IRCC held six Express Entry rounds between 1 and 16 September 2026 and issued 8,555 invitations. For the same stretch of August it was four rounds and 8,807.
Volume barely moved. What moved was who got invited.
Every round, 1–16 September
| Date | Category | Invited | CRS cut-off | |---|---|---|---| | 1 Sep | Canadian Experience Class | 2,000 | 521 | | 3 Sep | Physicians with Canadian work experience | 229 | 198 | | 4 Sep | Healthcare and social services | 3,500 | 475 | | 14 Sep | Provincial Nominee Program | 576 | 734 | | 15 Sep | Canadian Experience Class | 2,000 | 519 | | 16 Sep | Senior managers with Canadian work experience | 250 | 389 |
What changed
Healthcare is back, and big. The 4 September round invited 3,500 people — 41% of everything issued in the first half of the month — at a cut-off of 475. There was no healthcare round at all in the first half of August.
Two categories are inviting at scores most people would read as hopeless. Physicians with Canadian work experience cleared at 198. Senior managers with Canadian work experience cleared at 389. Both are small rounds, and both have the same condition in the name: *Canadian* work experience. If you are in either occupation and already working here, the general cut-off you have been watching is not your cut-off.
The Canadian Experience Class has not moved. 519 and 521 this month, and every CEC round since June has landed between 516 and 523. Seven rounds, a seven-point range. If you are sitting below 516 in CEC, nothing about the current pattern suggests waiting will fix it; that is a score problem, not a timing problem.
What did not change, and is being read as if it did
No French-language round has been held since 19 August — 28 days.
French is the single largest category of 2026. It took 50,500 of the 120,427 invitations issued from January to August — 41.9%, ahead even of CEC. August had two French rounds of 5,000 each, thirteen days apart. So the absence in September looks like a signal.
It is not one yet. Measured across IRCC's own record, French rounds have already been further apart than this three times since December:
- 17 December 2025 → 6 February 2026: 51 days
- 28 May → 9 July: 42 days
- 29 April → 28 May: 29 days
And in 2025 there was a gap of 140 days, from March to August, after which French rounds resumed on a regular cadence.
A 28-day gap in a category that has gone 51 days this year is noise. Anyone telling you French selection has stopped is extrapolating from three weeks. If there is still no French round after 9 October, the gap passes 51 days and becomes the longest since the 2025 pause — and that would be worth writing about. Until then it is a calendar, not a policy.
The number that misleads people every time
The Provincial Nominee Program round cleared at 734. That is not a score anyone reaches on their own.
A provincial nomination adds 600 points. Take it away and the underlying cut-off was 134, which is low enough to be meaningless as a target. The number that actually decides whether a PNP candidate is invited is not 734 — it is whether the province nominated them at all, and that decision is made on the province's own grid, not the CRS.
That is also why the more useful question for most PNP candidates is not "what is the Express Entry cut-off" but "what does my province score", which is a different calculation entirely: Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta. Reading the draws goes further into why the headline number is almost never the one that applies to you.
Still missing
No STEM round since 11 April 2024. IRCC has now held 151 rounds and issued 309,408 invitations since then, none of them to the STEM category. That is its own story.
Sources
Every figure is computed from IRCC's machine-readable rounds of invitations file, read 2026-09-16, containing 445 rounds with the most recent dated 16 September 2026. Category shares for 2026 cover 1 January to 31 August. French-round gaps are measured between consecutive rounds whose category names French-language proficiency.
This page covers federal Express Entry rounds only. Provincial draws are published by each province on its own page, in its own format, with no machine-readable feed, and they are not included here.
Not immigration advice. Where IRCC's own record disagrees with this page, IRCC is right — tell us and it gets fixed.