Australian Visa Statistics 2026

What the numbers mean

The first thing the pricing table tells you is that there is no such thing as “the Australian visa fee.” The charge you pay depends on which visa you are applying for, which stream of it you fall into, whether you are inside or outside the country when you lodge, and how many people are on the application with you. Someone asking what a visa to Australia costs is really asking a question with dozens of correct answers, which is why the gap between the cheapest charge and the dearest one is so wide.

That spread is not random. At the bottom sit the visas Australia has decided should not be rationed by price: protection and refugee categories, bridging visas that keep people lawful while they wait, transit, and the arrangement that lets New Zealanders live and work here. At the top sit the business and investor visas, where the charge is a rounding error next to the investment the applicant has to make anyway. In between are the ordinary migration visas, and that is where most applicants land. The median tells you where the typical charge sits. The mean, dragged upward by the investor tier, tells you how lopsided the top end is.

The pattern that catches people out is the one that has nothing to do with the headline price. Additional applicant charges follow a rule of thumb across most of the table: a partner is charged a share of the main applicant’s fee, and each child a smaller share again. That sounds modest until you apply it to a family. A partner visa quoted at one number in every guide on the internet becomes a materially different number once a spouse and two children are added, and nothing on the department’s own page adds it up for you. Budgets break there, at the total rather than the headline.

Where you lodge matters too. The same tourist visa, applied for from inside Australia rather than from home, costs a multiple of the offshore charge, which turns a decision people often make for convenience into an expensive one. The paper-application surcharge works the same way: a flat penalty for not applying online, identical on every visa that carries it, and easy to trigger by accident if you are helping an older relative apply.

Access is the other half of the story, and it works nothing like price. Australia’s two online visitor visas carry no application charge at all, but only a limited group of passports can use them. Everyone else pays for the visitor visa the rest of the world uses. So the real cost of visiting Australia is set less by any fee schedule than by which passport you happen to hold, and the same is true of working holidays: two visas that look alike from the outside, with different eligible-country lists behind them, and an upper age limit that differs depending on which agreement your country signed. For a would-be backpacker, those extra years of eligibility are worth more than any fee difference on this page.

None of this is hidden. All of it is published by the Department of Home Affairs, spread across a pricing table that paginates, a set of visa pages that each carry their own eligibility list, and notes that qualify individual rows. What has not existed is the aggregate view: the whole schedule in one place, sorted and counted, so a journalist can check whether a claim about Australian visa costs holds up without opening a dozen tabs. That is what this page is for. It also explains why the figures are recalculated from the source on every build instead of sitting in prose, where they would go stale without anyone noticing.

One caveat worth stating plainly, because it changes how these numbers should be quoted. An application charge is not the whole cost of a visa. Health checks, police certificates, skills assessments, English tests, second instalments payable before some visas are granted, and any agent you choose to hire all sit outside the pricing table and outside this dataset. Where a row publishes no figure, we leave it out of the averages and say so rather than guessing. What you are quoting from this page is the charge to lodge an application. That is all it is, and it is worth saying before anyone repeats it as the cost of moving to Australia.