A significant change to how education agents get paid took effect this year. Under ESOS integrity reforms, registered providers are banned from paying commissions to agents for onshore student transfers that occur after 31 March 2026.

The target is “course hopping” — where a student obtains a visa for one course and provider, then moves to an often lower-level course, sometimes to work more and study less. Restricting the commission removes the financial incentive to facilitate those transfers.

What’s actually prohibited

  • If a student transfers to a new provider without completing their principal course, the new provider cannot pay an agent a commission for that transfer.
  • “Commission” is defined broadly — direct cash, per-student fees, bonuses, service fees, gifts or any other incentive connected to recruiting an overseas student.
  • Transition rule: the ban does not apply to students accepted for enrolment at the new provider on or before 31 March 2026, even if they start later.

It sits inside a wider ESOS integrity package — including new expectations that providers assess ownership and control links with agents, and monitor that affiliated agents act ethically and in students’ best interests.

Which movements count as a transfer

The rule bites when an international student moves from one provider to another after they have started studying in Australia, and before they have finished their principal course. That framing is wider than most agents assume, and Study Australia is explicit that it captures:

  • Cancelled enrolments — not just orderly transfers
  • Withdrawals followed by enrolment elsewhere
  • Mid-package transfers, where a student jumps out of a package partway through

The common thread is the principal course. Until the student finishes it, a move to a different provider is a transfer, however it is labelled administratively.

What you can still be paid for

Two categories remain commissionable, and they cover most legitimate work:

  • Initial enrolments. Recruiting a student to their first provider is untouched.
  • Progression within a package the student is already enrolled in — where the courses are already specified in the conditions of enrolment attached to their visa. Moving a student from the ELICOS component to the diploma they were always going to take is progression, not a transfer.

The transition rule is more generous than it first reads

The grandfathering provision is worth reading carefully, because it turns on acceptance, not commencement:

The ban does not apply to students who were accepted for enrolment at their new provider on or before 31 March 2026, even if they start later.

Providers can continue to honour existing contracts for those students and pay future instalments of commission on them. So a student accepted in March 2026 who commences in July, with commission paid in two instalments across the year, remains commissionable throughout. What matters is the acceptance date sitting on or before 31 March 2026 — and being able to evidence it.

That evidentiary point is the whole practical problem. The grandfathering is generous, but only to agents who can show, per student, when acceptance happened.

What this means for your practice

For legitimate agents, the risk isn’t the rule — it’s proving which transfers are commissionable and which aren’t. You need a clean record of each student’s principal course, enrolment dates, and transfer history to know whether a commission is payable at all.

Tracking commissions and sub-agent splits in a spreadsheet makes that hard and error-prone. Handling it in the same system that holds the student’s enrolment record — so a commission can’t be raised against a transfer the rules now exclude — keeps you on the right side of the line. That’s part of what Centrio is built to do across the education desk.

This is general information, not migration or legal advice. Details and dates were accurate at publication and can change — always confirm against the primary source before relying on them.

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