Years ago, each Subclass 189 occupation had an allocation for every financial year. Since the Department stopped bothering with that, whether it issues invitations in a round—and how many—has felt entirely down to its mood.
Today, Iscah published a new calculation for the current Subclass 189 invitation ceiling for each occupation, reportedly sourced from the Department of Home Affairs.
How the calculation works
- The total number of people currently working in the occupation in Australia
- The percentage used to set the occupation’s ceiling, based on its priority level
- The number of people in that occupation who took the Subclass 186/190/491 pathways in the previous financial year
Occupations are divided into four tiers, each with a percentage used to set its allocation ceiling.
1. Tier 1—high value—4%
Various medical occupations
2. Tier 2—high priority—2%
This tier reflects the Australian Government’s current priorities and can respond flexibly to policy changes. It mainly covers education and healthcare—in other words, the occupations currently receiving priority processing (Figure 3).
3. Tier 3—diverse occupations—1%
These occupations have a ceiling of 1%. This group includes occupations more familiar to us, including engineering and trade occupations (the lead image and Figure two).
4. Tier 4—oversupplied occupations—0.5%
These occupations have excessively large EOI backlogs, so the Department tightly controls the percentage. Examples include accounting and auditing occupations, IT occupations and chefs (Figure 4).
How does it work? An example
Occupation A has 50,000 workers in Australia and is in Tier 3. In the previous financial year, 1,000 people in this occupation obtained PR through employer sponsorship/Subclass 190/491. One per cent of 50,000 is 500. Subtract the 1,000 PR grants across those three categories in the previous financial year and the result is negative, so this occupation is very likely to receive no invitations this year.
What this means
- A higher tier is more favourable, as with various medical occupations.
- A large Australian workforce is an advantage, as with nursing and construction trades.
- The more people in an occupation who obtained Subclass 186 employer-sponsored, Subclass 491 or Subclass 190 visas in the previous financial year, the less favourable the position.
Here are the top ten Subclass 186 occupations for 2023–24 for reference (Figure 5; the 2024–25 figures have not yet been released).
- Chefs, accountants, software engineers, developer programmers and business analysts have large numbers of employer-sponsored applicants and are in the lowest tier, with a weighting of just 05%, making invitations very difficult to secure.
- Choosing cookery to learn a trade and pursue skilled migration is now an outdated approach. Although construction trades are in Tier 3, they have large workforces and very few people can take the Subclass 186 route, so they receive more invitations.
- Although many registered nurses also take the employer-sponsored route, they are in a higher tier and have a large workforce, so we can still see many invitations.
This calculation gives you a general idea, and from what I can see it broadly fits the invitation patterns in the past few rounds. Remember, though, that the calculated number is theoretically a ceiling: invitations cannot exceed it, but that does not mean that many will be issued. Early childhood teachers have been a significant exception in the past two rounds. In principle, they are in a relatively high priority tier, and their workforce must also be sizeable.
