← all questions · The unaccredited years
Nobody publishes it. RACS sets no PGY gate but its specialties require registrar-level surgical terms that put the earliest realistic application at PGY3–4 12. First-hand accounts on the sub cluster at three to four unaccredited years and PGY5–6 at offer, with real tails from PGY4 to PGY12 34. Never quote a single number.
What the colleges actually say. RACS states that application is not linked to postgraduate year level, and that the earliest point you may be able to apply is your third postgraduate year 1. The real gate is the rotation prerequisite: orthopaedics, cardiothoracics and plastics require terms at PGY3 or above, and paediatric surgery requires 52 weeks of supervised postgraduate surgical work at registrar level in an Australian or New Zealand unit 12. You cannot compress the pathway below roughly PGY4 entry for most specialties. No college publishes the average number of unaccredited years its trainees did before selection — that figure is not published, anywhere.
The scale of the holding pattern is published. The 2024 Medical Training Survey puts unaccredited and other non-specialist trainees at roughly half the training cohort 3. That is the denominator the college reports leave out.
What the sub's own first-hand accounts show. Across the AMAs and "how many attempts" threads, the modal profile is three to four unaccredited years, PGY5–6 at offer, one to three applications 45. The tails are long in both directions and in the same specialty: one ortho first-attempt PGY4 offer sits in the same 2026 cohort as a PGY11 46. One general surgery AMA is titled "got on to GSET at PGY10" after eight unaccredited years 5.
The counter-argument to the averages. Applying early is not free — the sub's own read is that applying before about three years reads as premature in some specialties 7. And the most repeated threshold heuristic runs the other way: if you have not got on by your fifth unaccredited year, reconsider 7.
Use a distribution, not a number. Decide, in writing, how many years and how many attempts you will give it before you start 5.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
The average person is getting onto training as a PGY-5 or PGY-6.
I think if you haven't got on by 5th year of unaccredited you should really reconsider if is the path for you
Of two of the names I've recognised, one is PGY5 and the other is PGY11
I've heard this is a minimum amount for some surgical specialties. Applying before 3 is seen as embarrassing.
Asked 17 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 the r/ausjdocs dump (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /unaccredited.{0,45}(year|long|how many|average|PGY)|(how (long|many)|average|median).{0,45}(unaccredited|SET|PGY at)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments that state a PGY or a year count, chosen so the 'too early' and 'too late' heuristics both appear beside the distribution.