SkillSelect EOI Data & Occupation Ceilings

Where the EOI data actually is

Not on the Home Affairs website. The department publishes its SkillSelect expression-of-interest figures as an interactive dashboard hosted on the Employment portfolio’s reporting platform, and links to it from exactly one page — the previous-rounds page, in a single line near the bottom. The SkillSelect landing page does not mention it.

That is also why you found this page instead of that one. The dashboard serves a few kilobytes of JavaScript and builds its tables in your browser, so there is nothing in it for a search engine to read. The most authoritative source on the subject cannot rank for its own data, and a row of commercial mirrors has filled the gap.

It is worth the trip: it is the only place the figures are official. There is no spreadsheet, no export and no published dataset — a search of the national open-data catalogue returns no SkillSelect dataset at all. Filter it by visa subclass, occupation, points score, nominated state and month, and read the answer yourself.

Department of Home Affairs — SkillSelect, Previous rounds (which links the dashboard) (opens in a new tab) verified 31 Jul 2026

Why the pool figures you have seen disagree

Because a pool count is meaningless without its slice, and almost nobody publishing one states theirs. Totals in circulation for the same month differ by more than a factor of five. They are not all wrong; they are answers to different questions presented as answers to the same one.

The department has published the figure that explains most of the gap. Reviewing its own SkillSelect data, it found that in 2022/23, 87% of subclass 189 candidates had also lodged an expression of interest for a state-nominated subclass 190 or subclass 491. One person, several entries. Add the nominated-state dimension and a single candidate can appear many times over, so a total summed across every subclass and state counts people repeatedly — while a total for one subclass in one state counts almost nobody you are competing with.

Two more things quietly move any total. Counts below five are masked as “<5”, and so is any figure that would let you work a masked one out. And every expression of interest is archived after two years, so a pool includes people who have since been granted a visa another way, left, or stopped trying. A queue you measure this way is longer than the queue you are actually in.

We publish no pool figure of our own. Keeping one honest would mean restating a number whose denominator we could not show you, refreshed from a source that updates a handful of times a year on no announced schedule. The dashboard is a link away and it is official; what is worth adding is how to read it.

Department of Home Affairs — FOI FA 25/10/00198, Reform of SkillSelect invitation rounds, para 12 (opens in a new tab) verified 1 Aug 2026

The asterisked eight — and where they turn up again

Eight groups carried an asterisk in every published year, marking them “subject to pro rata arrangements”: rather than being invited in a block, they were released across the year so a high-supply occupation could not take its whole ceiling in the first round.

Those eight ANZSCO codes — 2211, 2212, 2334, 2335, 2339, 2611, 2613, 2631 — are exactly the groups the department published a separate minimum score and date of effect for in every round of the same era. The ceilings table said how many an occupation could have; the round results said what it cost to get one. They were two halves of one mechanism, and both halves stopped within months of each other. You can still read the second half: the round results are published in full here, pro-rata era included.

When publication stopped, and how we know

The department’s ceilings page returned a page of figures on every archived capture up to 24 July 2021, and a 404 on every capture taken since. It was last edited on 14 May 2021 — and by then the following program year had already begun, with the table still showing 2020-21. It was archived rather than updated. A sweep of both departmental domains for any address containing “ceiling” finds no replacement in any year, and the two explanatory FAQ pages that went with it had already gone months earlier.

The concept did not go with the page. The department’s current invitation-rounds page still carries an “Occupation ceilings” section, still defines the term, and still names the visas it does not apply to. It gives no figure for any occupation, and its opening paragraph ends in a colon introducing a list that is not there.

Because the source page no longer exists at its own address, every figure in the table above cites two links: the department’s original URL, and the timestamped capture the figures were read from. We are not treating an archive as an authority on migration policy — only as evidence of what a department published on a given day, which is the one thing it can properly attest.

Ceilings today: re-established, and measuring something else

Occupation ceilings came back for 2025-26. The department’s own word is “re-established”, in a submission recommending they be rebuilt on a tiered model with different multipliers by occupation, that their fulfilment be monitored across the permanent and provisional programs, and that subclass 189 rounds generally be held quarterly. There are four tiers. Which occupation sits in which is redacted from the released document, as is the table of multipliers.

It is not the same measurement as the series above, and putting the two in one column would compare things that are not alike. The published ceilings capped invitations under the points-tested program. The re-established ones cap visa grants across all the skilled programs — so employer sponsorship, state nomination and regional grants all consume the same allowance, and the subclass 189 receives only what is left.

Note what that leaves. An occupation with a large workforce can still have very little room in the subclass 189 if the other programs have already spent the allowance, and you cannot infer the second number from the first. The department also attaches a caveat worth carrying: ceilings are “policy guidance”, are “subject to change”, and “do not necessarily reflect the final outcomes of the program”. They are not a quota anyone is entitled to.

Why there is no ceilings table for this year here

The 2025-26 ceilings exist. They were released under freedom of information as a six-page document covering all four tiers, and you can read it. We have not copied its figures onto this page, and the reason is specific rather than squeamish: five of its six pages are scanned images containing no machine-readable text at all, and the text layer on the page that has one misreads its own column headings — printing “figure” as “fiaure”, “adjusted” as “adiusted” and “Physicians” as “Phvsicians”.

Every figure on this site is traceable to a source we can machine-read and re-check. A table retyped by eye from a scan cannot meet that standard, and the tables of “2025-26 occupation ceilings” in circulation elsewhere — which disagree with one another — are what that looks like when it is done anyway. The worked example above is a different case: it is a complete departmental sentence, published as text, and its arithmetic checks out, so it is stored with the sum verified rather than assumed.

If you need a specific occupation’s current ceiling, read the release itself and check the row against the method above — multiply the stock by the multiplier, subtract the grants. That is more than any page republishing those numbers lets you do. Nothing has been published for the program year now under way.

Department of Home Affairs — FOI FA 26/01/00545, occupation ceilings by tier, 2025-26 (opens in a new tab) verified 1 Aug 2026

Department of Home Affairs — FOI FA 25/10/00198, the submission re-establishing ceilings (opens in a new tab) verified 1 Aug 2026

What actually decides whether you are invited

Not the size of the pool. Within a round the department invites the highest-scoring expressions of interest first, and separates equal scores by date of effect — the moment each reached its current score, earlier first. A ceiling can close an occupation for the year; your score and your date of effect decide everything else.

The department is blunt that it will not tell you where you stand: it cannot notify you of your EOI’s progress or say whether you may be invited. What it points to instead is its own round results — after each round it publishes the lowest score invited for the subclass 189 and the 491 Family Sponsored, which it describes as an indication of how likely an invitation is next time.

That is the number worth your attention, and it is published occupation by occupation rather than as one national figure. Look up the minimum score invited in your occupation, then work out your own score against the points test and compare the two. If there is a gap, English is usually the fastest place to close it.

Department of Home Affairs — SkillSelect, After you submit your expression of interest (opens in a new tab) verified 1 Aug 2026

Frequently asked questions