After you graduate
Rules read 16 Aug 2026
What Australia's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Money you must prove before the visa
A$29,71012 months of living costs, for the student alone — course fees, travel and any school fees for accompanying children are counted separately and on top
Shown as a balance in a bank account. You keep control of it.
Figure published for: 10 May 2024 — the Department's own announcement is headed 'From 10 May 2024, the amount of money that Student and Student Guardian visa applicants need to have to be eligible for the visa is increasing', raising the primary applicant's figure from AUD24,505 to AUD29,710, and says applications lodged before that date are assessed under the earlier requirement. Still the published figure on the Subclass 500 page when read on 19 August 2026. It is set by Legislative Instrument LIN 19/198 as amended and is pegged to 75 per cent of the national minimum wage, so it moves when that wage does. This amount is revised regularly, so check it again before you transfer anything.
AUD29,710 is living costs only. The Department requires the applicant to hold enough for travel, 12 months of course fees (or the total if the course is shorter, less anything already paid and evidenced), 12 months of living costs for the student and anyone coming with them, and school fees for any school-age child. Family members add to it: AUD10,394 for a partner, AUD4,449 for a child, and at least AUD13,502 a year in school costs per school-age child. Travel costs to include as a guide are AUD2,000 applying from outside Australia, AUD2,500 from East or Southern Africa, AUD3,000 from West Africa, AUD1,000 applying inside Australia. A shorter stay is pro-rated: annual cost divided by 365, multiplied by the days intended. An alternative to showing savings is evidence that a parent or partner earned a personal annual income of at least AUD87,856 in the 12 months before applying, or AUD102,500 if family members come too — evidenced by official government documents such as a tax assessment less than 12 months old, not by bank statements or an employer's letter. Genuine access must also be proved: a single-day bank balance certificate is explicitly not enough, because it does not show how the funds accumulated. Secondary exchange students may instead give a completed AASES form, and DFAT or Department of Defence students a letter of support. Whether evidence must be attached up front depends on the Document Checklist Tool for the applicant's passport country and provider — but the Department may still ask for it later, and subsequent entrants must always attach it.
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Australia also requires proof of health cover for this visa. See what's required →
Work during study
Student visa (subclass 500) holders may work up to 48 hours per fortnight while their course is in session — a limit that applies during study terms and semesters (including exam periods), before the course starts (unless a different visa already permits work), and when taking a term-break course that counts toward the main course (unless CRICOS requires it). Working more than 48 hours a fortnight during these periods breaches the visa condition and can lead to visa cancellation. At other times — including scheduled course breaks — there is no work-hour limit on a student visa. A student who has started a Master's by Research or Doctoral degree has no work-hour limit at any time once the course has started.
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Post-study work visa
Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485) — Post-Higher Education Work stream . Up to 3 years
For international students who have recently graduated with a degree-level qualification or higher (bachelor's, master's or doctoral) in a CRICOS-registered course from an Australian institution. Applicants must generally be aged 35 or under and have held a Student visa in the last 6 months. Grants the right to live, work (unrestricted hours, any sector) and study in Australia temporarily, usually for between 2 and 3 years depending on the qualification (Hong Kong and British National (Overseas) passport holders may be granted up to 5 years). A separate, shorter Post-Vocational Education Work stream (up to 18 months) exists for associate degree, diploma or trade-qualification graduates whose qualification is tied to a nominated occupation on the skilled occupation list.
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Route to permanent residence
Australia does not grant permanent residence automatically at the end of a Temporary Graduate visa. A graduate must separately qualify for one of the permanent or provisional skilled-visa programs gated by the country's combined list of eligible skilled occupations — for example the points-tested Skilled Independent visa (subclass 189), the state/territory-nominated Skilled Nominated visa (subclass 190), employer-sponsored routes such as the Employer Nomination Scheme (subclass 186), or the Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482) Core Skills Stream, which an eligible Temporary Graduate visa holder who finds skilled work may be able to apply for while still in Australia. Each program requires the applicant's nominated occupation to appear on the relevant occupation list for that specific visa.
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Route to citizenship
Australian citizenship by conferral is granted by the Department of Home Affairs, the same department that runs the visa system. The general residence requirement is having lived in Australia on a valid visa for the 4 years immediately before applying, holding a permanent visa (or a New Zealand citizen's Special Category subclass 444 visa) for the last 12 months of that period, and not having been absent from Australia for more than 12 months in total across the 4 years, including no more than 90 days in the 12 months immediately before applying. Applicants must also meet separate character, 'knowledge of Australia,' English-language and 'close and continuing link to Australia' requirements (most commonly demonstrated through the citizenship test). Australia has permitted dual citizenship since April 2002: on the Department's own dual-citizen travel page it states plainly that Australia allows a person to have dual citizenship, while noting some other countries do not, so becoming an Australian citizen does not require renouncing another nationality.
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What the government currently prioritises
Australia's skilled-visa programs gate eligibility by occupation, using a combined list of eligible skilled occupations coded to the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO). Depending on the specific visa, the relevant list is the Core Skills Occupation List (CSOL, used for the Skills in Demand visa's Core Skills Stream), the Medium and Long-term Strategic Skills List (MLTSSL) or Short-term Skilled Occupation List (STSOL) used by the points-tested and state/territory-nominated skilled visas, or a Regional Occupation List (ROL) for regional visas. Which list an occupation sits on — or whether it is on any list at all — can change; the current lists are published in each visa's legislative instrument rather than in one fixed table on this page. Reading the Department's own published CSOL directly (a 456-occupation ANZSCO table) confirms engineering and ICT occupations are heavily represented, as this dataset's brief expected: named engineering occupations include Chemical, Materials, Civil, Geotechnical, Structural, Transport, Electrical, Electronics, Industrial, Mechanical, Production/Plant, Mining, Petroleum, Aeronautical, Agricultural, Biomedical and Environmental Engineer, plus Engineering Technologist; named ICT occupations include ICT Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Web Developer, Analyst Programmer, Developer Programmer, Software Engineer, Software Tester, Cyber Security Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Penetration Tester, Database Administrator, Systems Administrator, several named cyber-security specialisms, and Computer Network and Systems Engineer. Being on the CSOL is necessary but not sufficient on its own — which visa (if any) it actually unlocks depends on the specific programme (see residencyRoute) — and it is a list of eligible occupations, not a job or salary guarantee.
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The Skills in Demand (subclass 482) visa replaced the Temporary Skill Shortage (subclass 482) visa on 7 December 2024, and the Temporary Graduate visa (subclass 485) was restructured into named streams — Post-Higher Education Work (degree-level graduates) and Post-Vocational Education Work (associate degree/diploma/trade graduates tied to a nominated occupation) — with shorter maximum stays than the visa previously granted. Some government-linked pages not yet updated for that restructure still refer to a 'Post-Study Work stream' by its pre-restructure name; this entry uses the current stream name and durations as published on the pages cited above. Read 16 August 2026 — Australia's post-study work settings have changed more than once in the last two years and should be re-checked before anyone relies on this. Deepening pass, 17 August 2026: inDemandOccupations re-cited directly to the Department of Home Affairs' own published Core Skills Occupation List PDF (immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/Documents/core-sol.pdf, 456 occupations) rather than only its own overview page, to name the actual engineering and ICT occupations on it. The PDF returned only raw binary bytes to this project's default fetcher and to WebFetch (HTTP 403); it was downloaded with curl and converted with pdftotext (poppler-utils, -enc UTF-8 -layout), then archived over the same snapshot ID via fetch-source.mjs --save, the same pattern used for Italian- and Korean-government PDFs in the original residency-pathways pass — flagged here for a future collector processing another Home Affairs PDF. citizenshipRoute added 17 August 2026: the 4-year residence quote is cited to immi.homeaffairs.gov.au's own 'Become an Australian citizen (by conferral)' page (3854466f05248e57) — its Eligibility tab is a set of nested accordions with no static HTML text, so it was captured with the project's browser fallback after expanding the Residence requirement panel. The dual-citizenship statement ('Australia allows a person to have dual citizenship. Some countries do not.') was separately archived from the same Department's entering-and-leaving-australia/traveling-as-a-dual-citizen page (1097061b02b91fa4, also browser-captured) rather than folded into one citation, since the two facts sit on different pages of the same official domain. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route' on 18 August 2026: the authority already cited under citizenshipRoute publishes criteria a foreign resident could actually follow, which is the only claim this field makes. It is deliberately not a judgement about how attainable that route is in practice. studentVisaFunds added 19 August 2026. Capture note, because it is unusual: immi.homeaffairs.gov.au assembles this page client-side from a JSON payload, so plain HTTP fetching returns a shell with none of the financial-capacity content in it — the project's own fetcher produced a 3,480-character snapshot containing no figures at all. The figure was therefore read in a real browser, with the 'Step by step' tab and the 'Evidence you have enough money for your stay' section expanded, and the rendered text archived through fetch-source.mjs --save (capture: browser, snapshot 7f47e8b7e2b6338c). Nothing else in the dataset cited the earlier HTTP snapshot of this URL, so nothing was disturbed by replacing it. The effective date comes from the Department's own announcement of the change, archived the same way (snapshot 5ed6634501eda7b0, immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/news-media/archive/article?itemId=1196), which prints the before-and-after table: AUD24,505 before 10 May 2024, AUD29,710 after. mechanism is bank-balance because Home Affairs names no single instrument — deposits with a financial institution, a government or bank loan, or a scholarship are all accepted — and because its guidance is specifically about a balance being shown to be genuinely held and accumulated over time. studyaustralia.gov.au, also allowlisted, was checked and publishes no figure on its living-costs or visa pages.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗