Express Entry draw #401

The cut-off for round #401, held on 4 March 2026, was 397. It was a French-language proficiency round and it issued 5,500 invitations to apply, 3 points below the previous French-language proficiency round 4 weeks earlier. Candidates who tied at 397 were ranked by the date they entered the pool, with the cut-off timestamp set at October 10, 2025 at 18:18:20 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 March 1, 2026, the Express Entry pool held 232,534 candidates. 151,837 of them sat in score bands entirely at or above the 397 cut-off. A further 53,727 sat in the 351-400 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 397 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.