The specialty selection calendar

Who publishes selection dates for each Australian specialty, when in the year they do it, and what is open now for the next intake.

25 September 2026

Several bodies are named by their initials below. There is a plain-English list of all of them at the end of this page.

There is no single calendar

Each college, specialty society or state health service sets its own selection dates and publishes them on its own site. No body publishes one timetable for every specialty. The dates also move every year, so any guide that gives you dates without naming the intake they belong to cannot be checked.

Below you will find who publishes the dates for your specialty and where, which changes little from year to year. After that comes what the year looked like for the 2027 intake, so you can see roughly when your specialty’s steps fall before the 2028 dates come out.

The 2028 intake table further down is empty because most bodies have not published those dates yet. The Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS), which oversees all nine surgical specialties, publishes the next year’s selection information in November. We fill the table in once the dates are published, with a link to each source.

A selection round and an intake are named for different years. A round that runs in 2026 selects people who start in 2027. The specialty selection guide explains why that matters and how often it trips people up.

Who publishes your dates

It depends on who selects you. Where the college selects nationally, the college publishes one timetable. Where your employer selects you, the dates come from a state campaign or a regional training scheme, and they differ by state.

For the bottom three rows, the college’s own page mostly tells you that it does not run selection. The dates you need are in the state campaigns below.

RANZCP says so directly. Its page states that “the trainee selection process, including dates and timing, is managed by local training programs in each state and territory”. ANZCA says the same about anaesthesia: the college does not appoint trainees, the employer does.

The state campaigns

Where the state selects, it usually does so through one annual recruitment campaign. That campaign covers junior doctor jobs as well as training posts.

New South Wales: Annual Medical Recruitment. NSW Health runs one campaign with an early round and a main round. For the 2027 clinical year, the published dates were:

• Early round: advertised from 4 May 2026, with offers from 2 June 2026.
• Main round: advertised 14 July to 4 August 2026, with offers between 21 August and 30 September 2026.

NSW runs statewide centralised panels for a named list of specialties, including psychiatry, radiology, pathology, and physician specialties such as cardiology, endocrinology and neurology. Surgery is not on that list, because RACS already selects surgical trainees nationally.

Victoria: the PMCV match. Victoria allocates many training posts through a computer match run by the Postgraduate Medical Council of Victoria (PMCV). You rank your preferences, health services rank applicants, and an algorithm pairs them. Victoria is also where RANZCR runs radiology selection centrally, so a Victorian radiology candidate follows a different process from a candidate in any other state.

Queensland: the RMO and Registrar Campaign. Queensland Health runs a single statewide campaign for resident medical officer (RMO) and registrar posts. RMOs are junior doctors in the years after internship. Candidates for some college-selected specialties still apply through it for the job itself. Dates are published on Queensland Health’s careers site.

Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory recruit through their own services. Western Australia coordinates Basic Physician Training across its networks through MedCareersWA. Anaesthesia runs through regional schemes, such as the South Australian and Northern Territory scheme.

What the year looked like for the 2027 intake

This is the most recent round that has finished. These dates are closed. They are here to show roughly when each step falls in the year, so you can plan before the 2028 dates are published. Expect the 2028 dates to fall at a similar time of year, but check the source before relying on any of them.

The first deadline comes in January, not at the interview. A surgical candidate who starts looking in May has already missed registration and applications for that year. Most colleges work the same way. The interview date is the last step, and several deadlines come before it.

Specialties do not share one season. Surgery and obstetrics interview in the middle of the year. The NSW main round runs from July into September. Emergency medicine runs two rounds a year, and ACRRM runs several intakes a year, each feeding one of two start dates. Advice about “selection season” is only useful once you know which specialty it is talking about.

Open or still running now

As of 25 September 2026. This section is refreshed with each update to the page.

• ACRRM, 2027 Semester 2 intake: applications open. Applications close at 11:59pm AEST on Monday 26 October 2026, and the Multiple Mini Interviews (MMIs) run from 1 to 12 February 2027. The interviews are six short scenarios: you get two minutes to read each one and eight minutes to respond. Training starts on 2 August 2027. Source.
• ACEM, Round 2: assessment in progress. Applications closed on 1 September 2026, the selection committee meets on 20 October and applicants are notified on 17 November 2026. ACEM allows one application per year and a maximum of three attempts. Source.
• NSW main round: offers finish on 30 September 2026. Source.

Surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, ophthalmology and RACGP general practice are all closed for the 2027 intake.

The 2028 intake, as dates are published

The 2028 intake is the one selected mostly during 2027, for training that starts in 2028. Most bodies have not published its dates yet. We will start filling this table in from early November 2026, when RACS publishes the surgical dates, and add each row as its body publishes, with a link to the source. Until a row has a date and a link, treat the 2027 table above as a guide to timing only.

One change is already known for the 2028 intake. RANZCOG is replacing its standardised interview with an MMI, as set out in its published roadmap.

How this page is sourced

Every date on this page comes from the college’s, society’s or health service’s own published page for the intake named beside it, and links to it. Where a body has not published a date, the page says so and leaves the cell empty rather than estimating one.

Acronyms