Turning a Canadian licence into an FAA certificate

Two paths, one choice

The piggyback (14 CFR 61.75). The FAA issues you a US private pilot certificate on the basis of your Canadian licence. Private privileges only, no matter what your Canadian licence says. No knowledge test for the basic certificate, no flight test, and you can keep flying on your Canadian medical. The catch is in the name: the certificate lives and dies with the Canadian licence underneath it, and every limitation on your Canadian paper follows you into the American cockpit.

The full conversion (the FAA and Transport Canada licensing agreement). A standalone FAA certificate at your actual level, private, commercial, or ATP, with no dependency on the Canadian licence. It costs more effort: an FAA medical is mandatory, your Canadian licence needs the printed English proficiency endorsement, and you sit one knowledge test covering air law and communications. Still no flight test. You keep your Canadian licence too; nothing is surrendered.

The rough rule: visiting and renting, take the piggyback. Working toward US commercial privileges or anything career shaped, take the full conversion. Neither one involves the TSA; converting paper is not flight training, so no vetting applies to the conversion itself.

The piggyback, step by step

• The FAA first verifies your licence and medical directly with Transport Canada. Start this early: it commonly takes 45 to 90 days, and the verification letter it produces is only good for six months.
• Apply through IACRA, then book an appointment at a Flight Standards District Office to be seen in person. Two weeks' lead time is normal.
• The certificate itself never expires, but you may only exercise it while the Canadian licence under it is valid, and you carry both documents (plus the Canadian medical) in the aircraft.
• Your Canadian medical keeps working for this certificate. BasicMed mostly does not: it requires having held an FAA medical at some point after mid-2006 and a US driver's licence, which rules out most Canadians, and it is not valid in Canadian airspace anyway.
• If Transport Canada changes your licence number's prefix or suffix, the FAA certificate must be reissued, verification letter and all. The FAA also wants a real residential address on file, and an unreported move voids your privileges after thirty days.

How the ratings map

• Classes. Canada endorses landplane, seaplane, and multi-engine separately; the FAA splits single and multi by land and sea. The piggyback certificate gets the FAA equivalent of whatever your Canadian licence carries, so single-engine privileges for both land and sea come across as both ASEL and ASES. The FSDO makes the call from the verification letter, which is a good reason to make sure Transport Canada's records list everything you hold.
• Instrument. If your Canadian licence carries instrument privileges, the FAA adds an instrument rating after you pass one knowledge test (the foreign instrument pilot test) within the 24 months before you apply. You pass it once. The story that it must be retaken every two years is a myth, fed by two adjacent rules that really are 24-month rules; ongoing currency afterward is the ordinary FAA six-approaches regime. One wrinkle: Canada's instrument groups (Group 3 single-engine, Group 1 all aeroplanes) have no FAA equivalent, and the safe reading is that a Group 3 rating keeps you out of multi-engine IFR through the limitations carryover. Ask the FSDO how they read it before you file multi IFR.
• Night. The famous one. An FAA private certificate includes night; a Canadian PPL only includes it with the separate night rating. No night rating in Canada means no night flying on the converted certificate, under either path (the full conversion prints "Day VFR Only" on the certificate). The fix on the piggyback, per FAA guidance, is night training and an endorsement from an FAA instructor, or just earn the Canadian night rating first and convert it with everything else.
• VFR over-the-top. Doesn't transfer, and doesn't need to. The FAA has no such rating because an FAA private pilot needs no special qualification to fly VFR above a layer. This one evaporates in your favor.
• Tailwheel, complex, high performance. These are FAA instructor endorsements, not ratings, and Canada has no counterpart, so they never appear in any conversion. Flying an N-registered taildragger on your converted certificate requires the tailwheel endorsement like any other FAA pilot. Two grandfather clauses help the long-timers: pilot-in-command tailwheel time logged before April 1991, or complex and high-performance time before August 1997, counts regardless of which side of the border it was flown on.
• Adding US ratings later. The piggyback certificate accepts add-on class ratings the normal FAA way: training, an endorsement, and a checkride, with no additional knowledge test. A float rating earned this way is annotated "U.S. TEST PASSED" and is genuinely yours.

The full conversion, in brief

• One knowledge test on air law and communications, matched to the level you're converting (private, commercial, instrument, ATP). No flight test at any level.
• Classes must be individually earned: the matching Transport Canada rating plus pilot-in-command time in that class. A commercial conversion needs 250 hours. An ATP with multi-engine privileges also needs the FAA's ATP certification training program first, otherwise the FAA issues commercial multi with instrument instead.
• Expired ratings on the Canadian licence still convert, which is occasionally the cheapest way to resurrect an old qualification.
• You end up holding both countries' papers, which means both countries' currency and recency rules whenever you want to use both. Pick which regime you live under deliberately.

Living with a converted certificate

• The FAA flight review is its own thing: it must come from an FAA flight instructor, and a Canadian proficiency check does not substitute on the piggyback path. Certificates from the full conversion get one accommodation: a Transport Canada skill test within the previous 24 months counts.
• An N-registered aircraft carries FAA rules with it everywhere, including over Canada. Flying N-reg inside Canada, you may instead use your Canadian licence directly, which is often simpler than keeping two currency regimes warm.
• Training in the US toward any of this has its own two gates, TSA and immigration, covered in the Canadian citizens guide. Conversion paperwork triggers neither; a training course can trigger both.