What Cutting the Immigration Levels Plan From 500,000 to 380,000 Did to Express Entry Volumes
You’re a South African candidate in the Express Entry pool in early 2025, watching your CRS score stay flat while draw sizes seem to shrink around you, without any obvious explanation in the news. The explanation isn’t obvious because it happened in a policy document most applicants never read. The levels plan cut effect on express entry volumes is one of the clearest cases of a single number on a government table quietly reshaping thousands of individual outcomes.
The number that changed
The 2023–2025 Immigration Levels Plan had targeted 500,000 overall permanent resident admissions for 2025. On 24 October 2024, the newly tabled 2025–2027 plan cut that sharply: 395,000 for 2025, 380,000 for 2026, and 365,000 for 2027 — a reduction of over 100,000 admissions a year from what had previously been planned. The Federal High Skilled line, which is where Express Entry admissions are counted, dropped correspondingly, and Provincial Nominee Program admissions were halved, from 110,000 to 55,000 a year.
How a lower levels plan changed express entry draw sizes
Trace that policy number through to actual draw data and the pattern holds. Through 2025, Provincial Nominee Program cut-offs sat between 667 and 855 all year — a direct consequence of far fewer nomination spaces being available to compete for. And 2025 saw no general, all-program draws at all, following on from the last one in April 2024; the system leaned entirely on category-based, Canadian Experience Class and PNP selection instead, each of which is a narrower door than a general draw.
Did fewer total admissions mean fewer invitations? Not uniformly — CEC and category draws actually continued at meaningful volumes, and 2025’s total of 113,998 invitations was higher than 2024’s 98,903. But the composition of who could realistically be invited narrowed considerably: routes without Canadian work experience, a provincial nomination, or French fluency became harder to use, because so much of the reduced overall admissions target was being channelled into narrower, more targeted selection tools instead of broad general draws.
The subsequent partial correction
The following plan, tabled 5 November 2025, held the 2026–2028 overall target flat at 380,000 a year rather than cutting further, and actually restored the PNP admissions target to 91,500 for 2026 — a meaningful recovery, though still below the pre-cut 2024 level of 110,000.
What this means for reading future plans
Whenever a new Immigration Levels Plan is tabled each autumn, the headline overall number is worth checking, but the category-level breakdown underneath it is where the real signal sits for an Express Entry candidate specifically. A flat or rising overall target doesn’t guarantee more opportunity if the underlying Federal High Skilled or PNP line moves the other way.
How a shifting levels plan affects your own specific timeline and strategy is worth a conversation with a licensed RCIC, since the practical implications differ depending on which programme you’re actually pursuing.
We track each year’s Levels Plan against the actual draw data as it’s published — see our ongoing Express Entry coverage for the current picture.