Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482) & Sponsor Compliance

Standard business sponsorship, nomination and visa applications under the subclass 482 (Skills in Demand) program, prepared end-to-end: labour market testing integrated with your recruitment workflow, salary benchmarking against the income thresholds, and nomination submissions built on the same commercial business-case discipline as our 400 work — including the harder cases, like converting a role whose 400 history the Department will examine.

The subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa has three streams: Specialist Skills, Core Skills and Labour Agreement. The Specialist Skills stream is open to most occupations where the salary meets its income threshold. It isn’t available for technicians and trades workers, machinery operators and drivers, or labourers, whatever the salary.

Sponsor obligations don’t manage themselves. Sponsor obligations start when you’re approved, and some continue after the sponsorship ends. They include giving equivalent terms and conditions, keeping records, telling the Department about certain changes within 28 days, paying reasonable return travel costs if asked, and cooperating with inspectors. Breaches can lead to sanctions, including bars on sponsoring, cancellation, infringement notices, civil penalties and enforceable undertakings.

Sponsorship and nomination charges, the Skilling Australians Fund levy and recruitment costs sit with the sponsor. Australian law prohibits passing them to the sponsored worker, directly or through deductions or bonds.

The Migration Act now provides for a public register of approved work sponsors. It can show sponsor names, ABNs, the number of nominations and the occupations nominated.

Resource Visa manages sponsor compliance on retainer: obligation monitoring, and the notifications and lodgements that follow each workforce change you tell us about. The obligations stay with your business in law. On a retainer we manage them with you, but we can’t take them over.

A Designated Area Migration Agreement (DAMA) lets an employer in a designated area sponsor occupations, with concessions, that the standard 482 doesn’t offer. The employer first needs endorsement from the region’s Designated Area Representative, then its own labour agreement with the Australian Government.