Anyone who applies for immigration to Canada through Express Entry (that’s how most immigrants come to Canada) competes with hundreds of thousands of other qualified candidates from all over the world. Every aspirant needs to create an Express Entry profile and enter information about their age, language skills, education, etc. After that each applicant gets a CRS score based on the answers they entered.
Once your Express Entry profile is created, you enter the Express Entry pool with all other applicants. It is from this pool of candidates, IRCC selects the applicants with highest scores through Express Entry draws and sends them an invitation to apply (ITA) to proceed to the next round. Your target should be getting out of this pool and proceeding to the next round as soon as you can.
What does the Express Entry pool look like
Since so many people enter this pool, it is highly varied with many applicants having high scores and many more with low scores. See this table to understand how many people are there in each scoring range. You are competing with these people. The higher you are on this table, the better chances you have for getting an ITA.
Express Entry pool as of March 21, 2021
| CRS score range | Number of candidates |
|---|---|
| 601 to 1200 | 155 |
| 501 to 600 | 1,714 |
| 491 to 500 | 995 |
| 481 to 490 | 2,493 |
| 471 to 480 | 6,208 |
| 461 to 470 | 9,837 |
| 451 to 460 | 10,115 |
| 441 to 450 | 8,970 |
| 431 to 440 | 9,379 |
| 421 to 430 | 7,148 |
| 411 to 420 | 8,272 |
| 401 to 410 | 9,524 |
| 351 to 400 | 54,345 |
| 301 to 350 | 28,336 |
| 0 to 300 | 4,629 |
How are people selected from this pool
Let’s say IRCC wants to select 6000 applicants in the next round. You can see in the table above that if an applicant’s score is 481 or more, they are definitely going to get an ITA. That’s because if you count the number of applicants starting from the top, you reach a total of 5,357 applicants by the time you reach the 481-490 range.
There are still 643 more applicants that IRCC needs to get to a total of 6000, so it will select some more from the 471-480 range. Of course, there are more than 6000 applicants in this range, and IRCC will select the ones with the next highest score. So, probably, the ones with a score of 479 or more will get selected.
How do you know if you will get an ITA
Keep checking the latest Express Entry draws to understand the recent cut offs and the number of applicants IRCC is selecting. In the above example, if IRCC decides to select 12,000 applicants in the next draw, you will definitely get an ITA if your score is 471 or more. You may even get lucky if you have a score of 469 or 470.
Does the pool remain same or does it keep changing
The Express Entry pool’s composition keeps changing with time depending on how fast or slow IRCC is selecting candidates from the pool. If there is a long gap between the draws or if very few applicants are being selected, then you will notice a lot more applicants in the high scoring brackets. Also, if the interest in migrating to Canada increases globally, more people will join the pool.
Related Topics
Process of PR application
Express Entry Explained
Latest Express Entry draws