterloo funding is not one process with one set of rules. It is three quite different experiences depending on where you applied, so work out which paragraph below is yours and read that one properly.
If you applied to the Faculty of Mathematics
Your path is the easiest of the three, because you will never fill in a scholarship form.
Two international specific pots sit behind your admission application. The Global Scholarships cover most Faculty of Mathematics programs and run from $12,000 to $40,000, with up to ten awarded. If you are an Indian student in one of the selected Mathematics programs, the International Awards for India run from $20,000 to $40,000, with up to fifteen awarded. Waterloo confirms that neither requires an application.
That has a consequence worth sitting with. Since there is no essay, no reference and no form, your grades and the quality of your admission application are the whole of your case. Every hour you would have spent on a scholarship essay belongs in your Admission Information Form and in your required course marks instead. There is no second chance to impress anyone later.
If you applied to the Faculty of Science
You have the largest awards available to you and the only real deadline risk on this page.
The Faculty of Science International Student Scholarships come in two shapes. Ten of them are renewable at $20,000 a year for four years, reaching $80,000 across a degree. Five more are single awards of $25,000. To be considered you must be an international fee paying visa student who has applied for admission to an undergraduate Science program, and the Medical Sciences pathway is excluded. The scholarship is granted after you receive an admission offer, so the offer comes first and the money follows.
The renewable awards carry a condition that catches people out in second year: you must maintain an 80% cumulative average each term to keep them. A term that slips does not just cost you a grade point, it can cost you $20,000.
Waterloo says the awards recognise three things: academic achievement, the impact a scholarship will have on your studies, and what motivates you to become a scientist. Two of those three are not on your transcript, which is exactly why a solid but unspectacular student can win one.
The date is the problem. Waterloo’s Science funding page was still showing 13 February 2026 when this guide was checked, which belongs to the previous cycle, while the admissions pages had already moved to 2027. The university had not published a refreshed date. Do not assume a 2027 equivalent and do not trust a third party site that has quietly invented one. Check the faculty page directly, and if it still disagrees with the admissions calendar, email the faculty and get an answer in writing.
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If you applied to any other faculty
Engineering, Arts, Environment, Health and the rest have no dedicated international pot listed on Waterloo’s international scholarships page. Your funding comes from two automatic sources.
The first is the $10,000 International Student Entrance Scholarship, covered in the next section. The second is the grade based scholarship ladder, which international students are eligible for. An admission average of 95% or higher earns the President’s Scholarship of Distinction, worth $2,000, and you can add an optional $1,500 International Experience Award and an optional $1,500 Research Award to it. An average between 90% and 94.9% earns a $2,000 President’s Scholarship. An average between 85% and 89.9% earns a $1,000 Merit Scholarship. All three are decided in early May with no application, and all three require you to accept your offer by the deadline and stay enrolled full time for the whole fall term.
Waterloo also runs a searchable awards directory covering scholarships and bursaries for incoming and current students. If none of the named awards above fits you, that database is where the smaller and more specific ones live, and it is worth an hour of your time rather than a glance.
The award almost everyone gets, and its five exclusions
The $10,000 International Student Entrance Scholarship is the floor under every route described above. It pays $5,000 per term across your first two terms, arriving as two instalments in late July and late November. Notification begins appearing in your Waterloo applicant portal from mid April.
It is a first year award. It does not renew in years two, three or four, and Waterloo does not present it as anything else. Any site telling you Waterloo gives international students $10,000 a year is misreading the page.
To qualify you must be an international fee paying student admitted to a full time first year undergraduate degree program. CEGEP applicants are eligible. No application is needed.
The exclusions are broader than people expect, and every one of them is a real applicant who found out late:
- Medical Sciences and the Doctor of Medicine pathway
- Bachelor of Social Work
- Doctor of Optometry
- Doctor of Pharmacy
- 2+2 programs
- Transfer students arriving with previous university credits
- Anyone who deferred admission to a later year
Two conditions keep the money flowing once it starts. You must remain enrolled full time, which Waterloo defines as three or more courses, in each of your first two terms. You must also keep your international fee paying status, since a change in status changes your eligibility for an award defined by it.
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The calendar that actually decides your funding
Because most of this money rides on your admission application, the admission deadline is your scholarship deadline. Waterloo states directly that international students work to the same dates as everyone else, and that first year admission is for September entry only.
- Most programs: apply by 1 February 2027, documents in by 15 February 2027
- Engineering, except Architecture: apply by 15 January 2027, documents in by 1 February 2027, plus supplementary forms and online interviews
- Optometry: apply by 12 November 2026
- Pharmacy: apply by 6 January 2027, documents by 20 January 2027 at 2 p.m. Eastern Time
- Schulich Leader nominations: 27 January 2027
- Awards for Black and Indigenous students: 15 April
Then two dates on the other side. The International Student Entrance Scholarship starts showing in the applicant portal from mid April. President’s and Merit decisions land in early May. If you need funding confirmation for a study permit application or a family conversation, those months are when you will have it, not February.
Being honest about the gap
Add the numbers up for a typical applicant outside Mathematics and Science and you have $10,000 in first year, possibly $11,000 or $12,000 with a President’s or Merit award attached, and then nothing automatic after that.
That is a genuine reduction in your first year bill. It is not a funded degree. Waterloo does not use the phrase fully funded anywhere on these pages, and no listed award is described as covering accommodation, living costs, health insurance, flights or visa fees.
The safest way to plan is to budget as though you receive only the automatic award, and to treat any faculty award as a bonus you did not count on. Students get into trouble when they accept an offer on the strength of money they hope to win, then discover in year two that the entrance scholarship has stopped and nothing replaced it. Working out whether you can fund years two, three and four is a harder question than funding year one, and it is the question worth answering before you accept anything.
Three things that quietly cost applicants money
Paying an agent. Nobody should charge you a fee to secure a Waterloo scholarship. The automatic awards require no form, and the application based ones go directly to the university. Any service selling access to these is selling something that does not exist.
Trusting a stale page. Scholarship aggregator sites go out of date fast, and figures that were right two cycles ago sit there looking current. Check every number against waterloo.ca before you plan around it. As shown above, even the official pages can disagree with each other between cycles, so note which page you read and when.
Missing the admission deadline while polishing something else. Since almost all of this money is attached to admission, a late admission application forfeits the funding as well as the place. Get the application in, then improve the parts that still accept improvement.
Questions applicants ask after reading the official page
The entrance award stops after first year. What happens if money gets tight in second year?
Waterloo offers need based bursaries of up to $2,000 to students after first year. It is a meaningful cushion rather than a replacement for a scholarship, so it should not be the plan your whole budget rests on. If your funding situation is genuinely fragile, raise it with the student awards office early in your first year rather than waiting until fees are due.
Can I hold a Waterloo award at the same time as a sponsorship from my home country?
The pages reviewed here do not state whether Waterloo awards can be combined with external government, employer or foundation funding. Sponsors frequently have their own rules about accepting additional awards. Ask both parties in writing, and do it before your offer acceptance deadline rather than after you have committed.
My school does not grade in percentages. How will Waterloo work out my average?
Waterloo assesses your top six Grade 12 level courses or their equivalents in your own curriculum, including the courses your program requires. The published pages do not set out conversion tables for every national grading system, so if your school reports grades, points or bands rather than percentages, contact admissions early. Estimating your own conversion and building expectations on it is how students end up disappointed in May.
Does submitting a scholarship application change my chances of getting an offer?
The scholarship decision and the admission decision are handled separately, and Waterloo describes the Science awards as being granted after an admission offer exists. The pages do not state that a scholarship application influences admission in either direction. If you qualify and the award matters to you, apply.
What happens to my second instalment if I switch programs or reduce my course load?
Waterloo publishes the enrolment and fee status conditions, but does not spell out every scenario involving a program change, a deferred term or a mid year drop below full time. Since the second instalment arrives in late November, anything you are considering before then is worth clarifying with the student awards office first. Ask before you change your registration, not afterwards.
What to do this week
Work out which of the three routes above is yours, because that decides how much work you actually have.
Mathematics applicants and everyone outside Science have one job: get a strong admission application in before 1 February 2027, or 15 January 2027 for Engineering. There is no scholarship form to chase.
Science applicants have two jobs. The same admission application, and a separate scholarship application whose 2027 date Waterloo had not published when this guide was checked. Open https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/international-scholarships, follow the link to your faculty, and if the date still looks like last cycle’s, email the faculty this week rather than in January. That single email is the difference between being considered for $80,000 and finding out in March that you were not.
