How Express Entry Draws Work: General, Program and Category Rounds

You cannot be invited until you are in the pool, and you cannot enter the pool until you meet the minimum of one of the three programs: the Canadian Experience Class, the Federal Skilled Worker Program or the Federal Skilled Trades Program. Once in, you get a Comprehensive Ranking System score and you wait for a round.

Rounds happen throughout the year, and IRCC follows the same four steps each time. It chooses the type of round. It decides how many people to invite. It finds the highest-ranked candidates who are eligible for that round type. It invites them.

General rounds invite the top scores from everyone in the pool who is eligible for any of the three programs. These have the widest field, so the cutoff reflects the strongest profiles in the whole pool.

Program-specific rounds invite only people eligible for one program. The common example is a Provincial Nominee Program round, which invites only candidates who hold a nomination.

Category-based rounds invite only people who meet a category the Minister has set to fill an economic need. You still have to be eligible for one of the three programs to be in the pool, and then you have to meet every requirement in that round's instructions as well.

As of this review, IRCC lists ten: French-language proficiency, healthcare and social services occupations, STEM occupations, trade occupations, education occupations, transport occupations, three for people with Canadian work experience as physicians, senior managers or researchers, and one for skilled military recruits with a Canadian Armed Forces job offer.

Each has its own test. The French category needs NCLC 7 in all four abilities. The healthcare category needs 12 months of full-time work, or the part-time equivalent, in the past three years in one occupation from IRCC's list, in Canada or abroad, and it does not have to be continuous. IRCC announces the categories in advance and says it may skip a category round when enough eligible people are already being invited through other rounds.

There is no target score. IRCC decides how many invitations to issue, ranks the eligible candidates by CRS score, and works down the list until the number is reached. The score of the last person invited becomes the cutoff for that round. That is why the cutoff moves from round to round and why a PNP round can have a cutoff hundreds of points above a French round held the same week.

If several people share the lowest score, the tie is broken by the date and time they submitted their profile. The earlier profile wins. That is one reason not to wait for a perfect score before entering the pool.

Every round comes with instructions posted the same day: the date and time, the number of invitations, the round type, which programs are included if it is program-specific, and the category rules if it is category-based. IRCC also publishes how many people sat in each score band a few days before the round, so you can see how crowded the pool is above you.

Your score does not need to beat every cutoff. It needs to beat the cutoff of a round you are eligible for. Someone with NCLC 7 in French, or twelve months in a listed healthcare job, may be invited at a score that would never reach a general round. A provincial nomination adds 600 CRS points, so nominees are invited through general and PNP rounds from near the top of the list.

So the question is not only how to add points. It is which rounds you can enter, and what would open another one. Our draws page shows every 2026 round with its type and cutoff, so you can see which door is closest.

We map a client's profile against the round types, not against one headline cutoff. Then we look at what would make a second door open: a French test, a change of primary occupation that fits a category, or a provincial stream. Watching the draws is useful; knowing which draws are yours is what changes the timeline.