Partner and family visas

Onshore or offshore — the choice that shapes everything else

The 820/801 and the 309/100 lead to the same place: permanent residence as the partner of an Australian. What separates them is where you are standing on the day the application is lodged.

• Onshore (820/801) — lodged while you are in Australia. If you hold a substantive visa at the time, you are generally granted a bridging visa that lets you stay while the application is decided.
• Offshore (309/100) — lodged from outside Australia, and you must be outside Australia when the temporary stage is decided. There is no bridging visa attached to it.
• Prospective Marriage (300) — for fiancés who intend to marry, then apply onshore afterwards at a much reduced charge.

Getting this choice wrong is expensive and slow to unwind, and it is usually driven by visa expiry dates rather than preference. It is the first thing worth talking through.

One payment covers both stages

A partner visa is granted in two steps: a temporary visa first, then the permanent one roughly two years later. People often assume that means paying twice. It does not.

The application charge is paid once, at the start, and it carries you through both stages. That is why the number looks so much larger than other visas — you are paying for the whole pathway up front.

What it costs in 2026–27

The base application charge for the main applicant on both the onshore and offshore partner visas is AUD 11,710. Each additional applicant aged 18 or over is AUD 5,860, and each child under 18 is AUD 2,935.

There are three cheaper doors into the same visa, and they are easy to miss:

• Applying for the 820 as a Prospective Marriage visa holder — AUD 1,955.
• Ceased Prospective Marriage visa — AUD 2,475.
• Transitional visa holder — AUD 700.

The Prospective Marriage visa itself is charged at the full AUD 11,710, so the reduction above is not a saving on the pathway overall — it is recognition that you already paid once.

What a case officer is actually assessing

The question is not whether you are a genuine couple. You know that already. The question is whether the evidence in the file demonstrates it to somebody who has never met you.

Four aspects of the relationship are weighed:

1. Financial — shared accounts, joint liabilities, how you actually pool money and who pays for what.
2. The nature of the household — living arrangements, shared bills, mail, division of chores and responsibilities.
3. Social — whether friends, family and the wider world understand you to be a couple.
4. The nature of your commitment — how long you have been together, the length of any separations, and what you have planned together.

A file that is strong on one aspect and silent on the other three is the most common shape of a partner application that runs into trouble.

Where partner applications come unstuck

• The early period of the relationship is undocumented. Most couples have plenty of evidence from the last year and almost none from the first. That gap gets noticed.
• Statutory declarations are doing all the work. Declarations support documents; they cannot replace them.
• The sponsor’s own history is not checked first. Previous sponsorships and certain criminal history can affect whether a sponsorship is approved at all — better to know before lodging, not after.
• Timelines do not line up. Dates in the forms, the declarations and the evidence need to tell one consistent story.