What the Transport Category Draws Actually Cover: Occupations and Licensing
In September 2023, IRCC invited 1,000 people from the transport occupations category, most of them with six months behind the wheel of a truck. By late 2025, that same six months in a truck cab qualified a candidate for nothing in this category at all. The transport category didn’t shrink. It changed into something else entirely, and if you’re reading old advice about which occupations the transport category draws cover, or what licensing they assume, you’re reading about a list that no longer exists.
That’s the myth worth killing early: that “the transport category” is a stable, ongoing route for truck drivers. It has never been stable, and right now it isn’t about trucks.
The version that ran in 2023 and 2024
Category-based selection launched in May 2023 with six categories, transport occupations among them. It drew three times in this window — 20 September 2023 (1,000 invitations, CRS cut-off 435), 20 December 2023 (670 invitations, also CRS 435), and 13 March 2024 (975 invitations, CRS 430). This was the era when truck drivers in Canadian category-based selection had a genuine, repeated shot: transport truck drivers had only just become eligible for Express Entry at all, added in the November 2022 NOC 2021 overhaul alongside bus and transit operators and heavy equipment operators.
Then it went quiet for nearly two years
When IRCC announced its 2025 categories in February that year, transport wasn’t on the list. Neither was STEM or agriculture and agri-food. Only French-language proficiency, health care and social services, trades and a newly added education category ran draws in 2025. Transport occupations sat idle through the whole year — no invitations, no round, nothing to check your profile against. This is the honest answer to why transport demand fluctuates year to year: categories are set annually by ministerial instruction, built around whatever IRCC decides is a labour-market priority that year, and a category with no draws is not a category you can plan a move around.
The 2026 list is a different occupation set
Transport returned in February 2026, but not as a truck-driving route. The current list covers air pilots, flight engineers and flying instructors, automotive service technicians and aircraft mechanics and inspectors — aviation and logistics roles in transport draws, not road haulage. As of the most recent published round data, this version of the category hadn’t drawn at all yet. It exists on IRCC’s category-based selection page as an eligible category; it simply hasn’t been used.
Every occupation-based category, transport included, now carries the same bar since February 2026: at least 12 months of full-time work experience (or the part-time equivalent) in a single listed occupation, accumulated within the past three years, gained in Canada or abroad — and it doesn’t have to be continuous. That’s double what it was when the category launched in 2023, when six months was enough.
What this means if you’re planning around it
If a South African aircraft mechanic or commercial pilot is reading this hoping for a fast lane, the honest position is: the category exists, the occupations fit, but nobody has been invited through it yet, so there’s no cut-off score to aim for and no draw pattern to study. If you drive trucks for a living, the category that once fit you doesn’t currently exist — your route back into Express Entry consideration would have to run through a general profile, a provincial nomination, or Canadian work experience instead, none of which this list determines.
Check IRCC’s own category-based selection page before treating any occupation list as current — this one has already been rewritten twice in three years. For how the categories fit into the wider points system, our Express Entry Explained guide walks through CRS and the three federal programs from the start.