Express Entry draw #403

The cut-off for round #403, held on 16 March 2026, was 742. It was a Provincial Nominee Program round and it issued 362 invitations to apply, 32 points above the previous Provincial Nominee Program round 2 weeks earlier. Candidates who tied at 742 were ranked by the date they entered the pool, with the cut-off timestamp set at October 05, 2025 at 20:35:25 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.

Because a provincial nomination is worth 600 CRS points, and that puts this round on a different scale from the published pool. The 742 cut-off here belongs to a candidate whose score without the nomination was roughly 142. IRCC publishes the pool at base scores, before any nomination is added, so placing 742 on that distribution would suggest nobody in the pool qualified, on a day the department invited 362 people. The comparison is not close to right, it is meaningless. Only candidates already holding a nomination were eligible for this round at all, and the published pool does not identify who they are. So a provincial round tells you about the nominated population rather than about the pool, and the two cannot be read against each other. The pool chart on this page is shown for context rather than for comparison.