Data and methodology

Official sources

We treat only the following as authoritative for Canadian immigration rules and data: Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) and Canada.ca, Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), Statistics Canada, the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants (CICC), official provincial and territorial immigration programs, and the official administrators of the TEF and TCF French examinations. We do not treat competitor blogs, SEO articles, social media, discussion forums or AI-generated answers as factual authority.

Data ingestion

A scheduled job reads IRCC's published rounds-of-invitations dataset and Statistics Canada's National Occupational Classification catalogue. Each run records the source, a content hash, the number of records retrieved, the number changed, and the outcome. Where the retrieved payload is unchanged, nothing is rewritten.

Validation

• Every round must carry a draw number, date, round type, cut-off score and invitation count.
• Records failing validation are not published; the previously verified dataset stays in place.
• If a synchronisation fails, we continue to display the last verified data with its correct update metadata. We never display fabricated values or blank a verified dataset because a fetch failed.

Round classification

Rounds are classified using the round type IRCC publishes with each draw: general, Canadian Experience Class, Provincial Nominee Program, French-language proficiency, and the category-based rounds (healthcare and social services, education, trades, transport, agriculture and agri-food, and STEM). Category names occasionally carry an IRCC version suffix; we group by the underlying round type so a renamed category version does not split a series.

Calculations

• Average cut-off — the arithmetic mean of the published cut-off scores for the rounds in scope, rounded to one decimal place.
• Median cut-off — the middle value of the sorted cut-offs; with an even number of rounds, the mean of the two central values. The median is reported alongside the average because a small number of unusual rounds can move an average noticeably.
• Minimum and maximum — the lowest and highest published cut-offs in scope.
• Invitations — the sum of published invitation counts; the average per round is that sum divided by the number of rounds in scope.
• Monthly and quarterly distribution — rounds grouped by the calendar month or quarter of their published date, in Canadian local dating as IRCC publishes it.
• Trend windows — a "30-day" or "90-day" figure covers rounds dated within that many days before the most recent round in the dataset, not before today's date.
• Year comparisons — where a year is still in progress, we compare like periods and say so explicitly rather than comparing a partial year with a complete one.

Update frequency

The Express Entry dataset synchronises on a scheduled cycle through the day, so a new round normally appears within hours of IRCC publishing it. The occupation catalogue changes rarely and is checked periodically. Every page that shows this data displays the date of the last successful synchronisation.

Terminology

Last synced

When our system last successfully retrieved data from the official source.

Last verified

When the dataset or value was last checked against the official source.

Last reviewed

When a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant last reviewed the explanatory content on a page.

Last updated

When the page itself last changed materially.

Limitations

• A cut-off applies only to the round it was published for. Past cut-offs describe what has happened; they do not indicate what a future round will require.
• We do not publish predicted cut-offs, invitation probabilities, nomination probabilities or approval likelihoods. Those are not supportable from published data.
• IRCC occasionally revises or restates published figures. Where that happens, our next synchronisation adopts the revised official value.
• Nothing on these pages is legal advice for an individual case, and no calculation is an eligibility decision.

Review process

Data pipelines are monitored operationally; interpretation and any statement about immigration rules is reviewed by Gagandeep Singh Boparai, a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant (CICC licence R709890). Frequently changing facts are held in an internal provenance register with their official source, effective date, verification date and the pages that depend on them, so a rule change can be traced to every affected page and reviewed rather than rewritten automatically.

Registered dynamic facts

The facts below change with policy and are tracked centrally rather than restated independently on each page.

Corrections policy

If Python Immigration identifies a material error in a calculation, a dataset or an analysis, the resource is corrected and its verification and review information is refreshed. Material corrections may be noted on the affected resource. We do not claim that our information is error-free, and we welcome corrections — write to us through the contact page with the resource and the official source that contradicts it.