Express Entry draw #408

The cut-off for round #408, held on 2 April 2026, was 477. It was a Trade occupations round and it issued 3,000 invitations to apply, 28 points below the previous Trade occupations round 28 weeks earlier. Candidates who tied at 477 were ranked by the date they entered the pool, with the cut-off timestamp set at February 14, 2026 at 20:53:54 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 29, 2026, the Express Entry pool held 230,186 candidates. 38,632 of them sat in score bands entirely at or above the 477 cut-off. A further 16,153 sat in the 471-480 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 477 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.