Express Entry draw #396

The cut-off for round #396, held on 17 February 2026, was 508. It was a Canadian Experience Class round and it issued 6,000 invitations to apply, 1 point below the previous Canadian Experience Class round 4 weeks earlier. Candidates who tied at 508 were ranked by the date they entered the pool, with the cut-off timestamp set at March 16, 2025 at 09:35:59 UTC, which means somebody sitting on exactly that score who submitted their profile after that moment was not invited. That tie-break is the part of a round most people never see, and it is the reason two candidates with identical scores can get different answers on the same day. It is also the argument for submitting a profile as soon as it is genuinely ready, since the ordering it creates costs nothing to be early in. The full record of this round, including the pool as IRCC published it that week, is set out on the rest of this page.

On February 15, 2026, the Express Entry pool held 235,695 candidates. 280 of them sat in score bands entirely at or above the 508 cut-off. A further 16,559 sat in the 501-600 band, which the cut-off runs through. IRCC does not publish scores at a finer resolution than these bands, so how many of that middle group actually cleared 508 is not knowable from the published data, by us or by anybody else quoting a precise figure. What the numbers do support is a sense of the shape: how much of the pool was in contention, and how far the round reached into it. Anyone offering an exact count of candidates above a cut-off has estimated it. The bands as IRCC published them for this round are set out below, so you can read your own score against the same distribution the department did rather than against a summary of it.