Physicians Get Their Own Express Entry Category, Restricted to Canadian-Only Work Experience
In December 2025, IRCC announced a new Express Entry category built specifically for doctors. On paper it sounds like an opening for South African physicians. In practice, the physicians with Canadian work experience category outline comes with one condition that changes everything: the experience has to have been earned in Canada.
What was announced, and when
The category was created through the news release “Targeted immigration measures to boost Canada’s supply of doctors,” published 8 December 2025. Alongside it, IRCC gave provinces extra federal nomination spaces specifically for doctors with a job offer, and committed to 14-day work permit processing for nominated doctors — both signals of how much priority this category carries within the system.
Physician category eligibility rule
Physician category eligibility rule rests on three eligible occupations: general practitioners and family physicians, specialists in surgery, and specialists in clinical and laboratory medicine. Every occupation-based Express Entry category, this one included, requires at least twelve months of full-time work experience — or the part-time equivalent — accumulated within the past three years, in a single listed occupation. That experience does not need to be continuous, which offers some flexibility on timing, but it does need to be Canadian.
NOC 31102 Express Entry — the code that decides who’s actually eligible
NOC 31102 Express Entry is the classification code covering general practitioners and family physicians, one of the three occupations this category targets. If your occupation code doesn’t match one of the three listed, you’re not eligible for this specific category regardless of your qualifications or years of practice elsewhere — this is a narrow, occupation-specific route, not a general “doctors welcome” category.
Canadian experience physician category 2026 — the results so far
Canadian experience physician category 2026 draws have moved fast since launch. The first-ever round, on 19 February 2026, issued 391 invitations at a Comprehensive Ranking System cut-off of 169 — the lowest cut-off recorded since the pandemic era. A second round on 24 June 2026 issued 271 invitations at a cut-off of 223. Both cut-offs sit dramatically below the 500-plus scores typical of Canadian Experience Class rounds, which tells you how thin the eligible pool is: with so few candidates qualifying under the Canadian-only experience rule, even a modest CRS score is enough to clear the bar.
Who this actually shuts out
That low cut-off is also the honest catch for an offshore South African physician. It exists because almost nobody without Canadian work experience can even enter this pool — the low score reflects a small, already-qualified group, not an easy bar for newcomers to clear. A South African doctor who has never worked in Canada isn’t excluded because of a high score requirement; they’re excluded before the score is even relevant, because the occupation-experience rule itself requires Canadian time that a purely offshore applicant simply doesn’t have.
Whether your own combination of qualifications, occupation code and any Canadian work history might actually fit this category is a specific, checkable question — one worth putting to a licensed RCIC rather than guessing from a category outline like this one.