The Sponsor Compliance Retainer has a Registered Migration Agent manage your sponsorship obligations with your HR team: every notifiable event you tell us about in time, lodged within its deadline; records maintained in a producible form; nominations prepared as you hire; and visa expiries tracked forward. Resource Visa runs this for Australian resources and energy employers, and for labour-hire businesses sponsoring at scale.
The retainer
Your obligations, managed by someone whose job it is
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.
Scope
What the retainer covers
Obligation monitoring. Every notifiable event you tell us about in time, lodged within its deadline.
Records, kept current. In a form you can produce on request.
Nominations as you hire. New nominations and renewals prepared at agreed retainer rates.
Visa expiry tracking. A forward calendar of every sponsored worker’s expiry, with decision points flagged in advance, including when a permanent residence conversation should start.
Sponsorship renewal. Diarised and prepared before it becomes urgent.
Monitoring support. If the Department requests records or attends a site, we help you prepare and manage the response.
Direct access to a Registered Migration Agent. Questions answered as they arise, rather than accumulating until they become a problem.
Who it’s for
Who it’s built for
Employers sponsoring more than a handful of workers, where the administrative load has outgrown whoever picked it up.
Labour-hire and on-hire sponsors, who carry sponsor obligations at a scale in-house teams often weren’t built for.
Businesses newly approved as sponsors, where nobody has done this before and the obligations are unfamiliar.
Employers with DAMA or labour agreement commitments, where annual ceilings and reporting obligations run alongside ordinary sponsorship.
What it replaces
What it replaces
Usually one of three arrangements, all of which work until they don’t:
An HR manager doing it alongside their real job. Works until they are on leave when a notification falls due, or until they leave the business and the knowledge goes with them.
A migration adviser engaged per transaction. Fine for lodgements. Nobody is watching the obligations between transactions, which is where breaches happen.
Nothing in particular. More common than it should be, and usually discovered during a monitoring request.
How it works
How it works
Every retainer starts with a fixed-fee onboarding review, scoped in writing. It establishes your starting position and whether anything needs remediation before the retainer begins. From there it runs as a standing arrangement with one nominated contact on each side, a forward calendar you can see, and a short quarterly review.
You keep the employment relationship and the commercial decisions. The obligations stay with your business in law. On a retainer we manage them with you, but we can’t take them over.
Fees
What it costs
Retainers are fixed-fee, scoped in writing, and priced on the number of sponsored workers and the complexity of your arrangements. We quote after the Sponsor Compliance Check, once we know how much work is involved.
Departmental charges for nominations and visas sit outside the retainer and are passed through at cost. 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.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions
Already sponsoring under the 482 or a DAMA? Start with a Sponsor Compliance Check: a structured conversation about your sponsorship position, followed by a one-page note of the gaps we discussed. No fee for the initial check. Any further work is quoted in writing before it starts. Before we meet, we’ll send you the Consumer Guide published by the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority. The Sponsor Compliance Retainer is an ongoing engagement in which we manage a sponsor’s obligations.
The records remain your business’s records and your legal obligation. What changes is that they are maintained in a producible form and someone is managing that with you.
Nominations and renewals for your sponsored workforce are prepared at agreed retainer rates. Departmental charges are passed through at cost. New matters outside the sponsored workforce, a 400 mobilisation, a labour agreement, are quoted separately.
Possibly, and we will say so. For a small sponsored workforce with simple arrangements, the Sponsor Compliance Check plus a calendar you run yourself may be enough. We would rather tell you that than sell you a retainer you do not need.
Send it to us the same business day. Helping you respond is part of what the retainer covers.
Yes. The onboarding review doubles as a handover review.
Reviewed by a Registered Migration Agent (MARN 1686595) · Last reviewed [date]
Keep reading
Related pages
Sponsor Compliance Check
Find out where your sponsorship obligations stand before the Department does.
Sponsor Obligations & Monitoring
What sponsorship commits your business to: records, notifications, equivalent terms, and what happens when the Department asks.
Skills in Demand visa (subclass 482)
Sponsoring an ongoing role under the Subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa. The three streams, what your business must do, and the obligations that follow.
Carrying sponsor obligations now?
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