Latest Express Entry draw

The most recent Express Entry draw was round #441, held on September 4, 2026. IRCC issued 3,500 invitations to apply under the Healthcare and social services category, with a minimum CRS score of 475. Read a single round carefully rather than as a verdict on your chances. Which category IRCC draws from is a policy choice made round by round, and the cut-off in one category says very little about the next round in another: a general draw and a French-language draw in the same month can be a hundred points apart for the same pool of people. What one round does tell you reliably is where the line sat on that day for that category, which is the only firm data point anybody has. This page is rebuilt from IRCC's feed each time a new round is published. The archive below carries every round since 2015, so a single figure can be read against its own history.

There is no fixed schedule for Express Entry draws, and the cadence differs by category rather than following one rhythm. Over the last 24 months, Provincial Nominee Program draws ran roughly every 15 days, Canadian Experience Class draws every 21 days, and French-language proficiency draws every 32 days. Across all categories IRCC held 77 rounds in the last 12 months. Those averages are worth knowing and are not a timetable. IRCC announces nothing in advance, and it can change which categories it draws from, how many it invites and how often, without notice and without explanation. So the cadence is useful for setting expectations about a wait and useless for planning a date. Treat it as a description of what has happened rather than a schedule of what will. The gaps between rounds are visible in the archive below, which is a better guide than any average.

A good CRS score depends entirely on the category you qualify for, which is why a single number has stopped being a useful answer. The last Canadian Experience Class draw cut off at 521, while the last French-language proficiency draw cut off at 382, a gap of 139 points for the same pool of candidates. Somebody who qualifies for a category is competing against a much smaller field and a much lower line than somebody who does not, and that qualification is worth more than months of preparation aimed at lifting a general score. Of the 226,673 candidates in the pool, 20,101 hold a score above 500. So work out which categories you are eligible for first, and read the cut-off for those rather than the headline figure. The calculator on this site shows which real rounds would have invited your own score.

IRCC last published a pool of 226,673 candidates, as of August 30, 2026. At least 12,924 new profiles enter each month, and that is a floor rather than an estimate, because profiles also expire twelve months after they are created and IRCC does not publish how many drop out that way. So the true inflow is higher than the figure and nobody outside IRCC knows by how much. Set that against about 15,257 invitations issued a month and the direction becomes clear: the pool shrank by 27,999 over the last year. A shrinking pool is not automatically good news for a candidate, because it can mean fewer people entering as much as more people leaving, but it is the number that explains why cut-offs move the way they do. IRCC publishes the pool by score range, so you can see how many candidates sit above you rather than guessing.

The tie-break rule decides who is invited when more candidates share the cut-off score than there are invitations left. IRCC uses a timestamp: only candidates who submitted their profile before that moment are invited, and everybody at the same score who submitted afterwards is not. For round #441 the tie-break was May 26, 2026 at 00:26:14 UTC. So a candidate sitting exactly on 475 who submitted after that timestamp was not invited, despite matching the published cut-off exactly. The practical lesson is about timing rather than score. Once your profile is genuinely ready, submitting it sooner rather than later buys you a place in that ordering at no cost, and a profile held back for a few weeks of polishing can lose a round it would otherwise have made. Ready means the language results and the credential assessment are in hand, not that the profile feels finished. Waiting past that point buys nothing.

You cannot reliably predict the next Express Entry draw, and no consultant, tool or newsletter can either. IRCC announces no schedule and can change the category, the size and the frequency of rounds without notice and without giving a reason. Historical cadence gives you a reasonable expectation window, and this page shows one per category, but a pattern in past data is not a forecast and should never be the basis of a decision about when to submit a profile. That distinction matters because acting on a prediction usually means waiting, and waiting is the one thing that can only cost you: the tie-break rule rewards an earlier submission, and a round you were not in the pool for is a round you could not have been invited from. Get the profile in when it is ready.