Australian Immigration Statistics 2026: The Complete, Verified Roundup

The headline numbers: Australia's migration system in 2026

Four numbers get conflated more than any others in Australian immigration reporting, and they measure four different things.

The permanent Migration Program planning level for 2026-27 is 185,000 places, unchanged from 2025-26 and 2024-25. Of that, 132,240 places (71%) sit in the Skill stream and 52,460 (28%) in the Family stream, with 300 for Special Eligibility. This is announced once a year by the Department of Home Affairs — the 2026-27 levels were announced 12 May 2026 — and it caps permanent visa grants, not arrivals or temporary visas of any kind.

Net overseas migration (NOM) — the ABS measure of arrivals minus departures across every visa type and Australian citizens — was 305,570 for the 2024-25 financial year, down from a record 538,340 in 2022-23. The ABS's more recent quarterly figure, covering the year to the December 2025 quarter, put annual NOM at 300,960, though the Bureau labels estimates from March quarter 2025 onward as preliminary until finalised.

Temporary visa holders in Australia are a much larger and entirely separate population. Home Affairs' quarterly Temporary Entrants report — a stock count of every temporary visa holder plus New Zealand citizens present in the country on a given date — put the total at approximately 2.97 million as at 31 March 2026, a record high. The largest single classes were Student (500) visa holders at 732,210, Visitor visa holders at 609,678, and Bridging visa holders at a record 432,300.

International student numbers, a different measure again (see section 3), fell to 680,582 in the year to May 2026 — 6.9% down on the same five months of 2025 — per the Department of Education's monthly international student data.

None of these four numbers should be added to any of the others. They answer different questions: how many permanent places does the government offer this year, how many more people arrived than left, how many people are currently here on a temporary visa, and how many people are currently studying.

The permanent program: what's planned versus what's actually delivered

Announcing 185,000 places is not the same as delivering 185,000 places, and for most of the last decade Australia didn't. Migratio's Migration Program: Planned vs Delivered study reconciles ten completed program years against the Department of Home Affairs' own Migration Program Reports and finds two distinct eras.

From 2015-16 to 2021-22, the program routinely fell short. The worst year was 2018-19: 160,323 places delivered against a planning level of 190,000, a shortfall of 29,677 places (15.6%). Part of the explanation is definitional — the planning level was treated as a ceiling rather than a target for most of that period, so under-delivery was compliant, not a miss.

Since 2022-23 the topline has landed almost exactly on target: 195,004 against 195,000, then 190,000 against 190,000, then 185,001 against 185,000 — the last three completed years within four places of the announced figure. The 2025-26 outcome is not yet published; as at the time of writing, the program year ended 30 June 2026 and the report had not appeared, so any 2025-26 delivered figure currently circulating is an estimate, not a published outcome.

The most striking unexplained figure in the whole series sits inside the 2026-27 settings, not a past year. The Regional visa category was cut from 33,000 places to 14,110 — a reduction of 57.2% and the single largest reallocation in the program. Home Affairs published an explicit rationale for every other major change in 2026-27 (why Employer Sponsored rose, why Skilled Independent rose, why Talent and Innovation fell) but gave none for the Regional cut. That absence, not the number itself, is the actual finding.

Temporary migration: students, working holiday makers, 482 visa holders — and why none of this is the Migration Program

This is the distinction a previous version of this page got wrong, so it is worth stating plainly: temporary visas are not part of the permanent Migration Program, are not capped by its 185,000-place planning level, and should never be summed into it. Student, Visitor, Working Holiday Maker and Skills in Demand (subclass 482) visas are all temporary. The Migration Program measures permanent visa grants only.

As at 31 March 2026, Home Affairs' quarterly stock count of temporary visa holders in Australia showed: Student (500) visa holders at 732,210, Visitor visa holders at 609,678, Bridging visa holders at a record 432,300, Working Holiday Makers (subclass 417 and 462 combined) at a record 258,974, temporary skilled/employer-sponsored visa holders at 255,821, and Temporary Graduate (485) visa holders at 237,015. These are point-in-time counts of people present in Australia on that date, not annual grant totals — a visa holder can appear in this count for several consecutive quarters.

International student numbers are a related but distinct measure again. The Department of Education's monthly student data counts unique students studying in Australia during a given period, drawing on enrolment records rather than visa-holder stock, and its year-to-date May 2026 figure of 680,582 (down 6.9% on the same period in 2025) will not match the Home Affairs subclass-500 visa-holder count above — the two measure different things using different methods and will diverge, sometimes by a wide margin.

On 482 visa grant volumes specifically — how many Skills in Demand visas were actually granted in a given year, as opposed to how many holders are currently in the country — we could not locate a figure from a primary Home Affairs publication that we were confident citing precisely, and secondary reporting on this specific number was inconsistent. It is omitted here rather than guessed. The stock figure above (255,821 temporary skilled visa holders as at 31 March 2026) is the verifiable number.

Processing times: the median hides the wait that matters

Migratio's Australian Visa Processing Times: What the Numbers Hide study captures the full published Home Affairs dataset — 76 visa and stream combinations, four percentiles each — and the single most important finding is how badly the median alone misrepresents the experience of a meaningful share of applicants.

For the reference period ending 31 May 2026: a Student (500) Higher Education visa has a median processing time of 16 days and a 90th-percentile time of seven months (214 days) — the same visa, a thirteen-fold gap between a typical case and an unlucky one. A Skilled Independent (189) Points-Tested visa runs 6 months median, 8 months at the 90th percentile. Partner visas lodged offshore (subclass 309) run 16 months median, 27 months at the 90th percentile; lodged onshore (subclass 820), 20 months median, 25 months at the 90th percentile.

The deeper divide sits between temporary and permanent visas as classes, not between individual subclasses. Of temporary visa applications lodged in 2024-25, 97.6% were finalised within the year; of permanent visa applications lodged the same year, only 53.4% were, per the Home Affairs Annual Report 2024-25. That is why a visitor visa clears in 16 days while a partner visa takes over a year and a half — they sit in structurally different processing systems, not different points on one spectrum.

Home Affairs publishes only a current snapshot of processing times, with no historical series, no downloadable dataset and no archive — the Parliamentary Library confirms the department's own tool 'offers the latest available processing times only... not trends or changes over time.' Migratio now captures the full 76-row dataset monthly, the only public archive of this data we are aware of.

Costs: every visa charge rose 25% on 1 July 2026

On 1 July 2026, every Australian visa application charge rose by exactly 25% — the largest single-year increase in over a decade, set out in Schedule 1 of the Migration Regulations 1994 (Compilation No. 288, F2026C00667). A subclass 189 Skilled Independent visa rose from $4,910 to $6,135. A partner visa (subclass 820/801 or 309/100, charged once for the whole pathway) rose from $9,365 to $11,710. A Student (500) Higher Education visa rose from $2,000 to $2,500. Skills in Demand (subclass 482) rose from $3,210 to $4,015 across all streams.

The charge that applies is the one in force on the day of lodgement, not the day preparation began — applications lodged on or before 30 June 2026 kept the old rates. Several streams sit well below the headline figures: a follow-on partner visa application from a former Prospective Marriage (subclass 300) holder is $1,955, not $11,710, and a Skilled Regional (887) visa is $630 for eligible former provisional-visa holders. From 1 July 2026 a new reduced charge also applies across most subclasses to holders of an eligible Pacific Island or Timor-Leste passport.

The visa application charge is paid to the Department of Home Affairs and is separate from a migration agent's professional fee, which the agent sets and which was unaffected by the 1 July increase. Full details, the complete before-and-after table and the exceptions are in Migratio's Australian Visa Fees Rose 25% on 1 July 2026 study.

The advice industry: 5,489 registered agents, a missing generation, and a lapsed report

Australia's migration advice profession is regulated separately from the visa system itself, and Migratio's own analysis of the full public OMARA register (June 2026) is the primary source for the figures in this section.

There are 5,489 currently registered migration agents. New agent registrations collapsed roughly 85% after 2018 entry-requirement changes — from 417 new agents in 2018 to just 62 in 2020 — before recovering to a decade-high 457 in 2025. The median currently registered agent has held registration for 10 years, derivable from the year encoded in the first two digits of any agent's MARN.

Sanctions are rare relative to the size of the profession: 61 registered agents since 2021-22 against a register of 5,337 is roughly one agent in 314 in a given year, and the 2024-25 count alone represents about 0.37% of registered agents. Enforcement has, on the department's own figures, intensified. Migratio's OMARA sanctions study reconciles the government's claim of 61 registered agents sanctioned since 2021-22 exactly against annual figures (13 + 4 + 10 + 20 + 14 across 2021-22 through the part-year 2025-26 to 17 March 2026). Sanctions rose from 4 in 2022-23 to 20 in 2024-25 — a genuine intensification, though the 2022-23 low is partly a change in complaint-triage methodology rather than a pure conduct signal.

One finding has had no follow-up coverage: OMARA's Migration Agent Activity Report, the six-monthly publication designed to document exactly this data, has not been published since the period ending June 2024 — roughly two years overdue against the department's own stated cadence, during precisely the period it has been publicising an enforcement surge.

Where people come from: students and permanent migrants

Australia's two largest inbound cohorts — international students and permanent migrants — draw from different sets of source countries, and both have shifted.

For international students in the year to May 2026, the Department of Education's data puts China at 23% of all international students, India at 16%, Nepal at 9%, Vietnam at 5% and Bangladesh at 4% — the top five accounting for 57% of the total. China's share has been gradually narrowing as India, Nepal, Vietnam, Colombia and the Philippines diversify the intake.

For the permanent Migration Program, Home Affairs publishes grants by citizenship from 2019-20, and the most recently published complete year (2024-25) shows India as the largest source by a wide margin: 48,326 grants, more than double second-placed China on 20,405, ahead of the Philippines (10,972), the United Kingdom (10,205), Pakistan (9,557), Sri Lanka (9,444), Nepal (8,319), Vietnam (5,665), South Africa (4,137) and Afghanistan (3,474). India has held the top position in every year since country-level reporting began, and the gap has been widening — its 2019-20 total was 25,698, meaning it has nearly doubled in five years.

The two rankings are genuinely different lists reflecting different pathways — the student intake skews far more heavily toward China and South Asia's youth cohorts, while the permanent program reflects a longer pipeline of skilled and family migration in which South Asia (India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal together) now dominates even more heavily than the student figures alone suggest.

How to cite this page

Every figure on this page is sourced and dated inline; nothing here has been estimated or interpolated. Suggested citation: Migratio (2026), Australian Immigration Statistics 2026, migratio.com.au/blog/australian-immigration-statistics-2026.

The primary sources behind this page are: the Department of Home Affairs Migration Program Reports and migration program planning levels page (permanent program figures); the Department of Home Affairs quarterly Temporary Entrants in Australia report (temporary visa holder stock); the Australian Bureau of Statistics Overseas Migration and Overseas Arrivals and Departures releases (net overseas migration); the Department of Education International Student Data monthly summary (student numbers and source countries); the Migration Regulations 1994 (Cth) Schedule 1, Compilation No. 288 (visa fees); and OMARA's Migration Agent Activity Reports plus the Department of Home Affairs Annual Report 2024-25 (agent register and sanctions). Where a figure draws on Migratio's own analysis — the agent-register statistics and the reconciled program, processing-time and sanctions series — that analysis is itself fully sourced in the linked study, and each underlying dataset is available as a downloadable CSV in the Migratio data press kit.

One category of figure was deliberately excluded rather than approximated: annual Skills in Demand (482) visa grant totals, discussed in section 3, where available reporting did not reconcile cleanly enough to state a specific number with confidence. If you need that figure for a specific reference period, email us and we'll check the primary report directly rather than repeat an unreconciled secondary figure.

This page is updated as new official data is published — the planning-level, fee and sanctions figures will move at least annually, and processing times roughly monthly. If you're citing a figure for a print or broadcast deadline, note the 'as at' date attached to it above rather than the date you accessed this page.

How many migrants come to Australia each year?

It depends which number you mean. The permanent Migration Program offers 185,000 places for 2026-27. Net overseas migration — arrivals minus departures across all visa types, a broader measure — was 305,570 for 2024-25. These are not interchangeable: the Migration Program counts permanent visa grants only, while net overseas migration counts everyone who stayed longer than they left, including on temporary visas.

What percentage of Australia's Migration Program is skilled migration?

71% for 2026-27 — 132,240 of the 185,000 total places sit in the Skill stream, with 52,460 (28%) in the Family stream and 300 in Special Eligibility, per the Department of Home Affairs' 2026-27 planning levels announced 12 May 2026.

How many international students are in Australia in 2026?

680,582 studied in Australia in the year to May 2026, per the Department of Education — down 6.9% on the same period in 2025. That is a different measure from the 732,210 Student (500) visa holders Home Affairs counted as present in Australia as at 31 March 2026; the two use different methods and will not match.

What's the difference between the Migration Program and net overseas migration?

The Migration Program is an annual cap on permanent visa grants, set at 185,000 for 2026-27. Net overseas migration is an Australian Bureau of Statistics measure of arrivals minus departures across every visa category and Australian citizens, including temporary visa holders — it was 305,570 for 2024-25. NOM is always much larger because it captures temporary migration, which the Migration Program does not touch at all.

How many people are in Australia on temporary visas?

Approximately 2.97 million as at 31 March 2026, per Home Affairs' quarterly Temporary Entrants in Australia stock report — a record high. The largest classes were Student (732,210), Visitor (609,678), Bridging (432,300, also a record), Working Holiday Maker (258,974, also a record) and temporary skilled/employer-sponsored (255,821).

Are 482 visa holders counted in the Migration Program?

No. Skills in Demand (subclass 482) is a temporary visa. It sits entirely outside the 185,000-place permanent Migration Program and is not subject to its cap. Confusing a temporary visa's numbers with the permanent program's composition is a common error in migration reporting — this page keeps the two separate throughout.