What Happens to Express Entry the Month a New Immigration Levels Plan Is Tabled
Here’s the blunt part: tabling a new Immigration Levels Plan does not flip a switch on Express Entry the next morning. There’s no single, dramatic levels plan tabling effect on express entry visible in the very next round — the shift is slower and less visible than the headline number suggests.
When the Plan actually lands
Canada has tabled a new multi-year Levels Plan every autumn since 2022: 1 November 2022 (2023–2025), 1 November 2023 (2024–2026), 24 October 2024 (2025–2027), and 5 November 2025 (2026–2028). When is the immigration levels plan announced each year is easy to answer from that list — late October to early November, without exception across this whole window.
What changed, and when, after each one
The 1 November 2022 tabling reset Federal High Skilled targets to 82,880 / 109,020 / 114,000 for 2023–2025, but the draw calendar around it barely moved — general draws that November continued on the same rhythm they’d held all autumn.
The 1 November 2023 tabling is the clearest case of visible disruption: draws stopped entirely from 26 October 2023 to 6 December 2023, a roughly six-week autumn pause that began right around the tabling date, before general draws resumed at scale in December.
The 24 October 2024 tabling — the one carrying the large cut to 395,000 admissions for 2025 — produced no comparable pause. Draws on 21, 22 and 23 October continued, and the next rounds followed within about three weeks, on 12 and 13 November 2024.
The 5 November 2025 tabling, setting the flat 380,000-a-year plan now in force, again produced no pause: PNP, CEC and French rounds ran on 27, 28 and 29 October, then again on 10, 12 and 14 November, without a gap on either side of the tabling date.
Reading the first draws after a levels plan release
Two things are worth separating. First, the year’s overall admissions numbers — Federal High Skilled, PNP, and the rest — reset with the Plan itself, on the tabling date. Second, the specific category list and cut-offs candidates actually see in draws don’t necessarily move that week: the 2025 and 2026 category announcements each came in February, three to four months after their respective Plans were tabled, not alongside them.
So does draw behaviour change right after a new levels plan? Sometimes — 2023’s tabling coincided with a genuine multi-week pause — and sometimes not at all, as in 2024 and 2025. There’s no reliable rule tying the tabling date itself to an immediate draw pattern.
If you’re timing a decision around this, treat the Levels Plan as a reset of the year’s overall arithmetic, not a forecast of next week’s cut-off — that’s the real story behind how a new Levels Plan actually lands on Express Entry, and it’s a quieter one than the headline figures suggest. If a specific application timeline is riding on it, a licensed RCIC can check the current calendar against your file directly; this piece only tracks the historical pattern.
Our draw-history tracker updates within a day of each new round, so you’re never reading a stale cut-off against a fresh Levels Plan.