On 16 September we wrote that a 28-day gap in French-language rounds was noise, and that it would only become worth writing about if it ran past 9 October, the day it would beat this year's longest gap of 51 days.
It ran past. As of 10 October, IRCC has held no French-language round for 52 days, the last one on 19 August. That is the longest gap since the 140-day pause of March to August 2025.
Every round since our last read, 17 September – 10 October
| Date | Category | Invited | CRS cut-off |
|---|---|---|---|
| 28 Sep | Provincial Nominee Program | 733 | 725 |
| 29 Sep | Canadian Experience Class | 2,000 | 518 |
| 1 Oct | Trades occupations | 3,500 | 476 |
Three rounds, 6,233 invitations. Nothing since 1 October.
September against August
| Rounds | Invited | French rounds | |
|---|---|---|---|
| August | 8 | 15,811 | 2 (10,000) |
| September | 8 | 11,288 | 0 |
Read the totals alone and September looks like a 29% cut. Take French out and it is the other way round: August invited 5,811 people outside French, September 11,288, nearly twice as many. The slowdown is one category stopping. Everything else sped up.
What changed
French is no longer the largest category of 2026. Through August it held 41.9% of the year's invitations, ahead even of the Canadian Experience Class. CEC passed it in the first round of September. Year to date it is now 55,250 CEC against 50,500 French, 40.9% to 37.3% of 135,215.
Trades came back. The 1 October round invited 3,500 trades candidates at 476, the first trades round since 2 April, 182 days earlier. Trades gaps have run 330, 196 and now 182 days, so this is a category that arrives rarely and in bulk. If you are in a trade and below the general cut-off, 476 is the number that applies to you, not 518.
The PNP round was big. 733 invitations on 28 September, the second-largest PNP round of 2026 after 955 on 22 June. The cut-off of 725 is, as always, the nomination's 600 points plus an underlying 125. Whether you get invited is decided earlier, when the province does or does not nominate you on its own grid.
What did not change
CEC held again. 518 on 29 September. Every CEC round since June has now landed between 516 and 523: eight rounds, a seven-point range. Below 516 in CEC, waiting is not a strategy.
STEM is still missing. No round since 11 April 2024, now 912 days, through 154 rounds and 315,641 invitations to other categories. That story is here.
No provincial grid changed. All four grids this site scores (Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan) were last checked against their official sources on 28 September and matched. The next check runs before the end of October.
What the French gap does and does not mean
Fifty-two days is now a real signal, but it does not mean French selection has ended. Here is what the record supports:
- It has happened before, and it came back. The 2025 pause ran 140 days, and French then led all of 2026's invitations through August.
- It is not yet unusual for this program. Gaps of 78 and 140 days both occurred within the last two years.
- It does change the arithmetic. French has carried more than a third of 2026's invitations. If it stays away, the share it held goes either to other categories or nowhere. The rounds since 1 September, with healthcare, physicians, senior managers and trades all drawing, point to the first.
If you were counting on a French round, your score under the general categories matters more than it did in August. If your French is a strength, the gap is not a reason to drop it: a single French round of 5,000 is larger than all three rounds held since 17 September put together.
Your provincial score is a separate calculation from all of this: Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan. The September read covers the first half of the month, and Reading the draws explains why the headline cut-off is rarely the one that applies to you.
Sources
Every Express Entry figure is computed from IRCC's machine-readable rounds of invitations file, read 2026-10-10, containing 448 rounds with the most recent dated 1 October 2026. Category totals for 2026 cover 1 January to 10 October. Gaps are measured in days between consecutive rounds whose category names the same group. Grid check dates are from this site's own monthly comparison against each province's published grid.
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.