Express Entry Rounds 435 to 441: Seven Draws, 12,733 Invitations

Updated 8 September 2026. Seven Express Entry rounds, numbered 435 to 441, ran between 17 August and 4 September: 12,733 invitations across five draw types. Here is the full published record in one table, followed by what each round shows when it is read alongside the others.

The seven rounds at a glance

Source: IRCC’s rounds of invitations page on canada.ca. Our previous report closed with round 434, the 7 August Transport Occupations round (300 invitations at 470), so this table picks up exactly where that one stopped.

Two clusters with a quiet stretch between them

The seven rounds did not arrive evenly. Three came on consecutive days, 17 to 19 August, in the now-familiar order of provincial nominees, then Canadian Experience Class, then French. Nothing was published between 20 and 30 August. Then four rounds landed between 31 August and 4 September: provincial nominees on the Monday, Canadian Experience Class on the Tuesday, physicians on the Thursday and healthcare on the Friday. IRCC does not publish a forward schedule, so clusters and gaps like these are only visible after the fact.

What stands out in the numbers

Several of the seven rounds set a marker of some kind. The 18 August Canadian Experience Class round, at 523, carried the highest CEC cut-off of 2026; the previous CEC round on 5 August had invited 3,000 candidates at 516. The 19 August French round, at 382, carried the lowest French cut-off of the year, continuing a slide from 420 through 399 and 391. The 3 September physicians round ran under that category’s Version 1 definition, and its cut-off of 198 is the lowest figure in any round this site has reported. The 4 September healthcare round was the third of its kind in 2026 and the second-largest round in the table, at 3,500 invitations.

Why the cut-offs cannot be read side by side

A cut-off is the CRS score of the lowest-ranked candidate who received an invitation in that particular round. Every round in the table drew from a different subset of the pool, so 760, 523, 382, 198 and 475 are five answers to five different questions. The provincial rounds sit near 700 because a provincial nomination adds 600 points to a candidate’s score; strip those out and the last nominee invited on 17 August held an underlying score of 160, and on 31 August one of 97. The physicians round sits at 198 because the group it selected from is small and tightly defined, not because the bar was low. The Canadian Experience Class rounds sit above 500 because that programme’s group is large and every candidate in it holds Canadian work experience.

What the record does and does not tell a reader in South Africa

Two features of the 2026 record matter most from a Johannesburg or Cape Town desk. First, none of the 53 rounds run this year has been a general or all-programme draw, and none has been limited to the Federal Skilled Worker programme; every round has been a provincial, Canadian Experience Class, French or category-based round. Second, the largest rounds since July by size have consistently been the French-language rounds. Those are observations about where the invitations went, and nothing more: the published record does not say what any particular person’s profile would have done in any of these rounds, and this site does not forecast what the next round contains.

For the wider picture of where Express Entry sits among the routes, our move-to-Canada guide lays out the sequence of a relocation, and the working in Canada guide covers the employer-and-permit side that the Canadian Experience Class numbers keep pointing towards. Whether any of the above bears on an individual’s eligibility, score or strategy is regulated advice for a licensed RCIC or immigration lawyer, and every figure in this report can be checked against IRCC’s rounds of invitations page on canada.ca.