If your students are waiting longer — or clearing faster — than you expected, the reason is often the provider they chose, not the file you lodged.
Since 14 November 2025, offshore Subclass 500 applications have been assessed under Ministerial Direction 115 (MD115). Applications lodged before that date fall under the earlier MD111. For 2026, the government set the National Planning Level at 295,000 new overseas student commencements — 25,000 higher than 2025.
How the priority model works
MD115 gives faster processing to providers who stay within their allocation under the National Planning Level. Each provider effectively sits in one of three tiers:
- Priority 1 — provider is below 80% of its cap: fastest processing.
- Priority 2 — provider is between 80% and 115%: standard processing.
- Priority 3 — provider has exceeded 115%: slowest processing.
Two things are easy to miss:
- Priority affects speed, not the outcome. MD115 is not a visa cap and doesn’t set the criteria to grant or refuse. A strong application still gets granted — it just may wait longer behind a provider that’s over its cap.
- Onshore applications are exempt from the MD115 tiers and run on a standard benchmark.
What this means for your practice
The provider a student picks now materially changes their timeline. That makes two habits valuable: knowing roughly where your key providers sit in the traffic light, and timing offshore lodgements with that in mind — especially near intake deadlines.
When your student pipeline, the provider, and the application deadline all live in one view, it’s far easier to spot the file heading for a Priority-3 queue before it becomes a missed start date. That single-view visibility across the migration and education desks is the case for running both in one platform.
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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