← all questions · Competitiveness · Anaesthetics guide
Very. ANZCA does not select — a hospital department or state scheme does, off a crit-care SRMO year that works as a six-month audition. Queensland's 2026 first-year round took 51 from 404 eligible applications 2. PGY4 is the modal entry year and PGY3 entry is now rare 3.
The official position. ANZCA sets only a floor: general registration and 104 weeks of prevocational medical education and training, of which at most 52 weeks may be anaesthesia or ICU 1. The college does not run selection. A hospital department or a state rotational scheme hires you into an accredited post and you register with ANZCA afterwards 1. So "how competitive" is a question about employers, not a college, and the answer differs by state.
The numbers that exist. Queensland publishes its own: 404 eligible applications for 51 first-year selections in the 2026 round 2. NSW does not publish a ratio; secondary aggregation puts it at roughly 100 scheme posts plus 100–130 one-year independent posts a year 3. There is no national applicant-to-place figure — treat anyone quoting one as guessing.
What the ratio hides. The real bottleneck is the feeder job, not the training post. A critical-care SRMO year is the audition, and those jobs are themselves heavily contested 4. Entry is now typically PGY4, with PGY3 described in 2026 threads as close to unheard of 3.
The counter-argument. Anaesthetics is competitive at a point in time, and that point is early. Unlike surgery, you find out by PGY3–4 whether you are on track, and the crit-care terms you do while waiting are useful in ED, ICU and retrieval if you change course 5. Several people who missed out are now haematologists, GPs or intensivists 5. The sunk cost is a year or two, not a decade.
What actually moves the needle is consultant references from the department you worked in, not course counts — the panel process described by people who have sat on them turns on whether someone at the table vouches for you 6.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
I’m going to be honest here, you applied for a highly competitive position in an increasingly competitive speciality as a PGY2. You realistically had a 1 in 5 chance from the get go, and that doesn’t even factor in some of these applicants may have had things you don’t, like more connections or registrar experience.
The bottleneck is at the start. There is minimal sunk costs doing some crit care/general RMO terms while you wait to get on. By PGY3 you basically know if you're a high chance to get on within a year, or if you need to make a change (CV/interview/location).
I’ve spoken to many people on anaesthesia training interview panels and selection committees. There is some variation obviously state to state, but the persisting and shared aspects have included the following:
Its not a walk on- but its not competitive like surgical specs.
Asked 20 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /(?=.*(anaesth|anesth))(?=.*(competitiv|chance|odds|hard|difficult|reject|ratio|popular|easiest|too late|realistic))/i. Quotes selected as the highest-scoring comments inside anaesthetics-titled threads that address entry odds, balanced cautionary against positive; text taken verbatim from the comment dump.