Day one of the new financial year, and visa fees have jumped sharply! Unlike the earlier CPI-linked tweaks, this time the rises are mostly around 25%, and some — like the 155 RRV and the Bridging visa B — have more than tripled outright. The student visa hasn’t hit the rumoured 5k mark, but it has still gone up by 500, reaching $2,500.
Popular Visa Fee Rises in Detail: Breaking Down the Key Categories
The Subclass 485 has gone up yet again! A 25% rise takes it straight to $5,750. After it doubled from $2,300 to $4,600 back in March this year, just four months on it is somehow still climbing…
The 155 RRV has more than tripled, leaping from $490 straight to $1,475. By comparison, today’s citizenship application fee is only $595 — it was $575 last year, up just $20 — and even adding the $422 fee for a 10-year passport, the two together come to just $1,017, still short of the $1,475 for a single Subclass 155 visa.
What’s more, an RRV is granted for five years at most, and sometimes for as little as one. At five years the price is just about tolerable, but paying $1,475 for a single-year grant means renewal costs are only going to keep climbing.
Australia’s Migration Policy Keeps Tightening: Higher Fees and Stricter Assessment, a Double Hit
The Opposition and One Nation have been making noise about cutting PR benefits, including the first-home buyer grant and the like. One Nation has even floated extreme claims — that PR holders shouldn’t even be allowed to buy an established home. Labor almost certainly won’t go that far, but given the way visa fees are trending, plus the lengthening PR benefit waiting periods over the past few years, the policy settings feel increasingly unfriendly towards PR itself.
The partner visa fee has officially broken the $10,000 mark, up 25% as well — it is now arguably the most expensive partner migration visa of any country in the world… neighbouring New Zealand, by conversion, comes to just a little over 1k Australian dollars.
A reminder to everyone to be extra careful when preparing your documents, and to treat any request-for-further-information letter with real care! You must now supply every requested document in full and in one go — respond late or fall short of the requirements, and your application could be refused outright.
Taken as a whole, this round of visa fee rises is frankly absurd — especially with inflation already well down, and with nothing in the Budget papers or any other public documents giving the slightest hint that fees were about to see such a large-scale surge.
Last year it was only the student visa going up; in March this year it was the Subclass 485; now it has snowballed into an across-the-board hike.
The one silver lining is that the parent migration contribution charge hasn’t changed. The first-instalment visa fee has risen along with the rest, but thankfully the contribution has held steady — still $43,600 per person.
Day one of the new financial year has delivered a solid little gut-punch — here’s hoping the days ahead bring rather more good news!
