Yes — and more importantly, it can be undone by things you do after you get it, which is the part nobody warns first-time buyers about.
A pre-approval is a lender's assessment of you — your income, credit and debts — and usually comes with a rate hold for a defined period. It is a strong indication of what you can borrow.
What it is not is an approval to buy a particular property. The lender has not seen the home, has not appraised it, and has not decided whether it will lend against that specific asset. That is why a financing condition still matters even with a pre-approval in hand.
Pre-approvals and their rate holds run for a set window, and the exact length varies by lender and product. When it lapses you can usually renew, but the assessment is redone at current rates and current qualifying rules — so a renewal is not automatically the same offer.
Ask your broker for the specific expiry date and put it in your calendar. Buyers routinely discover it lapsed in the middle of writing an offer.
This is the important part. A pre-approval assumes your situation stays as it was when assessed. Change the inputs and it can fail at exactly the moment you need it:
The rule we give every buyer: from pre-approval to possession, change nothing financially. No new credit, no job change, no large purchases. Buy the furniture after you have the keys.
Get the pre-approval before you look seriously, keep your broker updated if anything changes, and treat the financing condition as real protection rather than a formality. If your circumstances have shifted since the pre-approval, say so before you write — discovering it during the condition period is survivable, discovering it after conditions are removed is not.