← all questions · Competitiveness · Psychiatry guide
Nationally, not very — and the trend is the other way. RANZCP intake fell 455 in 2024 to 429 in 2025, with NSW down 25% to 94 1, and WA, the only jurisdiction publishing a ratio, runs about 2:1 2. What is competitive is a specific metro service, not the specialty. Research scores zero 3.
The honest framing is: easy to get onto psychiatry, hard to get onto your preferred hospital. RANZCP-wide intake fell from 455 in 2024 to 429 in 2025, a 6% drop; Victoria went 115 to 110 and NSW 125 to 94, down 25% 1. Posts go unfilled. Western Australia is the only jurisdiction that publishes a ratio at all: roughly 50–60 applicants for 25–30 positions including rural, about 2:1 2.
What selection actually weighs. Branch Training Committees score against a published national rubric — CV 20%, interview 20%, referees 15% — and research and publications are worth zero 3. A psychiatry HMO term moves far more of your score than any paper will. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Māori and rural applicants all progress to interview automatically 3.
The catch is that entry is not the same as a job. College selection does not place you; you need an offer in an accredited post, which in Victoria means a PMCV/VPTC match plus applications to each health service, and in NSW and Queensland a college application plus the state JMO campaign 3. That is where the competition lives — the popular metro schemes, not the specialty.
The reason NSW got easier is not good news. Over 206 staff specialist psychiatrists resigned across 2024–25 and about a third were rehired as VMOs; the 25% intake fall is downstream of that 4. Easier entry, real supervision-quality risk.
Counter-argument. The sub's most-upvoted correction is that failing to get one registrar job at one inner-Melbourne hospital does not make a specialty competitive 5. The most-upvoted caution is the opposite of a competitiveness point: if you are coming for the lifestyle rather than the work, the patients deserve better and you will burn out 6.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
The good news it is probably not very competitive at all in NSW. The bad news is that there is a good reason for that.
The fact that you can't get the one reg job at the one inner melbourne hospital you want does not make the specialty competitive.
Psychiatry is definitely one of the less competitive specialties but at the risk of sounding obnoxious, I strongly urge people who are motivated primarily by the lifestyle aspect to reconsider.
Yes it is slightly more competitive than it used to be. But no... it's certainly not the new derm
Asked 29 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 /(?=.*(psychiatr|\bpsych\b|RANZCP))(?=.*(competitiv|chance|odds|hard|difficult|reject|ratio|popular|easiest|too late|realistic))/i. Quotes are the top-scoring substantive comments across seven psych-competitiveness threads, balanced so 'not competitive' sits beside the reason NSW in particular is not competitive.