← all questions · Competitiveness · Dermatology guide
Hardest mainstream program in the country on places alone, and shrinking: 39 entry positions in 2023 down to 18 full-time plus 2 part-time in 2026, with WA taking zero for two years running 1. ACD publishes no national applicant count, so no national success rate exists. Queensland's is 24 eligible applications for 6 places 2.
The supply side is the whole story. ACD entry positions: 17 in 2021, 28 in 2022, 39 plus one part-time in 2023, 35 plus one in 2024, 26 plus one in 2025, and 18 full-time plus 2 part-time in 2026 — NSW 8, QLD 3+1, VIC 6, SA 1+1, First Nations 0, WA 0 1. The College states it cannot guarantee how many positions will exist in any location 1. Halving the intake in three years is the reason this feels worse than it used to.
There is no national success rate, because ACD does not publish applicant numbers. Not published. The state proxies that exist: Queensland Health reports 24 eligible applications and 6 selected 2; a North Queensland training hub reports about 3 of 89 eligible applicants in 2021 3. Those are not the same denominator and should not be averaged.
The rubric is a black box. Six named CV categories with no published weights, points or scoring guide of any kind — the only figures ever disclosed came via the AMC for the 2017 round 1. Six referees across three tiers, and ACD chooses which one to call 1. The four-attempt limit was removed in 2019, and the College states prior outcomes do not affect your chances 1.
The real gate is the year before the application. Peer-reviewed work confirms higher research degrees have become near-normative and that research is now integral to selection 4. The sub is blunter: almost all successful applicants have done at least a year as a dermatology research fellow, which is itself selected on the same criteria a year earlier 5.
Counter-argument worth hearing. A registrar in the field says most current registrars do not hold PhDs and that intake varies year to year with funding and maternity leave, including out-of-cycle spots 6. And if what you want is skin, a GP with a skin-cancer practice gets there years sooner 5.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
Most current registrars do not have PhDs.
They take single digit applicants each year and are incredibly opaque on how they judge them.
The path to GP specialising in skin (and you can be a 100% skin cancer doc if you want) is infinitely easier than getting on to derm.
While strictly not required, almost all successful applicants will have done at least a year as a dermatology research fellow.
Asked 8 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 /(?=.*(dermatolog|\bderm\b))(?=.*(competitiv|chance|odds|hard|difficult|reject|ratio|popular|easiest|too late|realistic|\bPhD\b|get (on|in|into)|selection|training|apply))/i. Quotes are the top-scoring comments in the derm threads, chosen so the research-fellow reality and the 'most registrars have no PhD' correction appear together rather than only the doom.