Express Entry in Charts

Reading these charts

Four things that decide whether these numbers mean what they look like they mean.

• A cutoff is a result, not a target: The CRS cutoff is the score of the last candidate invited in that round. IRCC decides how many invitations to issue; the cutoff is whatever score that quantity happens to reach in the pool that day. It is not a pass mark published in advance, so a rising line means the pool got more competitive, not that the bar was raised.How to improve your CRS score
• Provincial Nominee rounds sit near 700 for a structural reason: A provincial nomination adds 600 points to a candidate’s CRS score. Everyone invited in a Provincial Nominee round already carries that bonus, so those cutoffs describe a different population entirely. Reading a 760 against a 523 tells you nothing about either.Express Entry vs PNP
• Draw types are not comparable, so they are not combined: That is why the cutoff charts below are three separate small multiples instead of one chart with three lines. Category-based rounds draw from a smaller targeted pool and land lower; Canadian Experience Class rounds draw from the general pool. Only invitation counts are genuinely additive across types, which is why the monthly chart stacks and the cutoff charts do not.Category-based draws explained · Glossary of terms
• Monthly totals move with batching, not with demand: IRCC runs rounds in batches, typically several within the same week, roughly every two weeks. A month that catches two batch weeks outscores a month that catches one, and that alone explains most of the sawtooth in the monthly chart. Compare months to the same month a year earlier, not to the month beside them.Full round-by-round table