The item 14 enrolment cut-off, measured

568 superseded training products sitting on 424 live RTO scopes reach their computed item 14 enrolment cut-off within the next 90 days — and every one of them falls on 4 days, 458 of them on 23 December 2026 alone. That is 11.7% of the 3,628 ASQA-regulated providers with a current registration — the ones item 14 binds — reaching the same date at the same time. It is not a breach finding and not a prediction: it is arithmetic the register publishes the inputs for and never performs.

The date the register never computes

When a training product is superseded, the register shows the replacement — and stops there. Item 14 of the 2025 Compliance Standards (F2025L00355, in force 1 July 2025) attaches a date to that event: under s 14(1)(a)(i), as ASQA's published guidance reads it (ASQA guidance, read live 25 August 2026), new enrolments into the superseded product are not permitted from one year after its replacement joined the national register — later if ASQA has approved otherwise. Learners already enrolled are on a different clock with no fixed date: they finish or transfer "in a timely manner".

Why it is a cliff, not a slope

The dates are not spread across the quarter. They cluster, because the register does not publish replacements one at a time: a training package release moves hundreds of products on the same day, so their cut-offs land on the same day one year later.

A provider reaching one of these dates still has every option open: enrol the final intake into the superseded product before it, move new intakes to the replacement, or apply to ASQA for an extension. What it cannot do is set that date itself: it arrives on the register's schedule, and only ASQA can move it.

Which products, and how many scopes

Two qualifications account for most of it, and they are among the most widely delivered in the country. Each code links to its own page, with the full chain and the computed dates:

The replacements are all flagged equivalent by the register, which makes the transition simpler — but it does not move the date. The equivalence flag describes the mapping between the old product and the new one; item 14 fixes when the old one stops taking new enrolments either way.

September is the first wave, not the last

The 90-day window above is an editorial choice, not a property of the data. Run the same arithmetic with no window at all and 2,081 scope instances across 1,075 providers have a computed cut-off still ahead of them — and they fall on just 13 dates between September 2026 and July 2027, for the same reason as before: a training package release moves whole cohorts of products on the same day, so their computed cut-offs land together one year later.

* Distinct providers — one provider can sit in several waves, so the column does not sum. The last column is deliberately strict: an instance counts only when every replacement the register names is flagged not equivalent. If even one equivalent pathway exists, it does not count — so the 206 shown are the instances where the transition cannot ride an equivalence mapping at all.

And one thing these wave totals cannot do. ASQA has published transition extensions for 2 products — AMP20316 and AHC41316 — and such an extension moves the enrol-by date for every RTO with the product on scope. Every row that counts products on this page has it applied: the table of September products above, and the already-past count below. The wave table does not, because it counts by date: the read never recorded how many of a wave's instances carry which product, so a wave here still counts a product ASQA has since moved, and subtracting it would mean inventing a number we did not measure. As far as the published extensions go that cuts one way: they can only make a wave total here too high. ASQA publishes the current extensions here.

The September cliff has its own page now: the four products behind it, what replaces each one and the release dates the arithmetic runs from, checked by hand against the live register.

Two more of these waves are worth naming. On 23 December 2026 the largest single-product wave after September arrives: CHC30121 Certificate III in Early Childhood Education and Care, on 361 live scopes by itself — measured on its own page. And on 2 February 2027 comes the wave where equivalence runs out: 139 of its 164 instances — meat processing products, concentrated on 28 providers — have no equivalent replacement named at all, measured product by product here.

Every date in this table is the computed floor as of the same 2 October 2026 read: ASQA can extend any of them — for a whole product, as noted above, or for a given provider — and each new register release adds a new wave a year out. The calendar grows at the register's pace.

And the windows already past

Looking backwards from the same read: 37 scope instances are past their computed cut-off with no extension published for them, on at most 19 live scopes. The read itself counted 45; ASQA has since published an extension covering 8 of them, which moves the day new enrolments stop. That number needs splitting twice over — by the extension, and because the instrument only commenced on 1 July 2025:

What stands out is how small that whole column is: 37 instances across 3,628 providers. Whatever else is true of the sector, it is not sitting on a pile of long-expired enrolment windows. The RTO column is the measured one and does not divide when the extension is applied — the read did not record which providers held only the extended product — so 19 is an upper bound, not a count. The page for that column shows the arithmetic in full. Most of the 45 measured — 41 of them — passed since the instrument commenced, a median of 8 months ago, and they cluster in a handful of agricultural qualifications. Only 4 have a computed date predating the rule, under the framework the repealed 12-month rule belonged to. And a product can sit on a scope past its computed cut-off with nothing wrong at all: the provider may have stopped enrolling into it long ago and simply never removed the scope entry.

How this was measured

Every live scope, read product by product, in one day. 3,985 of the organisations flagged as RTOs on training.gov.au were read on 2 October 2026 — one did not answer — and every date on this page, including "past" and "still ahead", is measured against that same day. The population for every figure is the 3,628 providers that are both current and ASQA-regulated, out of 3,888 current registrations on the register; both counts come from the register's own facets rather than from our tally (counted on 20 August 2026). A scope entry counts if it has no end date or an end date of that day or later, and only qualifications, accredited courses and skill sets — the products a learner enrols in — are counted.

The date is computed the way the site computes it. For each superseded product we take its replacement as the register names it, the replacement's inclusion date as the date of its first release on the register, and the cut-off as that date plus one year. Where the register names several replacements, we use the one that gives the latest cut-off — the reading most favourable to the provider — so the counts here are floors by construction. Three of the largest results were then checked by hand against the live register, product by product, before publishing.

What was excluded, and counted as excluded. None. Every superseded product found on a live scope named at least one replacement with a published inclusion date, so a cut-off could be computed for all 2,126 instances. Had any lacked one, it would have been excluded from every count above and reported here rather than silently filled in.

ASQA-regulated providers only. Item 14 is an instrument of the national regulator, so it binds RTOs regulated by ASQA. Providers registered only with a state regulator — VRQA in Victoria, TAC in Western Australia — sit on the same national register but answer to their own instrument, and the register says which is which in each provider's registrationManager field. Every figure here is ASQA-only: 3,628 providers of the 3,888 with a current registration. That distinction is not cosmetic — counting the state-regulated providers too would have multiplied the "already past" figure more than twentyfold, and every one of those would have been a provider item 14 does not bind.

What this does not say

• It does not say anyone is in breach. ASQA can extend the enrolment cut-off. The extensions it publishes for a whole product are already applied to the product rows and to the “already past” count on this page, read 21 September 2026; the wave totals further up are the measured ones and still carry them. An extension granted to a single provider is published nowhere we can read, so every date here is the computed date, absent an approval we cannot know about — which is also why a window counted as past may in fact still be open.
• It does not put a clock on enrolled students. The one-year date is for new enrolments only. Students already enrolled in a superseded product have no fixed deadline — ASQA's guidance (ASQA guidance, read live 25 August 2026) says there is no longer a requirement to transition or teach out within a specific period.
• It does not say anything about intake. The register records what is on a provider's scope, not who is enrolled in it. A product on scope past its cut-off may have had no new enrolment in years; a product approaching one may have none planned. Only the provider knows.
• It does not reach inside the qualification. The item 14 enrolment cut-off is arithmetic on a replacement's inclusion date. Where the register publishes a unit as deleted with an empty replacement list there is no such date to compute, and the product carrying it can be perfectly current: counted separately in deleted units still listed in current qualifications.
• It does not claim to be the only count. The product documentation of the major student management systems we read (aXcelerate, VETtrak, Wisenet and Cloud Assess, last read 15 September 2026) does not describe computing the item 14 enrolment cut-off. We read their public product pages, not their full knowledge bases, and a system can do something without publishing it, so ask yours directly. No published sector-wide count of it appeared in our searches. If one appears, we will link it.

Your own dates

This page is the register-wide picture. The per-provider version is free: type an RTO code and the check lists every superseded product on that live scope with its computed item 14 enrolment cut-off — the same arithmetic as this article, one scope at a time.