SkillSelect in 2026: 5 things your invitation chances really depend on

SkillSelect in 2026: 5 things your invitation chances really depend on

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Picture the scene. You've lodged your Expression of Interest. You've done everything right – the points test, the skills assessment, the English test. Now you're just waiting for an email from the Department of Home Affairs that says you've been invited to apply.

Weeks pass. Then months. You start checking migration forums late at night, comparing your score to strangers who say they got invited with less than you. You start to wonder if the system has forgotten about you.

We wanted a better answer than a forum post, so we went to the source. We pulled every SkillSelect invitation round the Department has published over the last two years, right up to the most recent one on 4 June 2026, and looked at what actually happened round by round: how many people got invited, from which jobs, and at what score. Quick note on scope: this is about the Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189) and the Skilled Work Regional (Provisional) visa (subclass 491) – Family Sponsored, the two pathways that actually go through these SkillSelect rounds. If you're going down the state or territory nomination route instead, hold that thought – we've got something for you too, further down. For these two visas, a few things stood out, and they change the advice we'd give depending on what you do for a living.

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The two-year wait is over

For a long time, the fear in that forum post was justified. Invitations really were taking years to arrive. When the Department ran its round in November 2024, the 15,000 people invited that day included some whose EOI had been sitting there since December 2022 – nearly two years earlier. If you'd lodged in early 2023 expecting a quick outcome, you'd been waiting far longer than you should have.

That's changed. By late 2025, people were being invited in the same month they reached their score. By the June 2026 round, the gap was down to about six weeks. The backlog that built up through 2023 and 2024 has essentially been cleared.

So if you're refreshing your inbox right now, the good news is that the system is moving fast again. The catch is that speed only helps if invitations are actually being handed out in your occupation - and that's where things get uneven.

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Accountants and software professionals have gone quiet – but "engineer" is not one job

If you're an accountant or you work in software, you've probably heard that the points bar has come down lately. So why hasn't your invitation shown up?

Here's what we found. For a few months in mid-to-late 2024, accountants and auditors were getting invited – and so were developers, programmers, systems analysts and ICT business analysts – but at high scores, ranging from the mid-80s up to 100 points. Then, starting in August 2025, all of them simply stopped appearing in the invitation results. Not "you need more points." Not invited, full stop, for three rounds running, right through to the June 2026 round.

Engineering is where we have to be more careful, because it's not one story. We first assumed "engineers" had gone quiet too, until we checked occupation by occupation and found that's not quite right. The broad, generalist titles – Civil Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, Electrical Engineer, Aeronautical Engineer, Structural Engineer, Industrial Engineer – did disappear after November 2024, the same as accounting and software. But several more specific engineering occupations tell a different story: Mining Engineer, Petroleum Engineer and Engineering Manager have been invited in every single round over the last two years without a gap; Electronics Engineer has appeared in five of the last six rounds, missing only November 2025; and Chemical Engineer and Materials Engineer were both invited as recently as November 2025, before dropping out of the June 2026 list. So if your occupation is a specific engineering discipline rather than a general one, it's worth checking exactly where you sit rather than assuming either the good news or the bad news applies to you.

For accountants and software professionals, and for the generalist engineering titles, none of this is a new policy aimed at your profession. Each occupation gets a yearly quota of invitations, and once it's used up, nobody else in that occupation gets invited until it resets. Accountants went through the same dry spell for most of 2023, so this has happened before. What's different this time is how long the current gap has dragged on.

If this is you, the honest advice is: don't bank on subclass 189 coming through this year on points alone. There are other doors worth exploring – state nomination, employer sponsorship, or timing your EOI for when the quota opens back up – and it's worth talking those through properly rather than waiting on a quota you can't control.

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Meanwhile, some trades and specialists barely noticed the disruption

It would be easy to read the last point and assume the whole system has gone quiet. It hasn't – and if you're a tradesperson or in one of a number of medical specialties, you've probably had a much steadier run than the picture above suggests.

Occupations like gasfitters, glaziers, roof plumbers and stonemasons, and specialists like cardiologists and ophthalmologists, have been invited in nearly every round over the last two years, mostly at scores between 65 and 85. The only round that skipped them was November 2024 – the same record-breaking round that invited 15,000 people and cleared two years of backlog, which understandably crowded out smaller trades that round in favour of finally working through older, high-scoring EOIs. Once that backlog-clearing round was done, these occupations went straight back to being invited as normal, and have stayed that way through to June 2026.

The real story isn't that trades and specialists are suddenly back in favour. They never left. Accountants, software professionals and generalist engineers are the ones who went from invited every round to not invited at all. If you're in a trade or a medical specialty, that steadiness is itself useful information: your occupation has been a reliable part of the program, not a volatile one.

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The magic number "65" is not what it looks like

You've probably seen it written everywhere: 65 points is the minimum. Once you clear that, you're in the game. It's technically true, and it's also a little misleading.

Sixty-five points has been enough to get somebody invited in every single round over the last two years – but that somebody was almost always in an occupation with plenty of room left on its quota. For the occupations everyone wants to migrate under, the real score needed has been 85, 90, even 100. The headline number and the number that actually matters for you can be thirty points apart.

So don't plan your migration around the lowest score you've seen mentioned online. Ask what score has actually been getting people invited in your specific occupation over the last two or three rounds. That's the number that tells you something.

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The regional family visa is still a coin flip

If your plan relies on a family member sponsoring you for the regional visa, subclass 491, brace yourself for a bumpier ride than the others.

This stream stopped completely for three rounds in a row, from June through November 2024. It came back in August and November 2025, with 150 and then 300 invitations. Then the June 2026 round's published results didn't include a single subclass 491 invitation. Out of the last six rounds, this pathway produced nothing at all in four of them.

That kind of on-again, off-again pattern means it's a poor pathway to build your whole plan around. Treat it as a bonus if it comes through, not the plan itself, and have a second option ready in case a round comes and goes without you.

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What this all means

The system has caught up on its backlog, which is a great starting point. But it's no longer useful to ask "what's the points cut-off these days?" The honest answer depends entirely on your occupation, and right now that answer swings from "you'll get in easily" to "you won't get in at all," depending on what you do. The number worth chasing isn't the national average or last year's total. It's how your specific occupation has performed in the last two or three rounds – and that's exactly the conversation to have with us before you decide what to do next.

And here's that something we mentioned earlier. State and territory nomination runs on its own separate track altogether, outside these SkillSelect rounds entirely – and one state in particular stands out from the rest by a wide margin. We're digging into that properly, because if a state nomination pathway is genuinely more open than the national one right now, that's worth knowing whatever you do for a living. Keep an eye out for our next post.

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Sources: Department of Home Affairs, SkillSelect Previous Rounds page (rounds from 13 June 2024 to 13 November 2025) and SkillSelect Invitation Rounds page (4 June 2026 round), both viewed 8 September 2026.

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Updated: 9 SEP 2026