Why 2025 Had No General Draws at All, and Neither Has 2026
Back home, if you want a government tender, there’s usually a single open bidding round anyone can enter, regardless of sector. Canada’s federal skilled-worker system briefly worked something like that too — one shared draw, any eligible profile welcome, whoever scored highest that round got invited. That single shared round is exactly what’s gone: no general draws 2025 2026 express entry at all, for two full years running.
The last one
The final general, all-programme Express Entry draw was round 294, held 23 April 2024: 2,095 invitations at a CRS cut-off of 529. Every round since — through all of 2025 and 2026 to the end of July — has been restricted to one of three narrower groups: Canadian Experience Class candidates, provincial nominees, or a specific category such as French-language proficiency, healthcare and social services, or trades.
Why did general Express Entry draws stop
IRCC’s own 27 February 2025 news release spells out the reasoning directly: 2025’s federal economic focus would shift to inviting candidates with Canadian work experience, running alongside category-based selection for French speakers, healthcare and social services workers, tradespeople and — new that year — education occupations. The release frames this as a deliberate pivot, not a temporary gap: Canada wanted Canadian-experience and category-matched candidates ahead of the broader pool a general draw would reach.
The real cost, for someone without an inside track
This is where the South African comparison bites. In an open tender, being qualified is enough to compete. Under the current setup, a strong CRS score alone buys almost nothing without Canadian work experience for CEC, a provincial nomination worth 600 CRS points, or a category match. Someone who would have cleared a 2023-style general draw at CRS 490 can now sit in the pool for years with the identical score, because no round currently exists for them. As at 19 July 2026, the pool held 231,533 candidates in total, with roughly 91,000 of them sitting at CRS 451 or above — a wide band of profiles that a general draw would once have reached in a single round, and that now waits on a category or a nomination instead.
Are general draws ever coming back? Nothing published says so. The 2026 public consultation on Express Entry reform is only at the proposal stage, and its focus is merging the three federal programmes and rethinking CRS points for job offers — restoring general draws isn’t part of the discussion paper at all.
The one number that carries the whole story
113,998 invitations went out in 2025, and 104,616 more by 23 July 2026 — real volume, just none of it through a general round. Whatever else changes, the fact that no general round has run in over two years is the headline any South African profile-holder needs going in. For that reason, the honest planning question isn’t “what’s my CRS score” on its own, but which of the three live doors — Canadian experience, a nomination, or a category — actually applies to your file. A licensed RCIC can help map a specific profile against those doors; this piece is only about how the system itself now sorts people.
We’ve laid out the full category list and its 2026 changes in a companion piece, if you want to see exactly which doors are currently open.