482 Skills in Demand Visa: What a Migration Agent Actually Does (2026)
A subclass 482 application needs three separate approvals to line up: employer sponsorship, nomination, and the visa itself. This video covers the current salary thresholds, the labour market testing rule, the 186 pathway, and what happens if you change employers. Figures as at September 2026.
Read the full guide, with official sources →
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Chapters
- 0:00 1 visa.
- 0:15 From 7 December 2024:
- 0:27 Core Skills: $79,423+
- 0:44 Labour market testing:
- 0:57 Wrong salary or wrong ads
- 1:21 Between employers:
- 1:38 Sponsorship: 5 days–4 months
- 1:53 Specialist Skills: 4–43 days
- 2:04 Visa application charge: $4,015
- 2:17 Initial consult fees:
- 2:34 Where to read more
Transcript
A subclass 482 case isn't one approval. It's three: your employer's sponsorship, the nomination for your role, and the visa itself. All three have to line up.
Since 7 December 2024, the old Short-Term and Medium-Term streams are gone. The Skills in Demand framework now runs on salary, not an occupation list alone.
The Core Skills stream needs a salary at or above 79,423 dollars, for an occupation on the Core Skills Occupation List. The Specialist Skills stream needs at least 146,576 dollars, with no occupation-list restriction.
Before the nomination, your employer has to run labour market testing: at least 2 valid job advertisements, running for a total of at least 4 weeks, within the 4 months before the nomination is lodged.
Get the salary or the advertising wrong and the nomination gets refused. That's the mistake an agent is there to catch before it's lodged.
Every current stream — Core Skills, Specialist Skills and Labour Agreement — can lead to the subclass 186 visa, permanent residency, through the Temporary Residence Transition stream, after at least 2 years with your sponsoring employer.
If you stop working for your sponsor, you're not immediately unlawful. Conditions 8607 and 8608 give you up to 180 consecutive days at a time, and up to 365 days in total across the visa, to find a new sponsor, get another visa, or leave.
Home Affairs' own data, for the period ending 30 June 2026, shows why timing varies so much: sponsorship approval alone can take from 5 days to 4 months, and nomination from under a day to 9 months.
The visa itself is the fastest step for a Specialist Skills applicant — 4 to 43 days. On the Core Skills stream it's slower: 16 days to 10 months.
The visa application charge itself is fixed: 4,015 dollars for the main applicant, whichever stream you use. Sponsorship and nomination charges are separate, and your employer pays those.
There's no official schedule for what an agent charges for the case itself. Across 686 quotes from 57 agents on Migratio, the median for an initial consultation is 220 dollars, with the middle half between 150 and 275.
The full guide, with the official sources, is on migratio.com.au. The link is in the description. And if you'd like to talk it through, you can compare registered migration agents there, and see their fees before you book anything.
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