Visa processing times are moving — but not all in the same direction

The Department of Home Affairs publishes a median processing time for each key visa category and updates it monthly. Read across the last year of those updates and the headline is not “processing got faster.” It’s that the categories move independently, sometimes in opposite directions in the same month, and the number you’re quoting is about two months out of date.

The July 2026 figures, published in September, make that point better than any previous month, because they reverse June. In June, skilled temporary fell by a third while skilled permanent rose by a fifth. In July the two swapped places: skilled temporary more than doubled, from 47 days to 98, while skilled permanent fell from 11 months to 8, the lowest figure in the period charted. Same program family, same month, opposite directions, for the second month running and in the opposite pairing.

Underneath that, the rules changed on 25 July 2026, when Ministerial Direction 119 replaced MD 105 for skilled processing and, for the first time, ranked applicants by whether they were onshore or offshore when they applied. The July figures are the first to overlap it at all, and only by seven days.

All figures below are the Department’s own published medians, taken from its visa processing times page as it stood at each point in time.

Current Australian visa processing times

These are the latest published medians — July 2026, the most recent month available as at 10 September 2026. A median means half of the applications decided that month took less than this, and half took longer.

Four of the six moved. Skilled temporary more than doubled, partner set a new high for the period charted, and skilled permanent fell to its lowest. Working Holiday Maker is the quiet one worth noting: it had sat at less than a day for the whole period charted, and is now 5 days.

Two caveats before anyone quotes these to a client. The figure describes applications already decided, not the queue yours is sitting in. And it runs about two months behind the calendar: July’s decisions are published in September and get applied to a file lodged in October. Through August the newest published skilled temporary median was 47 days, which is the number that went into advice while July’s decisions were already running at 98.

Student and skilled temporary: still down over the year, both up sharply in July

Both categories peaked in October 2025 and are still well below that peak. Both also rose in July, and skilled temporary gave back most of the year’s gain in a single month.

That chart is the same two-point comparison we ran last month, and it now tells a materially weaker story than it did then. In August the second bar read 47 days. The category has not been re-based or redefined; one month of decisions moved it.

The student fall lines up with Ministerial Direction 115, which applies to offshore applications lodged on or after 14 November 2025; applications lodged before that date still run under Ministerial Direction 111. The median dropped from 41 days (October 2025) to 20 days (December 2025) across that changeover, drifted down to 17 days in June 2026, and is back to 21 days in July. That is still well under half the October figure, but it is the first increase in the student median in the period charted. We covered how the underlying priority model works in Ministerial Direction 115 and the student-visa traffic light.

Skilled temporary is the least smooth series on the page: 123 days in October 2025, 87 in February, 63 in March and April, back up to 70 in May, down to 47 in June, then 98 days in July 2026. June was the lowest figure in the period charted; July is the second highest. The category more than doubled in one month and gave back four months of improvement. A series that can move 51 days between consecutive months is not a series to quote to the day, and on this evidence it is not one to quote to the week either.

Onshore and offshore students run on different systems

This is the part that gets lost when a single median is quoted. Both Directions are titled “Order for considering and disposing of offshore Subclass 500 (Student) visa applications” — the traffic light never touches an onshore application at all.

• Lodged inside Australia — the Department aims to assess applications in the order they were lodged, by date of lodgement. No priority tiers.
• Lodged outside Australia — MD 111 or MD 115 applies, with Priority 1/2/3 set by the provider on the main CoE, as at the day of lodgement.

For offshore files the Department publishes target windows for when it aims to commence processing — which is not the same as deciding:

Priority 2 attaches to providers that have reached 80% of their New Overseas Student Commencement (NOSC) allocation; Priority 3 to providers that have exceeded that allocation by 15%. Higher education and dual-sector status is published on the Department of Education’s Visa Prioritisation Status page; for VET you have to ask the provider directly. The Department notes these windows are based on 2025 lodgement volumes and resourcing, and can shift in peak periods.

So the 21-day figure is a single blended number across two cohorts governed by different rules. For an offshore client it tells you very little on its own — the provider’s threshold status on the day you lodge tells you more.

Partner: up for a year, down three months, then up six

Partner (Provisional/Temporary) climbed steadily to 20 months in May 2026, fell to 17 in June, then jumped to 23 months in July — the highest figure in the period charted, and a six-month move in a single month.

The Department’s note against this row has been rewritten. It previously said the Department was focusing on older and complex applications and that this would affect processing times while it worked through the oldest cases. That paragraph is gone. In its place the page now names Ministerial Direction 117, and says it gives highest priority to applications made while the primary applicant was in Australia, for a visa that can be granted while the applicant is in Australia, with applications generally assessed in date order within each priority group.

That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the obvious reading of both movements. A rising median here is consistent with the backlog being cleared, not with things getting slower. Deciding a four-year-old file drags the median up in the month it is finalised. So a three-month fall is not automatically good news either: it can equally mean the oldest cases are through and the month’s decisions were weighted toward newer files. The median describes the applications that were decided, not the queue your client is in.

Last month this post read the June fall as consistent with the oldest cases being through. July says otherwise: 23 months is six months above June and three above the previous peak. On the same mechanism, that reads as a month weighted heavily toward very old files, which is the opposite composition to June. Both readings cannot be a trend. The honest conclusion is that this series tracks what the Department chose to finalise each month and carries almost no information about how long a file lodged today will take.

The onshore-first ordering the page attributes to MD 117 is the same axis MD 119 introduced for skilled applications. Where the applicant was at the time of application is now the published sorting rule in both programs. We cover what that does to a family caseload in parent places cut and the new family visa priority order.

Skilled permanent doesn’t behave like a queue at all

Skilled (Permanent) went 8 months (July 2025) → 13 (October 2025) → 9 (February 2026) → 10 (March/April) → 9 (May 2026) → 11 (June 2026) → 8 months (July 2026). That’s not noise in a queue. These applications are subject to an annual planning level and are processed against a priority order, so the median moves with what the Department chose to decide that month.

The June and July pair is the clearest illustration in the series, because the split reversed. In June, skilled permanent rose by two months while skilled temporary fell by 23 days. In July, skilled permanent fell by three months while skilled temporary rose by 51 days. Nothing about a queue produces that. A planning level and a priority order do: in each month one program was clearing older files and the other was clearing newer ones, and which was which swapped.

There is one more thing about the July pair. 1 July is the start of the program year, when a fresh set of places becomes available under the annual planning level, and 25 July is when MD 119 re-ranked every on-hand skilled file. Both point the same way for skilled permanent, where new places let newer files be decided and drag the median down. Neither explains the skilled temporary move on its own, but MD 119 brought subclass 482 into a Direction for the first time and applied to applications already on hand, so a month in which long-pending 482 files were finalised under a new order would look exactly like this. Seven days of overlap cannot carry a whole month’s movement, and the Department has published no explanation. Treat the mechanism as consistent with the numbers, not as demonstrated by them, and look at the August figures in October before drawing the line.

Through the whole period charted above, that order was set by Ministerial Direction 105. It isn’t any more, and the Department has stopped describing it publicly. The processing times page used to carry a paragraph naming MD 105 and setting out its priority order in full. As at August 2026 that paragraph has been replaced with a generic reference to “Ministerial Directions related to skilled visa processing priorities,” with no Direction named. The page still names MD 117 for Partner and MD 111 and MD 115 for Student. For skilled, the published explanation of what determines the order is now a link rather than a description.

The change that hasn’t shown up in the data yet

Ministerial Direction 119 came into effect on 25 July 2026 and has replaced all processing priorities under MD 105. Three things about it matter immediately:

1. It applies to all on-hand applications, not just new lodgements. Files already sitting in the queue have been re-ranked.
2. It brings the Skills in Demand (subclass 482) program in, which MD 105 did not cover.
3. Priority now turns on occupation and where the applicant was at the time of application.

The published order, highest first:

Read that fourth row carefully. An onshore applicant in any occupation outranks an offshore applicant in healthcare, teaching or construction — clause 8(3)(c) requires the applicant to be in Australia to reach that band, so an offshore nurse falls to (e) alongside everyone else offshore.

That one line reshuffles a lot of caseloads, and it applies retrospectively to files already lodged. We work through the bands, the ANZSCO definitions behind each category and how to triage an existing caseload against them in onshore vs offshore: what Ministerial Direction 119 does to your skilled files.

MD 119 covers subclasses 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 482 (both Skills in Demand and the older Temporary Skill Shortage), 489, 491, 494, 887 and 888. Separately, Ministerial Direction 120 took effect the same day for subclass 858, and MD 114 continues to cover the closed 132 and 188 programs.

The timing is still the point. The newest median available is July 2026, and MD 119 was in force for the last seven days of it. So roughly three weeks of that figure describe decisions made under MD 105 and one week under MD 119, blended into a single number with no way to separate them. The first month that sits entirely under MD 119 is August, which publishes around October. If you are advising a skilled client this week, the data and the rules are still describing two different systems — the data is now just ambiguous about which one it means.

Worked scenario: an offshore student, three ways

Aarav is applying offshore for a packaged program with a Bachelor at University Y as the main CoE. His priority is set by University Y’s threshold status on the day he lodges — nothing about Aarav changes across these three cases.

Two things to take from that. The gap between best and worst case is roughly two months before anyone opens the file — and it is decided by the provider, not the applicant or the submission. And if Aarav were applying onshore instead, none of this would apply: he would sit in plain lodgement order.

One timing trap worth diarising: under MD 115, applications lodged between 15 November and 31 December are prioritised against the provider’s indicative allocation for the following calendar year. A provider that is capped out in December may be Priority 1 again for a file lodged the same week, on next year’s allocation.

What this means for your practice

Three things follow.

First, a processing-time estimate has a shelf life. If your client-facing timeframes live in an email template or a PDF someone updates when they remember, they drift — and they drift in different directions for different visa types, which is exactly the case a single blanket update won’t catch.

Second, where the client was when they applied is now a field you need on the file, not a detail you remember. It sets the priority band under MD 119 for skilled applications and it decides whether a student application is on the traffic light or in plain lodgement order. Under MD 119 it applies retrospectively to on-hand files, so it isn’t only a question for new matters.

Third, the categories that moved most are the ones where lodging complete matters most. The Department attributes delay in skilled temporary directly to incomplete applications that trigger a request for further information. On the student side, the priority a file receives is a function of the provider’s threshold status on the day of lodgement, not the effort you put into the submission.

All three are tracking problems before they are advice problems: which files are waiting, how long each has been pending, where each applicant was at lodgement, and which are stalled on something outstanding at your end. When that sits on the client’s file rather than in someone’s head, “which of my on-hand 482s just moved priority band?” is a question you answer with a filter. That’s the kind of visibility Centrio is built around.

This is general information, not migration or legal advice. Figures were accurate at publication and change monthly — always confirm the current median against the primary source before quoting a client.

Sources:

• Home Affairs — Visa processing times (median processing times for key programs)
• Home Affairs — Global visa processing times guide
• Home Affairs — Student visa processing priorities
• Home Affairs — Skilled visa processing priorities
• Ministerial Direction 119 — skilled processing priorities from 25 July 2026 (PDF)
• Ministerial Direction 120 — subclass 858 from 25 July 2026 (PDF)
• Ministerial Direction 117 — Partner visa processing order (PDF)
• Ministerial Direction 115 — offshore subclass 500 (PDF)
• Ministerial Direction 111 — offshore subclass 500 (PDF)
• Department of Education — Visa Prioritisation Status
• Historical monthly figures: archived captures of the Home Affairs processing times page via the Internet Archive