What offshore 190 visa applicants should and should not...
@william_prm_adler (10H ago| Updated 10H ago)What offshore 190 visa applicants should and should not worry
(Part I)
For those already lodged or at least get the nomination, there are a few factors.
First, what will be the allocation level versus planning level for the 2025-2026 budget year? For now, we already know the planning level is 35500 for all primary and secondary applicants, so if the allocation level stays relatively low, resulting in far less than 35500 new primary and secondary applicants, then the existing visa backlog queue will further reduce, and you will not be competing against more and more onshore and offshore 190 visa applicants for limited slots, but will have more and more slots available for you.
For now, it is very likely that there will not be more than 29000 new primary and secondary 190 visa applicants in the 2025-2026 budget year, perhaps even less, so this is a good news, meaning, you just need to wait a bit longer than onshore applicants who lodged in the same or adjacent months, but it is not bleak.
If the first point is true, it is not as bad as it appears.
Second, what will be the allocation level versus planning level for subsequent budget years? The logic is exactly the same, so I am not going to repeat myself here.
Similarly, if the second point is true, then it is not so bleak, just a bit extra waiting time.
Third, will processing priorities change, and in what way? This is a question quite hard to speculate, but I reckon the prioritization of onshore applicants over their offshore counterparts will likely not change drastically.
There may also be a general clean-up of the very old backlogs, such as those lodged before 1 July 2024 but still waiting, considering their size is pretty small, so cleaning them up may not make the processing times look too bad.
(Part II)
For those waiting for invitations, generally speaking, regardless of whether you are onshore or offshore, the State and Territory requirements are going to become higher, so while onshore applicants may have an advantage, especially since certain States and Territories give limited to no slots for offshore applicants, the bar is clearly rising.
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thankyou very insightful.
Can you share your thoughts on what you think will happen to the visa 189 offshore applicants? It feels particularly bleak
There are numbers on the 189 visa to keep an eye. During the 2024-2025 budget year, there were 17913 lodgements versus 17236 grants for 189 visa. During the 2025-2026 budget year, there were 20730 lodgements versus 17076 grants for 189 visa. So the last two budget years brought 677 and 3654 excess backlogs as a result, or 4331 in total. So far, the processing times are still pretty fast, but the 3-month, 4-month, 6-month, and 6-month moving averages for 189 backlog number have all been slowly creeping up due to the reason I just mentioned above. The fundamental principles are universal: If there are more invitations and less grants in the next budget year, then in general, backlogs up, processing times up; If there are less invitations and more grants in the next budget year, then in general, backlogs down, processing times down; Subgroups (onshore priority, onshore non-priority, offshore, etc) are, in principle, affected in the same direction, but the magnitude may vary drastically. For your case, 189, offshore, lodged mid-June 2026, I would not say your situation looks "particularly bleak" now, I think it is an overstatement, for now, since (1) the numbers are good overall and (2) we do not yet know whether there will lots of new invitations to apply for 189 visa.
The situations for 189 and 190 are quite different for the last two years. During the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 budget years, 190 backlogs decreased by 14673, whereas 189 backlogs increased by 4331 at the same time. The 189 planning level has been surged to 21090, and I wonder (we can certainly speculate here) whether it is to address the 4331 excess backlogs generated during the last 2 budget years or not. So: If there are more than 21000 lodgements for 189 visa in the 2026-2027 budget year, then it will be not so good (not necessarily "bad", but certainly not "good", obviously) for 189 offshore applicants and 189 applicants overall; If there are less than 17000 lodgements for 189 visa in the 2026-2027 budget year, then it will be quite good news, since the 4331 excess backlogs generated during the last 2 budget years are neutralized; If anything in between, alright, things are moving in good directions, but the good effects may not be so obvious and immediate for certain subgroups of applicants. Remember, though, that you are already invited and lodged your visa, so you are in an infinitely better position than those who are still trying to be invited.