WES Credential Evaluation From Nigeria — Fees, Documents, Timelines
There is a particular way this goes wrong, and it goes wrong the same way every time. You order the cheaper of the two World Education Services reports. You spend six weeks chasing your registry for a transcript. The report arrives, you forward it to your graduate school, and the admissions office writes back to say it needs the other one. You start over, from the application form, at full price.
The difference between those two reports is $68 in the Basic package — $118 against $186. The cost of confusing them is closer to $300 and three months. The names are the problem: Document-by-Document and Course-by-Course sound like variants of one thing.
Below: what each report contains, what WES needs from a Nigerian institution, and what to do when your university registry has never heard of any of it.
Document-by-Document or Course-by-Course
Both verify the same documents to the same standard, so this is not a question of rigour. It is a question of what ends up printed on the report.
A Document-by-Document report states that your credential exists, is authentic, and is equivalent to a named U.S. or Canadian credential. One line per qualification. That is all. It is enough for most employers, for many professional licensing bodies, and for Canadian immigration.
A Course-by-Course report lists every course on your transcript, converts each to U.S. semester credit hours, converts each grade, produces a cumulative GPA on the 4.0 scale, and marks courses as upper- or lower-level undergraduate. Nearly every U.S. university admissions office wants this one, as do licensing boards that need to see specific coursework.
The test: if someone at the other end needs to read your individual course grades, you need Course-by-Course. If they only need to know that your B.Sc. from Unilorin is a real four-year bachelor’s degree, Document-by-Document is enough and paying more buys you nothing.
Ask the receiving institution in writing which report they require. Keep the reply.
What ICAP adds
Both reports come in Basic and ICAP versions. ICAP — the International Credential Advantage Package — means WES permanently stores your verified transcripts and can send them, along with the evaluation, to any institution you nominate later. Basic does not store them.
For a Nigerian graduate this is worth more than it looks. The hard part of this process is not the evaluation; it is extracting an official transcript from a Nigerian registry. If you expect to apply to a second school, a licensing board, or a Canadian immigration stream in the next few years, ICAP means you never repeat that step. If you know for certain this is a one-time application, save the money.
The 2026 fee table
WES raised its prices at the start of 2026. These are the figures published on the WES Evaluations and Fees page as of July 2026, in U.S. dollars, for reports delivered in the United States.
| Item | Fee (USD) |
|---|---|
| Document-by-Document, Basic | $118 |
| Document-by-Document, ICAP | $171 |
| Course-by-Course, Basic | $186 |
| Course-by-Course, ICAP | $239 |
| Standard delivery | $14 |
| Sealed envelope | $9 |
| International courier | $86 |
| Duplicate report ordered with application | $35 |
| Upgrade Basic to ICAP after the fact | $92 |
| Update a completed evaluation | $92 |
Two traps in that table. The headline price excludes delivery, so budget accordingly. And upgrading to ICAP later costs $92, while buying ICAP upfront costs $53 more than Basic — so if there is any real chance you will need stored transcripts, buy it at the start.
The Canadian ECA report for immigration is priced separately at C$264, plus delivery and 13% HST, per the WES ECA page.
WES charges in USD or CAD. Your Nigerian card will add an FX spread on top, and that spread moves — check what your bank actually charges before you assume the naira cost.
Getting the transcript out of your university
This is the part that fails. WES will not accept a transcript from your hands. It must come from the institution, either in an envelope sealed and signed or stamped across the back flap by the registry, or electronically through a channel WES recognises. WES states that official academic documents must be sent by the issuing institution, and separately notes that it does not want original certificates — those cannot be returned to you.
Three things make Nigerian applications fail at this stage.
You must apply and get your reference number first. WES issues a reference number when you create and pay for the application. That number goes on the front of the envelope. A transcript that arrives without it may sit unmatched.
The transcript must be Senate-approved. A student copy, a departmental printout, or a result slip from your faculty office will not clear verification. Nigerian registries distinguish between these, and the one you want is the official Senate-authenticated transcript.
Check the electronic route before you touch a courier. WES accepts digitally signed records through platforms including Digitary Core, MyCreds, Parchment and the National Student Clearinghouse, and it maintains direct SFTP or API transmission with specific institutions. The WES page on electronic academic records names the University of Lagos among its direct partners. If your school is on that list, you skip DHL, you skip the two-week transit, and you skip the risk of an envelope going missing. Ask your registry directly whether they transmit to WES electronically. Many staff will not volunteer it.
If it has to go by post, have the registry courier it themselves. Do not accept a sealed envelope to mail yourself — WES wants it from the institution.
WAEC, NECO and the scratch card
Be careful here, because a lot of Nigerian blog advice on this is wrong or out of date.
For a bachelor’s-level evaluation, WES’s required-documents list is built around your university transcript and a copy of your degree certificate. Secondary school results are not automatically part of it. Whether WAEC or NECO results are required depends on the specific credential you are having evaluated — if the qualification you are submitting is the WASSCE, then obviously it is.
When WAEC results do need verifying, WES verifies them with the council, not with you. The scratch card is the mechanism: a WAEC result checker PIN and serial number allow the evaluator to pull your result from WAEC’s system. Buy it from WAEC’s own channels, not a random vendor, and note that a single card has a limited number of uses.
For formal confirmation of results, WAEC Nigeria’s published requirements for school candidates list a scratch card at ₦13,000, a sworn affidavit from a law court, two passport photographs, two 9×4 envelopes, and a confirmation fee of ₦19,500 per result per recipient locally. The same page lists the international and embassy fee as ₦39,000,000, which is almost certainly a typographical error on WAEC’s side for ₦39,000 — confirm the figure at the WAEC office before you transfer anything.
Where NYSC fits
Plainly: probably nowhere. The NYSC discharge certificate is not part of what WES evaluates. It is not an academic credential and it has no U.S. or Canadian equivalent to be compared against. Nigerian employers ask for it constantly, which is why applicants assume evaluators do too.
Keep a scanned copy regardless — visa applications and some employers want it — but do not delay your WES application waiting for it. If you are uncertain, run your exact institution and credential through the WES Required Documents tool, which returns the list for your specific case. That tool, not any article including this one, is the authority on what you must send.
Timelines, stage by stage
WES publishes each stage separately. Added together they give a more honest picture than the headline turnaround. From WES current processing times:
- Verification — typically 2 weeks after all required official documents arrive.
- Document-by-Document evaluation — typically 1 week, up to 2 for complex cases.
- Course-by-Course evaluation — typically 2 weeks, up to 4 for complex cases.
- ECA for IRCC — up to 1 week.
Every one of those clocks starts after documents are received and accepted. Nothing in them covers the part you cannot control: your registry producing a Senate-approved transcript. Budget four to twelve weeks for that alone, longer around Nigerian academic strike periods, and start the transcript request before you do anything else.
Four other bodies IRCC accepts
For Canadian immigration, WES is one designated provider among several, and IRCC treats all of their reports as equivalent. An ECA must be less than five years old when IRCC receives your application.
| Body | ECA fee | Stated processing | Note for Nigerian applicants |
|---|---|---|---|
| WES | C$264 + HST + delivery | ~2 wks verify + ~1 wk report | Fastest; electronic transcript partners include UNILAG |
| IQAS (Alberta) | C$260, +C$100 per extra credential | ~15 business days; rush C$250 for 5–7 days | Will accept a sealed institutional envelope mailed by you if the school cannot send it directly |
| CES (U of Toronto) | C$241.50 + C$45 admin fee | ~40–60 business days | Up to two credentials on one application fee |
| ICAS | C$210 | ~20 weeks | Cheapest, slowest; refuses envelopes submitted by the applicant |
Read the last column, not the price column. The IQAS concession is the one that matters here. If your registry flatly refuses to courier documents abroad — common with smaller institutions and state polytechnics — IQAS gives you a legitimate route that WES and ICAS do not, and that is worth considerably more than saving fifty dollars.
ICES, run by BCIT in British Columbia, is also IRCC-designated. And if you are in a regulated profession, a general ECA may not be the document your regulator wants: physicians go through the Medical Council of Canada, pharmacists through the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada. Check with the regulator before ordering anything.
Five steps, in this order
- Confirm in writing which report your receiving institution needs.
- Run your institution and credential through the WES Required Documents tool.
- Email your registry and ask one specific question: do you transmit transcripts to WES electronically?
- Create the WES application and pay, so you have a reference number to give the registry.
- Only then start the transcript request.
Step four before step five is the whole difference between a ten-week process and a six-month one.
Three caveats worth naming. WES’s required-documents list is generated per institution inside the application portal, so no article can reproduce yours — run the tool. WAEC’s published international confirmation fee appears to contain a typo, so confirm it at a WAEC office. And the NYSC guidance above is drawn from the absence of any NYSC mention in WES’s documentation, not from an explicit WES statement.
Fees checked 26 July 2026 against wes.org, waecnigeria.org, alberta.ca, learn.utoronto.ca and icascanada.ca, all linked inline. WES raised prices in January 2026 and every one of these organisations changes fees without notice.
