What an Australian partner visa costs

The base application charge

The parity across all three is genuine rather than a copying error propagated across fee pages. Each pathway is charged under its own Schedule 1 item, and each arrives at the same standard figure.

How the charge attaches differs from how people expect. For the onshore pathway, subclass 820 carries no charge of its own — Schedule 1 item 1214C is nil, because the charge is levied under item 1124B, the combined item, at the time of the combined 820 and 801 application. The offshore pathway works the same way: subclass 309 is nil under item 1220A, with the charge levied under item 1129 for the combined 309 and 100 application. There is one payment for the pathway, not one per stage, and no second instalment appears in these items.

Additional applicants

• An additional applicant aged 18 or over: $5,860.
• An additional applicant under 18: $2,935.

These figures apply across the same Schedule 1 items as the base charge.

The Pacific-regional concession

After a prospective marriage visa

This is the concession most fee summaries omit, and it is substantial. An applicant who held a subclass 300 visa, married the intended spouse, and is applying to remain permanently is charged under a concessional sub-item rather than the standard one.

Why these figures carry a date

Schedule 1 charges are indexed and the compilation is remade each 1 July. The figures above are from the compilation in force on 1 July 2026; the Federal Register of Legislation always carries the current one, and the Department publishes its own pricing estimator. A quoted figure with no compilation date behind it is not something to rely on.

Processing times

Fees are legislated. Processing times are not — they are an administrative statistic the Department updates monthly and publishes through its own global visa processing times tool, which is the only authoritative source for them.

One structural point is commonly reported about the permanent-stage figures for subclasses 801 and 100: the published times are measured from the point an applicant becomes eligible for the permanent assessment, rather than from the original combined lodgement. Read that way, the reported end-to-end figures are the waiting period before eligibility plus the permanent-stage time on top of it. That composition is reported by published sources rather than confirmed against departmental methodology notes.

Because these numbers move monthly, any figure — including the ones above — is a snapshot of when it was checked, not a projection of an individual application.