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Not published, and the number everyone quotes is measuring something else. RACS reports offer rates among people who applied — 230 offers from 668 applications for the 2026 intake, 34.4% 1. That is where "about a third" comes from. It is not the fraction of unaccredited registrars who ever get on, and no college publishes that.
What RACS actually publishes. Table SET.4 of the 2025 Activities Report gives, for the 2026 intake, 668 applications and 230 offers across the nine specialties — 34.4% overall, ranging from cardiothoracics at 16.7% to plastics at 39.7% 1. The orthopaedics row is not comparable to the others: RACS states that for that year the ortho data includes only successful applications, so the 60.3% it implies is an artefact and should never be shown raw 1.
The one published figure that is close to the real question is ASPS's: across 2020–2024, 31.45% of plastics applicants were selected — 15.19% first attempt, 10.95% second, 4.24% third — and you get three attempts 2. So roughly two-thirds of people who ever apply to plastics never get on. That is per-person and cumulative, which is what people actually want to know, and only one specialty publishes it.
Why the denominator is wrong anyway. These are offer rates among people who cleared the eligibility gates and paid to apply. RACS charges a processing fee per specialty applied to, so one person applying to two specialties is two applications 3 — applications are not applicants. And the applicant pool is pre-filtered: people self-select out, and people who spent three years unaccredited and never became competitive enough to apply are not in the denominator at all 45.
The lore. The line "only 30% of pre-SET doctors actually make it onto SET" appears once in four years of the corpus, from one commenter, explicitly as something they were told, with four upvotes and no source 6. A doctor who did get on guessed 50% in the same corpus 7. Treat both as lore. The sub's most-viewed thread on this question produced no answer at all 4.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
The RACS publishes an annual activities report that is publicly accessible.
% of applicants successful is also wildly misleading as only surgical applicants who deem themselves competitive (i.e. maxed out CV) will apply in a given cycle
Gees hard to know. I recon 50%.
A number I have been told is only 30% of pre-SET doctors actually make it onto SET
Asked 5 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 /(percent|proportion|%|how many).{0,50}(unaccredited|never (make|get)|get on)|unaccredited.{0,40}(never|make it)/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the two threads that ask this question directly, chosen so the 30% and 50% claims sit beside the self-selection objection that discredits both.