← all questions · Competitiveness
There is no national ranking, and the sub rejects the one number people try to build it from. Real published figures: RACS 2026 SET offers ran 16.7% cardiothoracic to 39.7% plastics 1, RANZCO 27% 2, and Queensland publishes per-specialty selection counts 3. Everything else is not published.
No Australian body publishes a cross-specialty competitiveness ranking. What exists is a handful of colleges reporting their own applicant-to-offer numbers and one state that publishes per-specialty selection counts. Everything beyond that is a tier list somebody made up.
The numbers that are real. RACS Activities Report Table SET.4 for the 2026 intake: cardiothoracic 48 applications / 8 offers (16.7%), general surgery 195/50 (25.6%), vascular 33/9, urology 61/17, ENT 79/25, neurosurgery 49/17, paediatric surgery 19/7, plastics 68/27 (39.7%) 1. RANZCO: 142 applications for 38 places in 2026, 27% 2. Queensland Health publishes its own per-specialty counts — 168 eligible applications for 29 radiology places, 24 for 6 in dermatology, 89 eligible for 4 in ophthalmology 3.
Why the sub refuses to rank off those numbers, and it is right. Three named confounds. Self-selection: a 60% acceptance rate in a field where most applicants hold a PhD is not comparable to 60% anywhere else 4. Eligibility gates: the ratio counts only people who cleared the prerequisites and paid the fee, not the people who spent three unaccredited years and never became eligible 1. Cross-state double counting: Queensland reports 89 eligible ophthalmology applications against RANZCO's 27 for the same state, because applicants who preference several networks get counted repeatedly 3.
The metric the sub actually wants is median PGY at acceptance — proposed explicitly in the 2026 competitiveness thread and endorsed as the least bad option 4. No college publishes it. Not published, anywhere, for any specialty.
The tier lists the sub posts instead get shouted down for exactly this reason — the 2023 one is mostly people telling each other they are wrong 5.
So the usable answer is: surgical subspecialties and dermatology at the hard end, ophthalmology and radiology in the middle, psychiatry and GP historically easier and both tightening 3. Treat any ordering finer than that as guessing.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
How do you define competitiveness though?
No, and none would be accurate based on numbers because it doesn't include selection bias and precursors to applying.
Median PGY at acceptance is probably best option imo - but none is perfect
To add in that successful proportion of applicants is kinda meaningless as well. Some specialities have most candidates apply with a PhD - 60% acceptance in this sort of cohort is very different To other specialities
Asked 12 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 /(most|least|relative|rank(ing)?|tier|compare).{0,40}competitiv|competitiv.{0,25}(tier|rank|list|order)|tier list/i. Quotes are the four highest-scoring comments in the 2026 competitiveness thread that explain why a ratio is the wrong metric, rather than any comment that offers a ranking.