SkillSelect
Invitation Rounds

SkillSelect is the Department of Home Affairs online system that manages Expressions of Interest (EOIs) for Australia's points-tested skilled migration program. When you submit an EOI, you are not applying for a visa — you are entering a ranked pool of candidates. The Department draws from this pool in regular invitation rounds to issue invitations to apply.

The Migration Act 1958 requires the Minister to hold at least one invitation round per month for each relevant visa subclass. In practice, multiple rounds are often held in a month, and different occupations may be drawn in different rounds.

The system is designed so that migration planning — how many people are invited to apply, and in which occupations — is managed by government policy rather than being demand-driven. This means that even a competitive points score in a well-represented occupation does not guarantee an invitation will ever come, if the occupation's cap is already full.

The points cutoff — the minimum points score at which an invitation is issued in a given round — is not a fixed threshold set by the Department. It is an outcome: it reflects where the pool ran out of invitations. The cutoff emerges from the round, rather than being set before it.

Several factors cause cutoffs to shift between rounds:

The Department publishes round results after each invitation round on the DoHA website. The results show, for each visa subclass and occupation (where applicable): the date of the round, the number of invitations issued, the lowest points score invited, and the date of the earliest EOI submitted at that points score.

State and territory nomination for the subclass 190 (Skilled Nominated) and state-nominated subclass 491 (Skilled Work Regional — Provisional) does NOT go through SkillSelect invitation rounds. These are managed entirely by each state and territory government on their own schedule and with their own requirements.

Key differences from SkillSelect rounds: