Australian PR for Sri Lankans: How to Get Permanent Residency in 2026

Yes, a Sri Lankan citizen can obtain Australian permanent residence. There is no separate programme for Sri Lankans and no bilateral arrangement, so the answer is the ordinary one: you qualify under a general Australian migration pathway, or you do not.

What has changed is that the pathway once open to a well-qualified applicant in Sri Lanka with no Australian job and no Australian family has closed for this program year. That is set out first, because everything else follows from it.

Everything below reflects the published position as at 21 September 2026, with dates attached so a reader can see how old each figure is. Australian settings move several times a year.

Three companion pages carry the detail that would otherwise bury this one: which occupations actually have a pathway and who assesses you, whether a Sri Lankan Attorney-at-Law can practise in Australia, and your Sri Lankan legal loose ends, before and after you move. If you are already living in Australia and the thing you need is a Sri Lankan lawyer rather than an Australian one, start with the last of those.

The short version

Australia's 2026-27 Permanent Migration Program is 185,000 places, announced on 12 May 2026 and unchanged in total from the two preceding years. Of that total, 129,590 places are allocated to migrants already living in Australia, with a further 300 for Special Eligibility. The categories that grew are the ones an onshore temporary visa holder uses. The Regional category, long presented to offshore applicants as the realistic way in, fell from 33,000 places to 14,110.

Underneath the planning levels, the State and Territory programmes that nominate skilled applicants are mostly shut. New South Wales closed when its places ran out. Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory have not opened their 2026-27 programmes or have not announced them. Two jurisdictions are running: Tasmania and the Northern Territory. Both will nominate an offshore applicant, and both want something more than a good score.

So the binding constraint for someone applying from Colombo in September 2026 is not points and not English. It is an Australian connection: a job offer, or a relative in the Northern Territory. That may change when the larger states announce, and the preparatory work should start now, but it is the position today.

Which states will actually nominate you from Sri Lanka

Two jurisdictions are nominating offshore applicants this program year. Tasmania will nominate for a subclass 190 through its Overseas Applicant pathway, which needs a Tasmanian job offer of at least thirty hours a week in school teaching, health, allied health, medicine, midwifery or nursing, and registrations under it are lodged immediately rather than joining a ranked queue. The Northern Territory will nominate for a subclass 491 through its Job Offer stream, which accepts any occupation on the national list, or its Family stream, which needs a relative resident in the Territory for twelve months. The Territory also states that it does not rank applicants by points score, which matters to anyone sitting on sixty-five or seventy.

Every other State and Territory is closed or has not announced its 2026-27 programme. The Department publishes the monthly figures: for 1 to 31 July 2026, Tasmania nominated 146 expressions of interest for the subclass 190 and 23 for the 491, and every other jurisdiction fewer than five.

The two closures matter more than the two openings. Tasmania’s subclass 491 overseas pathway is not running for 2026-27, and Migration Tasmania gives the reason plainly: the Australian Government is prioritising applicants already in Australia. The Northern Territory’s priority occupation stream is closed on a backlog carried over from last year. Those were the two pathways that nominated an offshore candidate on skills alone, with no job offer and no relative. That door is shut across the country.

Victoria and South Australia are the ones to prepare for rather than to apply to. Victoria accepts offshore applicants for both subclasses and imposes no employment requirement at all for the 190. South Australia runs an offshore stream in which an applicant does not lodge a registration of interest and is assessed straight from the SkillSelect expression of interest, provided South Australia is the first preference. Having a skills assessment and a live expression of interest ready before either announces is the preparation that matters.

Which Australian cities count as regional?

Perth, Adelaide, Canberra and Hobart are all designated regional areas for Australian migration purposes. So is the whole of the Northern Territory, including Darwin. Only Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are not.

This surprises almost everyone, and it is not a quirk of departmental commentary. It is in a legislative instrument: the Migration (Designated regional areas for certain skilled and temporary graduate visas) Instrument (LIN 22/022) 2022, made on 17 February 2022 and in force since 5 March 2022 with no amendments since. The Regulations define a designated regional area as either a designated city or major regional centre, or a regional centre or other regional area. Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are simply not specified in the instrument, so they fall outside it by omission rather than by being placed in a category of their own.

Reading the instrument through, five jurisdictions are regional in their entirety. Every postcode in Tasmania, the Northern Territory, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Western Australia falls into one specified category or the other. Only New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland are split.

So a Sri Lankan applicant on a subclass 491 could live in Perth, a city of more than two million people, or in Adelaide, and be complying with a regional visa condition throughout. Regional, for migration purposes, does not mean rural.

Two further points keep this accurate. The distinction between the two categories makes no difference at all to subclass 491 eligibility or to the five regional-study points; the categories only matter for the length of the post-study work extension and for priority under a Designated Area Migration Agreement. And the classification is by postcode alone. The city names are departmental shorthand; the operative list is the schedule of postcodes in the instrument, which the Department mirrors on its regional postcodes page.

The same postcodes do three jobs. They define the designated regional area for the subclass 491, they define regional Australia for the five points awarded for regional study, and they govern the second Temporary Graduate visa in the Post-Study Work stream. The subclass 494 reaches the same geography through the expression regional Australia rather than designated regional area. Do not confuse any of this with the separate regional postcode lists used for Working Holiday Maker visas, which are a different list for a different purpose and, in any event, not open to Sri Lankan passport holders.

One term that comes up constantly deserves a flat answer. A Designated Area Migration Agreement lets employers in a designated region access a broader range of overseas workers than the standard programme allows, by varying the occupation lists and through negotiated concessions. There are thirteen. You cannot apply for one. The Department's own wording is that individuals cannot directly access a DAMA and must be sponsored by an employer operating in the designated region, for an occupation specified in that region's head agreement. Where an agreement exists it operates through the subclasses 482, 494 and 186. It is a reason a particular employer in Kalgoorlie or Cairns may be able to sponsor you when one elsewhere could not, and it is not a route you can take yourself.

What Australian PR is, and whether Sri Lankans have a special route

A permanent visa lets the holder live, work and study in Australia indefinitely, travel in and out for as long as the travel facility lasts, and apply for citizenship once the residence requirements are met. It is not citizenship, and it is not automatically renewed: the travel facility attached to a permanent visa expires and has to be replaced by a resident return visa.

Three visas that are frequently described as permanent residence are not. The subclass 491 and the subclass 494 are provisional. They allow the holder to live and work in Australia for five years in a designated regional area, and they lead towards permanent residence through a later subclass 191 application, but they do not confer it. The subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa is temporary. It may lead to a subclass 186 nomination, and frequently does, but nothing about holding a 482 entitles the holder to one.

The distinction matters in Sri Lanka because a family may sell land and wind up a business on the strength of being told they have permanent residence, when what they have is a five-year provisional visa conditional on living and working in a specified area.

Is there a special PR programme for Sri Lankans? No. There is no Sri Lanka-specific skilled migration concession, no bilateral permanent residence arrangement, no country-specific occupation list and no Sri Lankan processing stream. Sri Lankan citizens apply under the same general pathways as everyone else.

There is also a common and expensive misconception to dispose of. Sri Lankan passport holders cannot apply for either Australian working holiday visa. The Working Holiday visa (subclass 417) is open to citizens of nineteen countries and jurisdictions, and the Work and Holiday visa (subclass 462) to citizens of thirty. Sri Lanka appears on neither list. Both programmes are reciprocal, resting on a bilateral arrangement, and Australia and Sri Lanka have none. There is no application to make, no annual cap to wait for and no ballot to enter. Anyone in Colombo being charged to prepare an Australian working holiday application for a Sri Lankan passport holder is being charged for nothing.

What the September 2026 announcements did to the working holiday programme, including a ballot for second and third year applications, is therefore beside the point for a Sri Lankan reader.

Nor does Sri Lanka come within any of the other country-specific schemes. MATES, the mobility pathway for graduates and early career professionals, is open to Indian nationals only. The Pacific Engagement Visa and the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme are for Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste. The visa charge concessions introduced on 1 July 2026 are for Pacific Island and Timor-Leste citizens. Sri Lanka appears in none of them, and Australia and Sri Lanka have no bilateral migration arrangement of the kind that underpins those schemes.

Sri Lanka's strong recent numbers are the product of ordinary skilled and regional pathways used well, not of a concession.

The pathways, compared

Four of the nine do not confer permanent residence on grant: the 491 and 494 are provisional, the 482 is temporary, and the partner route reaches permanence only at its second stage.

The subclass 189, the 190 and the 491 are the three that most offshore applicants weigh up. All three are points-tested and all three run through SkillSelect. The differences decide the choice between them, and that choice is usually made badly.

The fifteen points attaching to a 491 nomination are the largest nomination or sponsorship award in the points test, though not the largest item in it: Superior English, a doctorate and eight years of Australian skilled employment are each worth 20. That is why the 491 is so often presented as the answer. It is also why the reduction of the Regional planning level from 33,000 places to 14,110, and the closure of the two offshore streams that did not require a job offer, matters more than any other change this year.

Do you need an Australian job offer? Not for every pathway, and the distinction decides whether someone in Colombo has anything to work with at all.

So the 189 is the one pathway to permanent residence needing neither an employer nor a State, and currently the hardest to reach, because the invitation rounds have stopped.

How SkillSelect actually works

All three points-tested visas run through SkillSelect. You lodge an expression of interest, which is not a visa application and creates no right to anything, and you wait to be invited. The expression of interest can be updated before invitation if your circumstances change, and it stays active for two years. Once an invitation arrives you have 60 days to lodge the visa application itself.

Two consequences follow. An expression of interest sitting in the pool is not an application, so nothing is being processed and no timeframe is running. And because the age points and the under-45 rule are both tested at the date of invitation rather than at lodgement, a birthday during the wait can cost points, ten of them at the move from 39 to 40, or end the route altogether at 45.

The last departmental invitation round for the subclass 189 was on 4 June 2026, when 10,000 expressions of interest were invited. For the 2026-27 program year to date the Department's published monthly table shows zero invitations for the subclass 189 and zero for the family-sponsored subclass 491, in every month, with a notice that the next round is expected by 30 September 2026. Anyone who lodged an expression of interest after June has therefore not been in a round at all. What that round did invite, and at what score, is set out in the companion page on occupations.

The 2026-27 program, and the onshore preference

The Government announced the 2026-27 Permanent Migration Program on 12 May 2026. The total, and the roughly seventy-thirty split between the Skilled and Family programs, are unchanged from 2025-26. The allocations underneath are not.

The Regional cut is larger than it looks, because the Regional category is not the subclass 491 alone. The Department's own Migration Program Report for 2024-25 reports the Regional category in three subcategories, and gives the outcome against the 33,000-place planning level as 32,948: Skilled Work Regional 28,069 places, Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional 4,461, and Skilled Regional 418. Each of those subcategories is noted as including both the current and the legacy subclasses. That is the Department reporting a past outcome, not defining next year's rows: the 2026-27 planning page names only the 491 in connection with the Regional category, and the Department's Administration of the Immigration and Citizenship Programs Paper counts the 494 as employer sponsored. Where the 494 and the 191 sit within the 2026-27 categories is therefore not something the Department has published, and the size of the cut to the wider regional pipeline cannot be read off the table.

The Parent category fell from 8,500 places to 7,060. For Sri Lankan families whose children have settled in Australia and who have been in a queue already measured in years, a smaller allocation means a longer wait rather than a shorter one.

Set the category table against the onshore allocation and the direction is consistent: the categories that grew are the ones an onshore temporary visa holder uses, and the category that collapsed is the one most often sold to offshore applicants.

The same preference now runs through processing. On 19 September 2026 Ministerial Directions 121 and 122 came into effect and replaced all the skilled processing priorities under the previous Direction 119. Direction 121 governs the temporary subclass 482. Direction 122 governs the permanent and provisional skilled subclasses: 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 489, 491, 494, 887 and 888.

Direction 122 sets four tiers, in this order. First, applications relating to construction, healthcare, teaching, agriculture, aquaculture, fishing and resources, or to Australia's law enforcement and defence interests. Second, applications where the applicant was in Australia when they lodged. Third, applications where the primary applicant was outside Australia when they lodged and the application is not combined with another person's at any time. Fourth, everything else.

An applicant in Sri Lanka outside a priority sector, applying with a spouse or children, falls into the last tier of four. Not excluded, but last.

One caution about the Department's own website. As at 21 September 2026 the subclass 189 points-tested page still refers to Direction 119 and still publishes lodgement-month queues under it. The processing priorities page is the current one. Where two departmental pages disagree, this is the kind of discrepancy an applicant should raise with an Australian adviser rather than resolve for themselves.

Occupation lists, and the two ANZSCO versions

Two classification versions are in use at once, which is a common source of error.

• ANZSCO 2022 applies to the subclass 186 Employer Nomination Scheme and the subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa, including the occupations on the Core Skills Occupation List.
• ANZSCO 2013 applies to every other skilled subclass, including the occupations on the MLTSSL, the STSOL and the ROL, which is what the 189, the 190 and the 491 run on.

So an occupation can appear under one code for an employer-sponsored application and a different code for a points-tested one. The Temporary Residence Transition streams of the 186 and the 187 have no occupation list at all: eligibility follows the occupation on the most recently held temporary skilled visa.

The Department also records a standing protection: pending nomination and visa applications are not adversely affected by the later removal of an occupation from a list. The Core Skills Occupation List itself was not amended during 2026; that is confirmed from the instrument's own version history rather than inferred from the absence of an announcement.

The practical point is to distrust any occupation list found through a search engine. The list that matters is the one attached to the specific subclass, under the classification that subclass uses, in the State whose programme is actually open.

How long it takes, honestly

There is no single processing time for Australian permanent residence, and the figure people quote usually measures the wrong thing.

Eight months measures the visa application once lodged. The part before lodgement is frequently longer: obtaining a skills assessment, sitting an English test, waiting for a State programme to open, and then sitting in the pool waiting for an invitation that, for the subclass 189, has not been issued since June. An applicant who counts only the departmental processing period will plan on a timetable that bears no relation to their own.

The Department also notes expressly that applications are not always processed in the order they are received, and that processing times are affected by planning levels, the ministerial directions on priority, the completeness of the application and the volume on hand.

The points test, in full

The threshold is 65 points. This is the number most often misunderstood, and the Department states the position without ambiguity: even if you meet the minimum points threshold, there is no guarantee you will receive an invitation. Sixty-five points makes you eligible to sit in the pool. What decides an invitation is how your score compares with others in your occupation when a round is run.

How far above 65 you need to be is also published, occupation by occupation, and the published answer is more uncomfortable than the usual advice suggests. Those figures are in which occupations actually have an Australian PR pathway.

The table below is the current test. The same items apply to the 189, the 190 and the 491, and only the nomination item differs.

Two qualifications on the employment items. Combined employment points, Australian and overseas together, are capped at 20. And employment counts only if it was in the nominated or a closely related skilled occupation, in the ten years before invitation, for at least twenty hours a week.

The partner items repay attention. A single applicant scores 10. An applicant whose partner is an Australian citizen or permanent resident scores the same 10. An applicant whose partner is neither, and who cannot produce Competent English and a skills assessment, scores nothing, which is a ten-point penalty against the same person unmarried. For a Sri Lankan couple the arithmetic frequently comes out differently depending on which of them is the primary applicant, which is one reason the choice is not merely formal.

A reform has been flagged but nothing has commenced. As at 21 September 2026 the operative points test is Schedule 6D of the Migration Regulations 1994, in the compilation as at 1 July 2026, and the tables the Department publishes for the 189, the 190 and the 491 are that test. Anyone told that the points test has already changed should ask to see the instrument.

English: the PTE numbers almost everyone is quoting are wrong

This is the most consequential thing in the article after the State nomination position, and it costs people money.

PTE Academic changed on 7 August 2025. Home Affairs puts it plainly on every page: PTE Academic has the same name as the previous version of the test that was accepted before 7 August 2025, however the test and the scores are different. The old requirement was a single figure, applied across all four components for Vocational upwards and as an overall score for Functional. Those figures, 30 for Functional, 36 for Vocational, 50 for Competent, 65 for Proficient and 79 for Superior, are still what most of the material online shows. They apply only to a sitting on or before 6 August 2025, and that test can no longer be sat.

Listening and reading became easier. Writing and speaking became considerably harder. Speaking for Proficient English went from 65 to 76, and for Superior English from 79 to 88. Somebody who would have scored a comfortable flat 79 under the old test is no longer at Superior level, and Superior against Proficient is a ten-point swing in the points test.

IELTS did not change. It remains a flat 6 in each component for Competent, 7 for Proficient and 8 for Superior, Academic or General Training, with One Skill Retake accepted for eligible visas. The consequence for a candidate whose weakness is speaking is arithmetical: IELTS asks a flat 7 or 8 where the revised PTE asks 76 or 88 on a scale where those are much harder marks. Which test suits a particular candidate is a question for whoever is advising them, but the two are no longer interchangeable, and most material online still treats them as though they were.

Four further points on English, all of which catch people out.

• A result from a test taken on or before 6 August 2025 can still be used until 6 August 2028 for Vocational, Competent, Proficient and Superior English, subject to the ordinary three-year currency rule and to the particular subclass. For Functional English the old-format window closed on 6 August 2026 and has already passed.
• Online, remote-proctored and at-home tests are not accepted at all. The Department names IELTS Online, TOEFL iBT Home Edition, OET@Home, CELPIP Online, LANGUAGECERT Academic Online and MET Digital taken at home. A computer-delivered test at a secure test centre is fine; it is remote proctoring that is fatal.
• TOEFL candidates must select 'Taking TOEFL for Australia' when registering. A result registered any other way is not eligible. Separately, TOEFL iBT was not approved for Australian visa purposes between 26 July 2023 and 4 May 2024, so a test sat in that window is unusable whatever the score.
• The passport exemption, for citizens of Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the United States, is available only up to Competent English. It does not reach Proficient or Superior, which are the levels that carry points.

OET also moved from letter grades to numerical scoring on 7 August 2025, and does not print an overall result, which matters for anyone needing an overall figure. The two instruments behind all of this are the Migration (Evidence of Functional English Language Proficiency) Instrument 2025 and the Migration (Specification of Language Tests, Test Scores and Passports) Instrument 2025.

Can you migrate to Australia after 40?

Yes, and the question is better put as what it costs you.

The points table is unsentimental. An applicant aged 25 to 32 scores 30 points for age. From 33 to 39 that falls to 25, and from 40 to 44 it falls to 15. A candidate at 41 is therefore fifteen points behind the same candidate at 30, which is three quarters of the twenty points that separate Competent English from Superior. In a competitive occupation that is usually decisive.

The hard limits differ by visa, and they bite at different moments. For the 189, the 190 and the 491 the requirement is to be under 45 when the Department invites you. Turning 45 after the invitation does not stop you lodging; turning 45 after lodging an expression of interest but before an invitation means no invitation will come. For the subclass 186 Direct Entry stream the age is tested at lodgement rather than invitation. The subclass 494 requires an applicant to be under 45.

Three things sit outside that framework. The subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa has no age requirement at all. The subclass 191, which is how a 491 or 494 holder reaches permanent residence, has no age criterion on its page: the requirements are three years holding the eligible visa, notices of assessment from the Australian Taxation Office for three income years out of the five, with no minimum income, and compliance with the visa conditions. And partner migration has no age criterion.

The subclass 186 also has express age exemptions, including for academics nominated by an Australian university and for scientists, researchers and technical specialists at ANZSCO skill level 1 or 2 nominated by a government science agency or an Australian university. The Temporary Residence Transition stream has a further exemption for a medical practitioner who has worked in a designated regional area for at least two of the three years before applying.

So the accurate position for a Sri Lankan professional over 45 is not that Australia is closed, but that the points-tested route is, and what remains runs through an employer or a partner.

Which occupations have a pathway, and who assesses you

There is no honest list of easiest jobs for Australian permanent residence. There is published evidence, and it is uncomfortable. In the subclass 189 round of 4 June 2026, eight of the ten commonest Sri Lankan skilled occupations received no invitation at all, including civil engineers, software and applications programmers, accountants, electrical engineers and chefs. The only occupations invited at the 65-point threshold were building and construction trades. Mainstream information technology does not appear in the round at all, and Jobs and Skills Australia rates accountants and every mainstream information technology occupation as no shortage.

Almost every skilled pathway also needs a positive skills assessment from the authority designated for the occupation, and the obvious guess is frequently wrong. Chef is on the MLTSSL and Cook is not. Construction managers go to VETASSESS rather than Engineers Australia. Early childhood teachers go to the childcare quality authority rather than the teaching institute. The three main authorities contradict one another on documents, and all three want colour scans of originals rather than the certified copies every Sri Lankan process trains you to produce.

The published invitation scores by occupation, the assessing authority for each of the occupations Sri Lankans actually migrate under, and the documentary requirements are in which occupations actually have an Australian PR pathway.

Lawyers are a special case. Solicitor is on the MLTSSL, which surprises people, but the Department treats Australian admission itself as the skills assessment, so admission has to precede the invitation, and admission is ordinarily obtained in Australia rather than from Colombo. Sri Lanka is also named specifically in the Australian admission rules, down to which subject you took at Law College. That is dealt with in can a Sri Lankan Attorney-at-Law practise in Australia.

Employer sponsorship, which is where the places went

Employer-Sponsored places rose from 44,000 to 58,040 in 2026-27, the largest increase in the program. For an offshore applicant the route runs through an Australian business, and it takes three shapes.

• The subclass 482 Skills in Demand visa is temporary, for up to four years. An approved sponsor nominates a position, the occupation must be on the Core Skills Occupation List under ANZSCO 2022, the applicant needs at least one year of relevant work experience in the nominated occupation or a related field, and the pay must meet the Core Skills Income Threshold of AUD 79,423 for nominations lodged in 2026-27, or the Specialist Skills Income Threshold of AUD 146,576 for that stream. There is no age requirement for this visa.
• The subclass 186 Employer Nomination Scheme is permanent on grant. The Direct Entry stream requires the applicant to be under 45 at lodgement unless exempt, the nominated occupation to be on the Core Skills Occupation List, at least three years of relevant work experience unless exempt, and a positive skills assessment before application unless exempt. The Temporary Residence Transition stream is the route a 482 holder ordinarily takes, is available to Skills in Demand holders across all occupations, and has no occupation list of its own: eligibility follows the occupation on the most recently held temporary skilled visa.
• The subclass 494 is provisional, for a regional employer, and leads towards permanent residence through a subclass 191 after three years. Which planning category the 494 is counted against for 2026-27 is not something the Department has published, as set out earlier under the program.

A 482 does not entitle anyone to a 186. It frequently leads there, and the Temporary Residence Transition stream exists for exactly that, but the nomination is the employer's to make and the employer can decline it, sell the business or fail. Sri Lankan families have restructured their affairs on the assumption that the 186 follows automatically. It does not.

The subclass 191 is widely misdescribed, so here it is exactly. Its requirements are that the applicant has held an eligible provisional visa for at least three years, has provided Australian Taxation Office notices of assessment for three income years out of the five, and has complied with the conditions of the provisional visa. There is no minimum income requirement and no age criterion on the visa page. What there is, is a hard compliance requirement: the regional residence and work conditions on the 491 or 494 have to have been kept, for years, and that is what fails.

Three thresholds govern employer-sponsored nominations, all indexed annually in line with average weekly ordinary time earnings and all effective from 1 July. The threshold that applies is the one in force when the nomination is lodged, not when the job was offered.

Where the annual salary is under AUD 250,000 the employer must also show that the annual market salary rate has been correctly determined, that the worker will not be paid less than it, and that both the market rate and the worker's pay, excluding non-monetary benefits, are at or above the relevant threshold.

Partner migration and the National Innovation visa

Partner migration is not a skilled pathway and none of the points, occupation or English machinery applies. An applicant outside Australia applies for a subclass 309 provisional visa leading to a subclass 100 permanent visa, sponsored by a spouse or de facto partner who is an Australian citizen, permanent resident or eligible New Zealand citizen. There is no age criterion. Partner is the largest single category in the Family program at 41,500 indicative places for 2026-27, Sri Lankan nationals received 1,080 Partner places in 2024-25, and the published median processing time for provisional and temporary Partner visas in July 2026 was 23 months, nearly three times the skilled permanent median.

The subclass 858 National Innovation visa is permanent on grant, invitation-only and very small. It requires an internationally recognised record of exceptional and outstanding achievement in a profession, a sport, the arts, or academia and research, together with a nominator of national reputation. Between April and June 2026 the Department received 2,166 expressions of interest and issued 248 invitations. In its first part-year the visa delivered 25 places nationally and none to Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka did lead the Distinguished Talent visa, a separate and older category that closed to new applications in November 2020, taking 56 of its 300 places in 2024-25. Whether that record translates into the new visa is not yet visible in the data. There is no hard age limit, but an applicant under 18 or aged 55 and over must show exceptional benefit to Australia.

The 17 September 2026 announcements, and what is actually in force

A package of migration measures was announced at the National Press Club on 17 September 2026 and has been widely reported in Sri Lanka as though all of it were now law. Almost none of it is. The Department's own wording governs: the changes have begun to be implemented and will be progressively rolled out over the next twelve months, and no commencement date is published for any individual measure.

For anyone reading this for permanent residence purposes, one sentence covers it. Nothing in the package changes the eligibility criteria for the subclasses 189, 190, 491, 186, 494 or 191. The measure that would touch them, a redesign of the points test scoring nominated skills at a higher qualification level, has been announced and not made; the Minister's own phrase was on implementation. Everything else is directed at students, graduates, visitors, working holiday makers, agent regulation and compliance.

Two days after the announcement, on 19 September, Ministerial Directions 121 and 122 commenced and replaced Direction 119. The Department does not state the relationship between the two events, and neither Direction is named in the announcement, so the sequence is recorded here rather than the connection. One further measure bears on this page: a No Further Stay condition is to be attached to all visitor visas, which would block entering Australia as a visitor and converting onshore to a partner visa. The Minister's stated rationale is the other side of it, that the Department could then grant more genuine short visits, including to a partner waiting on a spouse visa. It is prospective, it cannot apply to protection applications, and as at 21 September 2026 it is an announcement rather than a commenced measure.

One figure is being misread everywhere. The Bureau of Statistics reported net overseas migration at 292,000 on the same day, down 47 per cent from the 2023 peak, and the Government said its measures are designed to deliver Budget forecasts of 245,000 this financial year and 225,000 in 2027-28. Those are forecasts of a statistical measure that counts students, temporary workers and returning Australians. They are not caps, and they are not the Permanent Migration Program, which is 185,000 places and a separate thing entirely.

What the Australian figures actually say about Sri Lankans

These numbers are routinely misused, in both directions, so here they are with their periods attached.

At 30 June 2025 the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted 184,800 Sri Lanka-born people living in Australia, 0.7 per cent of the Australian population, making Sri Lanka the ninth-largest country of birth. That release came out on 29 April 2026. The Home Affairs country profile has not yet been refreshed and still reports 172,800 at 30 June 2024 and a tenth-place ranking, so both figures are in circulation and the newer one is the ABS.

On the migration program itself, the most recent complete year is 2024-25, ending 30 June 2025. No 2025-26 report has been published; on the usual pattern it would appear around November or December 2026. So any article claiming current-year Sri Lankan outcomes is claiming something that does not exist yet.

Sri Lanka was the sixth-largest country of citizenship in the 2024-25 program overall, having been eighth the year before and eleventh in 2019-20. The Department's own country profile ranks it higher still by category: third in the world for the total Skill stream, behind India and China; second for Regional, taking 3,611 places, eleven per cent of every regional place Australia granted; and fifth for Employer Sponsored.

A place is not a worker, and most reporting of these figures omits it. The Department states that the Skill stream comprises primary applicants together with their accompanying family unit, and that in 2024-25, of the 132,148 Skill stream places delivered nationally, less than half, 45.8 per cent, went to primary applicants. Every citizenship table carries the note that it includes primary and secondary applicants. So 8,235 is 8,235 places including spouses and children, not 8,235 skilled workers. The Department publishes no Sri Lanka-specific split, so the national 45.8 per cent cannot honestly be applied to the Sri Lankan figure either.

One number in that table cuts against the general direction and deserves attention. Skilled Independent places for Sri Lankans fell 37.8 per cent, from 806 to 501, in the same year total Sri Lankan permanent migration rose 66.5 per cent. The growth came from Regional, State nomination and employer sponsorship. The independent route, the one that needs nobody's permission, contracted.

So did the student route. Permanent places granted to former international students from Sri Lanka went from 615 in 2022-23 to 547 in 2023-24 to 478 in 2024-25, a fall of 12.6 per cent in a year when everything else rose.

For completeness on the temporary side: in 2024-25 Sri Lankan nationals received 29,191 visitor visas, 9,942 student visas and 4,707 temporary skilled employment visas, of which 2,087 went to primary applicants. That last pair of figures is the clearest illustration available of how far a grant count diverges from a worker count.

One last set of figures, about where people actually go. The Department publishes two measures in the same table, a population and a single year of arrivals, and they do not match: the established Sri Lankan community is in Melbourne, and new skilled arrivals are not.

Sri Lanka-born Australians are twice as concentrated in Victoria as the population at large, 52 per cent against 26. Recent skilled arrivals are dispersing: Victoria took 32 per cent of Skill stream additions against a 52 per cent stock, South Australia 11 against 4, Tasmania 5 against 1. The Family stream did the opposite and tracked the existing community at 49 per cent to Victoria, which is what family migration does. The skilled routes are pulling Sri Lankan migrants into the smaller States, and the State-nominated and regional programmes are the visible reason. These are 2021 Census figures; a Census is being conducted in 2026 and no results are out.

Do you need to study in Australia first?

No. The skilled independent, State-nominated and employer-sponsored routes are all open to someone who has never studied in Australia, and none of them requires an Australian qualification as a criterion.

Australian study earns points, and that is the extent of it. The Australian study requirement is worth 5 points. Study in a designated regional area is worth another 5. A Professional Year is worth 5. A Masters by research or Doctorate from an Australian institution in a specified STEM or ICT field is worth 10. Set against them, Superior English is worth 20 and a 491 nomination is worth 15, and both cost a great deal less than an Australian degree.

The published outcomes point the same way. Permanent places to former Sri Lankan international students fell for the third consecutive year in 2024-25, while the categories that grew were regional, State-nominated and employer-sponsored. A degree bought as a migration instrument is an expensive way to buy five or ten points.

None of that means Australian study is a bad decision. It means it is an education decision with a modest migration consequence, and it should be made on the first basis rather than the second. Anyone in Colombo presenting an Australian course as a route to permanent residence is selling the course.

Can you apply while still living in Sri Lanka?

Yes for most pathways as a matter of the visa criteria, and the real obstacle is elsewhere.

An expression of interest in SkillSelect can be lodged from anywhere. A subclass 189 requires no Australian presence. A subclass 190 or 491 requires a State or Territory to nominate you, and each jurisdiction decides for itself whether it will consider offshore candidates. A subclass 482, 186 or 494 requires an Australian employer, who can nominate someone offshore. Partner migration has an offshore stream, the subclass 309 leading to the subclass 100, expressly for an applicant outside Australia.

So the answer is not that the visas are closed to offshore applicants. It is that the discretionary gates in front of them have narrowed. Direction 122 puts offshore applications in the third or fourth of four tiers. The planning levels put 129,590 of 185,000 places with people already in Australia. And the State programmes, as at 21 September 2026, offer an offshore Sri Lankan applicant two doors, both of which need an Australian connection.

That is a description of the current settings, not a recommendation to enter Australia on some other visa and convert later. Whether any particular route is open to any particular person is exactly the question an Australian registered migration agent or legal practitioner exists to answer.

What it costs

Visa application charges changed on 1 July 2026, by the Home Affairs Legislation Amendment (2026 Measures No. 1) Regulations 2026. The figures below are the first instalment as published by the Department and read on 21 September 2026. They are the government charge alone and they are not the cost of migrating.

Four features of it decide real money.

• The subclass 482 charges an additional adult applicant the same as the primary applicant, AUD 4,015, rather than roughly half. Every other visa in the table charges about half for an adult and about a quarter for a child. The 482 still comes out cheaper for a couple, at AUD 8,030 against AUD 9,205 on a 189, but the gap is far narrower than the headline figures suggest. It widens again with children, because the 482 charges 1,005 a child against 1,540.
• The subclass 191, which is how a 491 or 494 holder reaches permanent residence, costs AUD 630. The expensive step is the provisional visa, not the permanent one.
• There is a second instalment, but it is not a general additional cost. It is payable only where an applicant had turned 18 at the time of application and is assessed as not having functional English, and it is substantial: AUD 4,885 or AUD 4,890 depending on the subclass, and AUD 9,800 for the main applicant on a subclass 186. For everyone else it is nil. This is one more reason the English result matters beyond the points.
• Employer-sponsored routes attract nomination and sponsorship fees and the Skilling Australians Fund levy on top, payable by the employer. None of that is in this table.

A family of four on a subclass 190, with two children, pays AUD 12,280 in visa charges alone. To that you would add, depending on the pathway, a skills assessment, English testing, health examinations, police certificates, translations, professional registration, State nomination charges where they apply, and the fees of a registered migration agent or an Australian legal practitioner. No total is given here, because a total that omits any of those is worse than none.

How the points actually add up

One illustration, and it is an illustration rather than a prediction of anybody's eligibility.

A 29-year-old civil engineer in Colombo with a Sri Lankan bachelor degree, six years of engineering work, Proficient English and no partner scores 30 for age, 15 for the degree, 10 for overseas skilled employment of at least five and under eight years, 10 for Proficient English and 10 as a single applicant. Seventy-five points, comfortably above the threshold. It is also an occupation that received no subclass 189 invitation at all in the round of 4 June 2026, and one that is not open through Tasmania or the Northern Territory without a job offer. A high score in a category nobody is inviting produces nothing.

The partner items repay more attention than they get. A partner who is an applicant for the same visa, under 45, with Competent English, an occupation on the same list and a suitable skills assessment is worth 10 points. A partner with Competent English alone is worth 5. A partner with neither is worth nothing, which leaves the applicant ten points behind the same person single. For a couple where both are qualified, the score frequently differs by ten points depending on which of them is named as the primary applicant, and Sri Lankan couples routinely decide that by default rather than by calculation.

From permanent residence to citizenship

Permanent residence is not citizenship and the gap between them is measured in years.

Citizenship by conferral under the general residence requirement calls for four years immediately before applying during which the applicant was present in Australia on a valid visa and never an unlawful non-citizen, of which the final twelve months must have been held as a permanent resident. Absences are capped: no more than twelve months in total across the four years, and no more than ninety days in the final twelve. Time spent in Australia on a temporary visa does count towards the four years, which is why a period on a 482 or a student visa is not wasted, but it does not count towards the final twelve months, which must be permanent.

There are discretions and concessions within the provision, and there is more to a citizenship application than residence, including character and the citizenship test. For anyone returning to Sri Lanka frequently for family or business, the ninety-day rule in the final year is the one that catches people.

Naturalisation, rather than permanent residence, is what affects Sri Lankan citizenship, so this is the point at which the Sri Lankan consequences arrive.

Common ways this goes wrong

A short list, all of them seen repeatedly.

• Paying a Sri Lankan consultancy to prepare an Australian visa application. Immigration assistance in Australia is reserved to registered migration agents and Australian legal practitioners. A consultancy in Colombo is neither, and when it goes wrong there is no Australian regulator to complain to.
• Quoting PTE 65 or 79 from a website. Those figures belong to a test that has not been available since 6 August 2025, and the two tests are no longer interchangeable.
• Treating 65 points as the target. It is the entry threshold for the pool. The occupations invited at 65 in the last round were building and construction trades and nothing else.
• Assuming a subclass 491 or 494 is permanent residence. Both are provisional, both carry regional conditions, and the subclass 191 that converts them requires three years of compliance with those conditions and three years of Australian tax assessments.
• Assuming a subclass 482 becomes a subclass 186. The nomination is the employer's to make and the employer can decline it.
• Buying an Australian degree as a migration instrument. Australian study is worth 5 points, or 10 for a research degree in a specified field. Superior English is worth 20 and costs a fraction as much.
• Believing that buying Australian property assists a visa application. It does not. No Australian visa in the skilled or family program awards anything for property ownership, and foreign purchase of residential property is separately regulated.
• Applying for an Australian working holiday visa. Sri Lankan passport holders are not eligible for either subclass.
• Assuming police certificates and medicals work the same way. The skilled visa checklists require police certificates upfront, from every country you have lived in for twelve months or more in the last ten years since turning sixteen, counting Australia. Health is different: the My Health Declarations service exists so applicants in listed subclasses can complete examinations before lodging. Both have currency periods, so read the checklist for the subclass rather than assuming either.
• Leaving the Sri Lankan side until after you have gone. Citizenship, children's births, land, provident fund balances, live litigation and powers of attorney are all far easier dealt with from Colombo than from Melbourne.

Who may advise you, and what a Colombo firm can do

Giving immigration assistance in Australia is a regulated activity. The people entitled to give it are registered migration agents, regulated by the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority, and Australian legal practitioners. A Sri Lankan Attorney-at-Law is neither, and neither is a Colombo consultancy with a photograph of the Sydney Opera House in its window.

The definition is wider than people assume. Under section 276 of the Migration Act 1958, a person gives immigration assistance if they use knowledge of, or experience in, migration procedure to prepare or help prepare a visa application, to advise an applicant about a visa application, or to represent them in related proceedings. Advising somebody which visa to apply for is itself immigration assistance. Section 280 makes it an offence of strict liability for an unregistered person to give it. Section 281 goes considerably further: asking for or receiving a fee for giving immigration assistance while not a registered migration agent carries a maximum penalty of ten years imprisonment, and the fee is not recoverable.

The practical consequence for a reader in Colombo is simple. If a consultancy here charges you to select your visa, assess your eligibility or prepare your application, you have no recourse to the Australian regulator when it goes wrong. Check whether a person is on the Register of Migration Agents before money changes hands. The Australian Government announced in September 2026 that it intends to change the agents' code of conduct so that those who encourage claims without merit can be sanctioned and deregistered, which tells you something about the scale of the problem.

AW Chambers does not provide Australian immigration assistance and does not hold itself out as able to. What this firm does is the Sri Lankan half of emigrating, which is a substantial body of work in its own right and which no Australian adviser will touch. It is set out in the Sri Lankan legal side of moving to Australia.

The order things usually have to happen in

Set out as a sequence rather than as instructions, because which of these applies to any particular person is exactly the question an authorised Australian adviser exists to answer.

1. Australian advice comes from someone entitled to give it, and registration can be checked on the Register of Migration Agents before any money changes hands. Nobody in Sri Lanka can lawfully give it.
2. The skills assessment is usually the longest item on the critical path, and the authority is decided by occupation rather than by the applicant.
3. English results take months to improve and the test regime changed in August 2025, so the figures most people are working from are out of date.
4. Sri Lankan employment evidence and civil records are far easier obtained while a person is still in the country and former employers still exist. Both are dealt with in your Sri Lankan legal loose ends.
5. An expression of interest sits in the pool until a round is run or a State opens, and the Department publishes the rounds itself rather than through any intermediary.
6. The Sri Lankan citizenship position is decided by the sequence of naturalising and applying, and a child born overseas has a registration deadline.

Where to go from here

• Choosing or checking an occupation, or working out which body assesses you: which occupations actually have an Australian PR pathway.
• Admitted in Sri Lanka and wondering whether you can practise in Australia: can a Sri Lankan Attorney-at-Law practise in Australia.
• Land, probate, a name discrepancy, a power of attorney or a case running in Colombo, whether you have left or not: your Sri Lankan legal loose ends.

Every figure here is dated. Planning levels are announced each May, ministerial directions are reissued without notice, income thresholds index each July, State programmes open and close through the year, and the English requirements changed as recently as August 2025. Check the Department's own pages before acting on anything on this one.