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Published 1 September 2026 by Dikshit Soni, RCIC R536007. All figures cover 1 January to 31 August 2026 and come from our own Express Entry draw tracker, built from IRCC’s published rounds of invitations.

Eight months of 2026 are done. That is enough data to look at the year properly instead of reacting to each round as it lands.

By volume 2026 is the biggest year the system has had. Fifty rounds since January, 120,427 invitations, and a round roughly every five days. Nothing in the programme’s history comes close.

That volume has not been spread the way the category list implies. IRCC named ten categories for 2026, and three of them have barely been used. One of the three is healthcare, which most people assume is what all the activity is for.

Out of 120,427 invitations, healthcare received 8,000. That is 6.6 per cent of the year, for a category IRCC built specifically to fill gaps in critical sectors of the Canadian labour market. It took two rounds to issue those 8,000, and the first of the two went out with an error in it.

STEM received nothing at all. No round since April 2024, in a category that exists because those occupations drive the economy.

I do not know how that is justified, or where it is heading. Here is what the numbers show.

Fifty rounds in eight months

Express Entry has held 50 rounds of invitations between 1 January and 31 August 2026. For scale, here is every year since the system launched, on both measures.

The average across 2015 to 2024 is 33 rounds for a whole year. 2026 passed that in June. Only two years in the history of the programme have held more than 50 rounds, and 2026 has already matched one of them with a third of the year still to run.

The gap between rounds has narrowed every year. In 2015 you waited an average of 15 days. In 2023 it was 8, in 2024 it was 7, in 2025 it was 6, and in 2026 it is 5. The pool is being worked through faster than it ever has been.

The record is in the invitations

120,427 invitations in eight months. The previous record was 114,224 for the whole of 2021, and 2021 was the year IRCC ran the large catch-up rounds during the pandemic backlog. 2026 passed it in August, in an ordinary year, with nothing exceptional behind it. The average full year between 2015 and 2024 issued 80,325 invitations, so 2026 is running at roughly one and a half times that pace.

Switch the chart above to Invitations issued to see the two lines diverge. Rounds have grown steadily. Invitations have not, and the years do not sit in the same order on the two measures.

How fast are the invitations going out, against the last three years?

Volume is one measure and pace is another. Comparing the same window in each year, 1 January to 31 August, shows how unusual 2026 has been on both.

IRCC has been issuing invitations at 496 a day this year. That is more than double the 2025 pace of 230, and roughly 1.5 times the 2023 and 2024 pace, which sat within five a day of each other.

The gap between rounds tells the same story from the other side. Rounds have landed every 4.9 days on average this year, against roughly seven in each of the two years before it. The department is not only inviting more people, it is inviting them more often, and it has been doing so since January.

One caution on reading 2025 as the baseline. That year finished at 113,998, which means it issued 58,178 invitations in its final four months, more than it had managed in the previous eight. A year that ends heavily is not the same as a year that runs evenly, and it is the reason a straight-line projection from either year lands in the wrong place.

Where the invitations actually went

Of the 120,427 invitations issued in 2026:

Two streams account for 83% of the year. The remaining eight named categories, plus the provincial rounds, share what is left.

There are reasons for both. Canadian Experience Class candidates are already in Canada and already working. The French rounds go towards a francophone immigration target the department has to report against. I would not argue with either priority.

It does mean that “record year” and “my category was invited” are separate statements, and a lot of people have been reading the first as if it were the second.

The cut-offs are where this gets uncomfortable. French rounds issued more invitations than CEC did, 50,500 against 49,250, in four fewer rounds. Across those ten French rounds the cut-off ranged from 382 to 420, averaging 401. The fourteen CEC rounds ranged from 507 to 523. The two healthcare rounds came in at 467 and 475.

Francophone immigration is a legitimate policy. The target is real and French speakers outside Quebec are under-represented, so I am not going to pretend the rounds should not happen.

My problem is the ranking. The biggest block of invitations this year went out on a language criterion at scores a hundred points below what a nurse needs, and the category built for that nurse was used twice. If the system is not prioritising the occupations we keep saying we are short of, I would like someone to explain what it is prioritising.

If you want to see where your own number sits against those cut-offs, our guide to how the Comprehensive Ranking System works and the post on what actually moves a CRS score in 2026 are the practical companions to this one.

When was your category last invited?

Three categories that have stalled

IRCC named ten categories for 2026. Three of them have gone quiet.

Healthcare and social services

Two rounds in 2026, for 8,000 invitations. In 2025 there were seven rounds and 14,500 invitations. The last healthcare round was 25 June 2026, at CRS 475. The only other one was 20 February 2026, at CRS 467.

And that February round came with a caveat attached. It was held two days after the eligibility rule changed, and candidates holding only six months of experience were invited in it, when the requirement had just moved to a full year. Those candidates were subsequently told the invitation did not reflect the new criteria and that they should not apply on it.

So the count for 2026 is two healthcare rounds in eight months, and one of them had to be partly walked back.

Meanwhile provinces are running overseas recruitment drives for nurses. Emergency departments close overnight because there is nobody to staff them. Governments at every level have called the health workforce a crisis for years. IRCC built a category for exactly these people, kept it on the 2026 list, and used it twice.

STEM occupations

Zero rounds in 2026. Zero in 2025. The last STEM round was 11 April 2024, at CRS 491. The category was not cancelled. It was renewed for 2026 and carries the new one-year experience requirement like the rest. It simply has not been used in almost two and a half years.

Education occupations

Zero rounds in 2026. The category was introduced in 2025 and used twice, most recently on 17 September 2025 at CRS 462, and it has not been used since.

Meanwhile, categories that hardly come up in conversation did get rounds: physicians (2 rounds, 662 invitations), senior managers (2 rounds, 750), trades (1 round, 3,000), transport (1 round, 300) and skilled military recruits (1 round, 4 invitations).

So the department is clearly still willing to run category rounds. It is running them for four invitations to military recruits and 300 to transport workers, and not for healthcare.

The rule change underneath it: six months became a full year

Then there is the rule change, which is the part most people missed.

When IRCC renewed the category list in February 2026, it also changed the rule underneath it. Until then, six months of work experience in a targeted occupation was enough to put you inside a category. From 18 February 2026, that became a full year, and the year has to sit inside the last three years. It applies to every occupation-driven category-based draw, not to a subset. The physicians category moved to the higher threshold first, in December 2025, and the rest followed. We covered that change in detail when it landed, in our 2026 categories update.

The stated reason is labour market readiness. A year in an occupation is a better signal than six months, so I have no argument with the threshold itself.

The categories that were tightened include healthcare, education, STEM and trades. Since the change took effect in February, healthcare has been invited once, on 25 June. Education has not been invited. STEM has not been invited. Trades has had a single round.

So a lot of candidates were inside a category on 17 February and outside it on 18 February. They lost the category, went back to competing on their CRS score in a year with no general rounds at all, and the category they were dropped from has hardly been used since.

The changeover was not clean either, as the 20 February healthcare round above shows. Candidates were inside the category on the Monday and outside it on the Wednesday, and a round two days later invited some of them anyway before they were told not to act on it.

If that was you, you ended up holding an invitation you could not safely use. An invitation is not a finding of eligibility. Submitting an application for a round you do not meet the criteria for is not a neutral act. At best it is a refusal and a lost invitation, and the cost of that is a year of your life and the fee. The only sensible response to an invitation you do not qualify for is to decline it and stay in the pool. If a refusal has already happened to you, what to do after an Express Entry refusal sets out the options, and we have taken one of these to judicial review and won.

A threshold doubled, a round two days later that did not apply it correctly, and one further round in that category since. That is how the change was handled.

What I cannot work out is the logic. If six months was too thin, raise it to a year. Fine. Then draw from the smaller and better qualified pool you have just created. That second part never happened.

And while a category sits unused, the people in it are not standing still. A language test is good for two years and then has to be sat again, at your own cost and with no guarantee you score the same. An ECA runs for five. A work permit has an expiry date, and for a lot of people in the healthcare pool that date is the real deadline, because when it goes the Canadian job that holds the profile together goes with it. Age points start coming off at 30 and come off again every birthday. The profile itself expires at twelve months and has to be put back in.

What we think is going on

IRCC does not publish its reasoning for a draw schedule, so what follows is read off the numbers rather than known. Anyone claiming to know the internal logic is guessing.

The levels plan came down. The permanent residence targets for the federal economic streams were reduced, and a smaller total has to be allocated somewhere. When the number shrinks, the streams tied to a hard commitment survive the cut: francophone immigration targets, and candidates already working in Canada. The discretionary category rounds are where the flexibility sits.

In-Canada candidates are being prioritised over new arrivals. CEC at 49,250 invitations is the clearest signal in the data. A category round invites people who may still be overseas. A CEC round invites people already here, already employed, already paying tax. In a year where the department is under pressure on temporary resident volumes, that is a coherent choice.

The category list may be broader than the plan behind it. Ten named categories, but only seven used at all this year, and four of those used once. That looks less like a plan being executed and more like a list being kept open.

None of that is much comfort to a nurse at 470 who has watched the pool move around her all year. It does at least explain why the headline and her experience of 2026 do not match.

What happens next, and why it is worth watching

Three things land together in the final months of this year. 2026 is already the heaviest year on record. A set of named categories has gone almost unused while that happened. And IRCC has signalled a redesigned selection system, so the current one is running near the end of its life.

Add the way the last quarter has historically behaved and there are four plausible outcomes. They contradict each other, which is why this is worth watching rather than predicting.

What we called in June

We published a Q2 review at the end of June, and two calls in it have held.

We said CEC volumes had peaked and would keep coming down. They have, and more sharply than the pattern suggested.

We also said draw frequency would stay above five rounds a month. It has. July and August each ran eight.

The table also shows how front-loaded the year has been. Q1 alone issued 55,830 invitations, nearly half the year’s total in three months, and every quarter since has been smaller. And French has overtaken CEC outright: in the third quarter it has issued two and a half times as many invitations.

And if it does happen, expect 2027 to crawl

We have seen this before. When Express Entry replaced the old Federal Skilled Worker system, its first year was the slowest on record: 23 rounds and 31,063 invitations in the whole of 2015, against 120,427 in eight months now. A new selection system does not arrive at full speed, and there are two reasons for it.

The first is the department. New criteria, new scoring, new instructions, and no operational history to calibrate against. Early rounds are small and cautious because nobody yet knows what a round of a given size actually pulls out of the pool.

The second reason is the pool itself. When the rules change, people build profiles on guesswork. They claim experience that does not meet the new definition, or category eligibility they no longer have, or they carry across assumptions from a system that no longer exists. A profile can be created in error and still sit in the pool with a score attached to it. When the early rounds go out, a real share of those invitations land on candidates who cannot convert them into an application at all.

Those are empty invitations. They count in the published numbers and they produce nothing, and they are why a new system’s first-year figures tend to overstate what it actually delivered. February’s healthcare round was a very small preview of exactly this: a rule changed, profiles that no longer qualified, and invitations that could not be used.

So expect the first stretch of the new system to be slow, with cut-offs that read strangely until the pool has been cleaned out. It will settle, and when it does it will favour people who built their profile accurately rather than optimistically. It will not settle quickly.

That is the practical case for acting under the system you already understand, if you are close enough to act.

Our best guess

The next sixty days should settle most of this, and I would watch the next two weeks closely.

Our read is that hypotheses one and three are the ones to back, and that they are not in conflict. We expect the remainder of 2026 to be quieter in raw volume than the first half was, with CEC rounds staying small and the year finishing well short of a straight-line extrapolation from 2025. We do not expect it to be quiet in composition. A department that renamed ten categories in February, doubled the experience threshold under them, and then used three of them once each has a gap between what it announced and what it did, and the last four months are the only room left to close it.

So the most likely shape, in our view, is fewer and smaller general rounds than the first half of the year, with at least one and possibly several category rounds among them. Healthcare is the most overdue on the published logic. Education is the easiest to run, because the pool is small and a round clears it cheaply. STEM has been dormant longest, which makes it either the most overdue or the most quietly abandoned, and we are not going to pretend to know which.

If the next two weeks bring another long pause, hypothesis one is confirmed and you should be planning around a slower autumn. If they bring a category round, everything above changes and the candidates who kept their documents current are the ones who benefit. And in the unlikely event this year really does run to 76 rounds, take it as a reason to move now rather than a reason to relax, because a finish on that scale makes a slow 2027 close to certain.

We will update this page as it resolves.

What this actually means for you

If you are in the CEC pool. This has been your year, and it is not finished. Fourteen rounds and 49,250 invitations, and CEC rounds have been the most consistent thing on the calendar, even as they shrink. Keep your Canadian experience documented to the month and keep the profile current.

If you have French. Ten rounds, 50,500 invitations, and cut-offs between 382 and 420. This is the single cheapest route to permanent residence in the system right now. If you have functional French and have not tested, that is the highest-value thing you can do with the next three months.

If you are in healthcare, STEM or education. Two rounds, zero rounds and zero rounds, and on top of that the eligibility bar under all three moved from six months to a year in February. That is the honest position. What it does not mean is that the category is dead. The list for the year still includes all three, and a single round can clear a large part of a category pool at once. What it does mean is that you have to be ready before it happens, because these rounds are announced on the day they are held. Language test current, ECA current, employment letters already written, profile accurate now rather than accurate once an email arrives.

If you are relying on a provincial nomination. 17 rounds and 7,961 invitations in 2026, against 24 rounds and 10,898 in 2025. Provincial rounds are still frequent but smaller, and a nomination remains the strongest single move available to a lower-scoring candidate. In Ontario, the Workforce Priority Stream is where a lot of these profiles now go.

If your score is in the 400s with no category and no Canadian experience. The general rounds that used to serve you have not run since 2024. There were nine of them that year and twenty in 2023. In 2026 there have been none. That is the group the current shape of the programme is hardest on, and a provincial nomination or a study-to-work route is realistically where the path is.

Every Express Entry round of 2026

All fifty rounds held between 1 January and 31 August 2026, with the category, the number of invitations and the CRS cut-off for each. Filter by category to see how often your stream has actually been drawn.

Frequently asked questions

Figures compiled by SAAB Immigration Services Inc. from IRCC’s published rounds of invitations and maintained on our Express Entry draw tracker. Updated 1 September 2026. This article is general information about published immigration data and is not legal advice on any individual case.