Healthcare Draw 441: 3,500 Invitations at CRS 475 Under 2026 Version 3
Updated 8 September 2026. On 4 September IRCC issued 3,500 invitations under the Healthcare and Social Services Occupations category at a CRS cut-off of 475, the third healthcare round of 2026. The round carried a tie-breaking rule and a new version label, and both deserve a plain explanation.
The published facts
| Round | Date | Draw type | Invitations | CRS cut-off | Tie-breaking rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 441 | 4 September 2026 | Healthcare and Social Services Occupations (2026 Version 3) | 3,500 | 475 | 26 May 2026, 00:26:14 UTC |
Source: IRCC’s rounds of invitations page on canada.ca, which links the Ministerial Instruction that defines the category.
The third healthcare round of the year
This was the third time in 2026 that IRCC drew from the healthcare and social services category. The previous healthcare round, on 25 June, closed at the same cut-off of 475 but issued a larger number of invitations. Two rounds landing on an identical cut-off ten weeks apart is a coincidence of ranking rather than a policy setting: the cut-off is simply the score held by the last candidate invited, and it emerges from who was in the category group on the day and how many invitations were issued.
What “2026 Version 3” means
Category-based rounds run under Ministerial Instructions that define which occupations and what work experience place a candidate in the category. When that definition is revised, the revised text carries a new version number for the year, and rounds run under it carry the label. “Version 3” therefore says that the 4 September round used the third published 2026 definition of the healthcare category. It happens that this was also the third healthcare round of the year, but the version number is not a count of draws; the French-language category, for instance, has run more rounds this year than its Version 2 label suggests. Reading the actual definition on canada.ca is the only way to know which occupations the current version lists.
The tie-breaking rule, in South African time
When more candidates share the cut-off score than there are invitations left, IRCC breaks the tie by profile submission time: candidates who submitted their Express Entry profile before the published timestamp are invited ahead of those who submitted after it. For round 441 that timestamp was 26 May 2026 at 00:26:14 UTC. South Africa runs two hours ahead of UTC all year, so the moment corresponds to 02:26:14 on the morning of Tuesday 26 May in Johannesburg, Cape Town or Durban. In Ottawa, where IRCC sits, it was still the evening of 25 May. The rule only touches candidates sitting exactly on 475; everyone above that score was invited regardless of when their profile went in.
Reading 475 against the same week’s rounds
The healthcare round closed 46 points below the 1 September Canadian Experience Class round (2,000 invitations at 521) and 277 points above the 3 September physicians round (229 invitations at 198). All three drew from the same pool on the same working week, and the spread between them comes entirely from the filter applied. A category round only ranks candidates who meet the category definition, so it reaches deeper into the score distribution than a programme-wide round would, and how deep depends on how many candidates hold the listed experience. At 3,500 invitations this was the second-largest round of the recent record, behind only the 5,000-invitation French round of 19 August.
From a South African desk
Nursing, allied health and social-work training are long-established South African pipelines, and the healthcare category lists occupations by their NOC codes rather than by country of training. That is as far as the published record goes. Whether a particular person’s experience matches a listed code and the category’s experience requirement is a question about that person, not about the draw. Our working in Canada guide covers the licensing and employer side of healthcare work as a practical matter, and the move-to-Canada guide sets out the overall sequence of a relocation. Any individual’s eligibility, score or strategy is regulated advice for a licensed RCIC or immigration lawyer, and the figures above can be verified on IRCC’s rounds of invitations page at canada.ca.