How does an Australian parent visa work from Pakistan? (2026)

Which Australian parent visas exist?

There are four permanent parent visas, two temporary contributory visas that lead to a permanent one, and a separate long visitor visa that leads nowhere. Families usually hear about one of them from a relative and never find out the other six exist.

The permanent visas

• Parent visa (subclass 103). The non-contributory offshore route. Permanent on grant.
• Aged Parent visa (subclass 804). The same idea onshore, for a parent already in Australia who is old enough to receive the age pension there.
• Contributory Parent visa (subclass 143). The paid route, offshore, permanent on grant.
• Contributory Aged Parent visa (subclass 864). The paid route onshore, again with the age pension age condition.

The two temporary contributory visas

The Contributory Parent (Temporary) visa (subclass 173) gives a stay of two years. The department says the holder can live in Australia for up to two years, work and study without receiving government support, and then apply for the permanent subclass 143. The subclass 884 is the onshore equivalent that leads to the subclass 864. Both of these must still be lodged on paper, while the four permanent subclasses must now be lodged online in ImmiAccount.

The one that is not a migration visa

The Sponsored Parent (Temporary) visa (subclass 870) lets a parent visit for up to 3 or 5 years per visa, to a maximum of 10 years in Australia. It carries no work rights and no path to permanent residence. It is covered in its own section below, because it is the route most Pakistani families end up using in practice.

How long is the wait, in the department’s own numbers?

This is the part worth reading twice. All parent visa applications are subject to capping and queueing. Capping means there is a maximum number of visas the department can grant in a migration program year. Once that number is reached, every remaining application stays in the queue until a place opens in a future year.

The published estimate for a new application

As of 4 November 2026, the department’s parent visa queue release page gives an estimated processing time frame for new applications of 18 years for the Contributory Parent visas and 42 years for the Parent and Aged Parent visas. The page says it generally updates this at the beginning of each program year and bases it on the current number of places available.

Where the queue had actually reached

The same page says that as at 31 August 2026 the department had released for final processing Contributory Parent applications with a queue date up to November 2018, Contributory Aged Parent applications up to November 2020, Parent applications up to March 2014, and Aged Parent applications up to October 2014.

Two different clocks

Read that table as two separate waits. The first is the wait for an initial assessment, which is what gives you a queue date. On 4 November 2026 the department was assessing subclass 103 applications lodged in February 2023 and subclass 143 applications lodged in April 2024. The second wait is the queue itself, and that is the one measured in years. An acknowledgement letter within about four weeks is not progress on the visa.

The department also says it will not respond to individual status enquiries on these visas because of the volume, and that it cannot give exact processing time frames for capped and queued visas. If an agent is promising you updates nobody else can get, ask how.

What does each route cost?

Every parent visa is paid in two instalments: the first when you apply, the second when the department asks for it. On the contributory route the second instalment is where most of the money sits, which is why the headline figure and the amount a family actually has to find at the end feel so different.

What the table does not include

• an additional applicant charge for each family member who applies;
• health checks, police certificates and biometrics for each applicant;
• the Parent Sponsor application for the subclass 870, listed at AUD420.00;
• health insurance from an Australian provider, which the subclass 870 requires throughout;
• any agent’s own service charge, which is not a government fee.

The department publishes a Visa Pricing Estimator for working out the total, and warns that the estimator does not take the second instalment or the other costs into account. A lower visa cost applies from 1 July 2026 to eligible Pacific Island and Timor-Leste citizens. A Pakistani passport is not on that list, so plan on the full figures.

What is the balance of family test, and will your family pass it?

This is where most Pakistani parent applications fail, and it fails before money is ever discussed. The test is not about the sponsoring child. It is about all of the parent’s children, wherever they live.

The rule as the department states it

The department says you meet the balance of family test if at least half of your children and step-children are eligible children, or if there are more eligible children living in Australia than any other single country. An eligible child, in this context, is one who is a settled Australian citizen, Australian permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen.

How that plays out for a typical family

• Two children, one settled in Australia and one in Lahore. Half the children are eligible, so the test is met.
• Four children, one in Australia, three in Lahore. One quarter are eligible, and three live in one other country, so the test is not met.
• Five children, two in Australia, one in Pakistan, one in Dubai, one in the United Kingdom. Fewer than half are eligible, but Australia holds more children than any other single country, so the test is met.

The department publishes examples of its own and the counting rules around deceased and estranged children, so work through your own family on its page rather than on an agent’s summary. The only published waiver is the narrow Retirement visa pathway, for a person who held an Investor Retirement (subclass 405) or Retirement (subclass 410) visa on 8 May 2018 and has held no other substantive visa since. That pathway also removes the sponsor and the Assurance of Support requirements.

Who sponsors a parent, and what are they signing?

The sponsor is normally the child in Australia, and the sponsorship is a commitment with real financial content. There is no fee to sponsor a permanent parent visa, which sometimes leads families to treat the form as a formality. It is not.

Who qualifies as a sponsor

The department says that to sponsor a parent, you or your cohabiting spouse or de facto partner must be an Australian citizen, an Australian permanent resident or an eligible New Zealand citizen, must be settled in Australia, and must be 18 years of age or older. Where the child is under 18, the sponsor can instead be the child’s cohabiting spouse, a relative or guardian of the child, a relative or guardian of that spouse, or a community organisation.

The two-year undertaking

The sponsor must agree to provide support, housing and financial help for the first two years the applicant lives in Australia, and that extends to any family members who apply with the parent. One sponsor can sponsor more than one parent on the same visa, and the sponsorship covers the main applicant plus the family members who apply with them. Sponsorship is lodged on Form 40, Sponsorship for migration to Australia, and the department must approve it.

Assurance of Support, health and character

Three requirements sit between a released application and a granted visa, and the first of them catches families who assumed the sponsor had already covered it.

The Assurance of Support is a separate guarantee

The department says you must be able to obtain an Assurance of Support unless you are applying under the Retirement visa pathway, that it guarantees the department you will not need to rely on government assistance for the assurance period, and that it covers you and the family members who come with you. The sponsor or a family member does not have to provide it: an individual, more than one person, or an organisation can. The department tells you when it is needed, and the amounts and the length of the assurance are administered by Services Australia, so take the current figures from that agency’s own page.

Health and character

The parent, and any family members who apply with them, must meet the health requirement and the character requirement. The department says it might also ask non-migrating family members to meet them. On a queue measured in years, medical results and police certificates expire and have to be redone, which is one of the hidden costs of these routes. If you or a family member owe the Australian Government money, the debt must be repaid or an approved repayment arrangement must be in place.

Everyone aged 18 or over must also have read, or had explained to them, the Life in Australia booklet, and must sign the Australian Values Statement.

The subclass 870, and what it is not

For most Pakistani families whose parents are in their sixties, the subclass 870 is the only route that produces a result inside the parents’ working memory of the decision. It is also the route most often misdescribed.

What the visa gives

• a stay of up to 3 or 5 years per visa;
• further visas to a maximum of 10 years in Australia;
• travel in and out during the visa;
• no work rights at all in Australia.

The department states that this is a temporary visa only and that the holder will not have the right to permanent residence. It also says you cannot apply for a permanent or temporary parent visa if you have applied for or hold the subclass 870, and the subclass 103 page says the reverse. The two tracks are mutually exclusive, so a family that lodges a subclass 870 to bridge the queue is not bridging anything.

The sponsor side of the 870

The sponsor must be approved as a Parent Sponsor before the visa application can be lodged, and that sponsorship application costs AUD420.00. The department requires the sponsor to have been usually resident in Australia for at least four years and not to have been unlawful or on a bridging visa other than A, B or C during those four years. If the sponsor is sponsoring their partner’s parents, the partner must also be an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen.

The income test is published: the sponsor’s taxable income for the most recent completed taxable income year before the sponsorship application must be at least AUD83,454.80. Income can be combined with a partner, or with another child of the prospective applicant who is an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen, but the sponsor’s own taxable income must then be at least 50 per cent of the specified amount.

The household limit nobody mentions

One sponsorship per household at a time, covering up to two parents. The department says a sponsor cannot lodge a new sponsorship application until their current approved sponsorship ends. In a family with two sets of parents and one Australian household, that limit decides who comes first.

The visa must be applied for from outside Australia, within six months of the sponsorship approval, or 60 days where the department has given permission to apply in Australia, which it says is only approved in limited circumstances. The holder must have and maintain adequate health insurance from an Australian health insurance provider throughout.

So which route makes sense?

I will not pretend there is a clean answer, because the published numbers do not give one. What follows is how the choice usually breaks down in a consultation.

If the parents are already elderly

A 42-year published estimate on the non-contributory route, and 18 years on the contributory one, are not timelines an elderly parent plans around. The honest conversation is usually about the subclass 870 or ordinary visitor visas, and about whether the family can meet the income test and the insurance condition year after year.

If the money is there and the family is patient

The contributory route buys a queue that was about four years further along than the other on 4 November 2026. That is what the extra AUD41,000 or so per applicant is purchasing: a better position, not a decision. Whether the gap holds for the next decade is not something anyone can tell you, because it depends on planning levels set each year.

If the balance of family test fails

Then none of the above applies, and the time to find that out is now, not after a charge has been paid. Count the children first. Our Australia visitor visa guide covers the subclass 600 route for ordinary family visits, and the Australia partner visa guide covers the other main family route into Australia.

Families comparing countries should also read the Canada super visa guide, the Canada parent sponsorship guide and the UK parent visa guide. The three systems handle elderly parents very differently, and the right question is often which country, not which subclass.

How do you apply, step by step?

The order matters more here than on most routes, because two of the early steps can rule the whole plan out before any money is spent.

1. 1

   Check the child in Australia first

   The sponsor is normally the child. That child, or their cohabiting spouse or de facto partner, must be an Australian citizen, an Australian permanent resident or an eligible New Zealand citizen, must be settled in Australia and must be 18 years of age or older. If none of that is true yet, there is no parent application to make this year.

2. 2

   Count the children for the balance of family test

   Write down every child and step-child of the parent, living and deceased, and where each one lives. The department says you meet the test if at least half of your children and step-children are eligible children, or if there are more eligible children living in Australia than in any other single country. Large families spread across Pakistan, the Gulf and the United Kingdom often fail here.

3. 3

   Decide between permanent, contributory and temporary

   The non-contributory Parent and Aged Parent visas are cheap and extremely slow. The Contributory visas cost far more and move faster. The Sponsored Parent (Temporary) visa (subclass 870) is a long visit with no work rights and no permanent residence at the end. You cannot hold or have applied for a subclass 870 and a parent visa at the same time, so this choice has to be made before anything is lodged.

4. 4

   Check whether the parent is old enough for the onshore routes

   The Aged Parent (subclass 804) and Contributory Aged Parent (subclass 864) visas require the parent to be old enough to receive the age pension in Australia, and they must be in Australia, but not in immigration clearance, when they apply and when the decision is made. A parent who is not of that age, or who is in Pakistan, applies for the subclass 103 or 143 instead.

5. 5

   Lodge the sponsorship

   For the permanent parent visas there is no fee to sponsor, and the sponsor applies using Form 40, Sponsorship for migration to Australia. For the subclass 870 the sponsor must first be approved as a Parent Sponsor, which costs AUD420.00 and includes an income test. The department must approve the sponsorship either way.

6. 6

   Lodge the visa application in ImmiAccount

   Subclasses 103, 143, 804 and 864 must now be lodged online in ImmiAccount. Temporary Contributory Parent applications, the subclass 173 and 884, must still be lodged on paper. Pay the first instalment of the charge when you apply, and keep a copy of everything you upload.

7. 7

   Expect a queue date, not a decision

   The department assesses the application against the core criteria, including health and character where applicable, then assigns a queue date and tells you in writing. The visa itself is only decided when a place becomes available and the department releases the application for final processing.

8. 8

   Be ready for the Assurance of Support and the second instalment

   Before a permanent parent visa is granted you must be able to obtain an Assurance of Support, which guarantees the department that you will not rely on government assistance for the assurance period. The assurer does not have to be the sponsor. The second instalment of the charge is paid only when the department asks for it, which on the contributory route is where most of the money falls.

What goes wrong most often?

Paying before counting the children

The balance of family test is a counting exercise that takes ten minutes and settles whether there is an application at all. Families routinely pay a consultant a deposit, then discover the test fails because three siblings live in Pakistan.

Treating the acknowledgement as progress

An acknowledgement in about four weeks, and later a queue date letter, feel like movement. They are not a decision. The decision comes only when the department releases the application for final processing, and the released queue dates on 4 November 2026 were November 2018 and March 2014.

Lodging a subclass 870 as a stopgap

The department says you cannot apply for a permanent or temporary parent visa if you have applied for or hold the subclass 870. Families who lodge one to get the parents into the country while the permanent application sits in the queue are not running two options. They are choosing one.

Assuming the sponsor covers the Assurance of Support

They are separate things. The sponsor signs a two-year support undertaking. The Assurance of Support is an additional guarantee against reliance on government assistance, it can come from someone else entirely, and the amounts are set by Services Australia. Finding that out when the department asks for it is late.

Buying a promise of priority

These visas are capped and queued and released in queue date order. There is no priority service to buy, and no agent who can reach into the queue. A quote that implies otherwise is the clearest warning sign you will get.

A realistic example

This is a hypothetical illustration, not a real client. Shahid is 38 and has been an Australian permanent resident in Perth for six years. His mother is 64 and his father is 69, both in Faisalabad. He has three siblings: one in Melbourne, one in Rawalpindi and one in Riyadh.

• The counting. Four children. Two are settled in Australia, one in Pakistan, one in Saudi Arabia. Half are eligible children, so the balance of family test is met.
• The arithmetic on the permanent routes. Two applicants on the contributory subclass 143 means the published charge from AUD49,900 for the first applicant plus an additional applicant charge, against a published estimate of 18 years for a new application. On the subclass 103 the charge is from AUD8,665, against an estimate of 42 years. Shahid’s father would be 87 on the first figure.
• What they actually do. Shahid checks his last notice of assessment against the AUD83,454.80 income test, finds he is over it, and applies to be an approved Parent Sponsor for AUD420.00. His brother in Melbourne agrees not to lodge a competing sponsorship, because the household limit allows one at a time.
• The subclass 870. Both parents apply from Pakistan within six months of the sponsorship approval, for the five-year visa at AUD12,440.00 each, and take out Australian health insurance they will need to maintain. They understand they cannot work, and that this does not lead to permanent residence.
• What they give up. By lodging the subclass 870 they cannot also hold a parent visa application. Shahid decides a decade of five-year visits beginning this year is worth more to his family than a queue place his father will probably not see.

Nothing in that plan is clever. It is a family reading two government pages, doing the arithmetic against their parents’ actual ages, and choosing with their eyes open.

The version that goes wrong

Now imagine a cousin in Sialkot who is told by a local agent that Australia has a parent visa taking two to three years, pays PKR 900,000 as a service charge on top of the first instalment, and receives an acknowledgement letter four weeks later that the agent presents as approval. Three years on, the application has a queue date and nothing else, the parents are three years older, and the agent has stopped answering. Nothing illegal has necessarily happened. The family simply bought a timeline that was never on the department’s website.

Key takeaways

Frequently asked questions