ADMINISTRATIVE REVIEW TRIBUNAL (ART), FORMERLY THE AAT

TRIBUNAL REVIEWS

If you have recently been refused an Australian visa, and disagree with the decision, there are some steps you can take. Information below may help you to generally better understand your options.

Merits Review Overview
Notification of Decisions
The Administrative Review Tribunal (ART)
Reform of the Merits Review System

The AAT has been replaced by the ART: The Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) was abolished on 14 October 2024 and replaced by the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART). All cases that were open at the AAT were transferred to the ART, and new review applications are now lodged with the ART. If your decision letter refers to the AAT, the ART is now the body that reviews your decision.

What is the ART?

The Administrative Review Tribunal is an independent body that reviews decisions made by Australian government agencies and departments, including the Department of Home Affairs, and provides a forum for individuals and organisations to have their disputes resolved in a fair and efficient manner.

Why was the ART established?

The Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) was established in Australia in 1975, as part of a wider reform to the administrative justice system, in response to concerns about the fairness and transparency of government decision-making.
After a review of the AAT, the Government abolished it and created the ART under the Administrative Review Tribunal Act 2024. The aim was a tribunal with a transparent, merit-based process for appointing members, better case management and a mechanism to deal with systemic issues.
Like the AAT, the ART conducts independent merits review of administrative decisions made by the Commonwealth Government. It can reconsider the facts surrounding the decision under review and decide whether to substitute its own decision. The Tribunal makes “the correct or preferable decision” based on the merits of the case (Drake).
The ART holds hearings, parties can be represented, it hears evidence, and it gives reasoned decisions. Its process is meant to be fair, just, accessible and quick.

What sort of visa appeals go to the ART?

The ART is organised into jurisdictional areas. Those that affect migration matters include:

The Migration area, which reviews most visa refusal and cancellation decisions made by the Department of Home Affairs, including many sponsorship and nomination refusals.
The Protection area, which reviews Protection visa decisions. Fast track protection decisions, which were previously reviewed by the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA), are now reviewed by the ART because the IAA was abolished.
Other areas of the ART, which review character decisions under section 501 of the Migration Act 1958, citizenship decisions and decisions about registered migration agents.

The ART has the power to review matters that relate to decisions about bridging visas, family visas, nomination and sponsor applications, partner visas, business visas, skilled visas, student visas, temporary work visas, some visitor visas, protection visas and citizenship.

The ART also has a Guidance and Appeals Panel, which can deal with cases that raise issues of significance to administrative decision-making or where a decision may contain a material error. In migration and protection cases, only the President of the ART can refer a matter to the Panel. You cannot apply to the Panel yourself.

What decisions can the ART make?

If your visa application has been refused or your visa has been cancelled by the Department of Home Affairs, you may be eligible to apply to the ART for a review of that decision.

The ART member will decide to affirm, vary, set aside, or remit the decision made by the Department of Home Affairs.

If the ART affirms the decision, it means the decision made by the Department of Home Affairs is not changed. If this happens you will need to immediately consider your next best steps such as applying to court, ministerial intervention, applying for another visa or leaving Australia.
If the ART varies a decision, it means the decision made by the Department of Home Affairs is changed or altered in some way.
If the ART sets aside a decision, it means the ART agrees or partially agrees that the original decision made by the Department of Home Affairs was wrong.
If the ART remits a decision, it means it sends the matter back to the Department of Home Affairs to make a new decision in accordance with the ART’s directions. In essence, this means you won your appeal case! Generally if your matter is remitted, you will need to wait to hear from the Department of Home Affairs before your visa is granted, as health, character and other checks may still need to be done.

Time limits for the ART

If you are in the community in Australia, you generally must apply within 28 days from the date you were notified of the refusal. Where a visa applicant outside Australia was refused and an Australian sponsor or relative applies for review, the time limit is generally 70 days.

The date considered notified depends on how you received the document.

If you received the refusal notification by email or in ImmiAccount, it is generally the day it was sent.
If you received the notification by post within Australia, it is 7 working days from the date of the letter.
If you are in immigration detention, the time limit is 7 working days.

The ART cannot extend these time limits, and the application fee must be paid (or a fee reduction requested) before the deadline. Check the exact deadline in your decision letter.

Has your visa been refused or cancelled?

Advantages of ART review

Disadvantages of ART review

1. Access to review: The ART provides an avenue for review of decisions made by the Department of Home Affairs about visas, sponsorships, nominations and citizenship. The Migration Act 1958 sets out which migration decisions can be reviewed.

2. Independent and impartial review: The ART is independent of the Department, which helps ensure that decisions are made in accordance with the law and are fair and reasonable.

3. New evidence: The ART looks at your case afresh and can consider new information and evidence that was not before the Department, so you can fix gaps in your original application.

4. Cost-effective: ART review is generally less costly than going to court, and 50% of the application fee is usually refunded if the decision is set aside or remitted.

5. Bridging visa: If you applied in Australia and held a bridging visa, you can usually remain in Australia lawfully while the review is under way.

1. Strict time limits: The ART cannot extend the time limit to apply, so a late application cannot be reviewed.

2. Limited further review: If the ART affirms the decision, you can only go to court if the ART made a legal error. The court does not reconsider the merits of your case.

3. Delays: Review applications can take many months, and in some visa types more than a year, to be decided.

4. Limited jurisdiction: Some decisions cannot be reviewed by the ART, for example many offshore refusals where no Australian sponsor is involved, and decisions made personally by the Minister.

5. Cost: The application fee is $3,727 from 1 July 2026 (with a 50% reduction for financial hardship), which is significant if the review is unlikely to succeed. See ART fees.

About

Administrative Review Tribunal

The role of the ART in migration matters is to review decisions made by the Department of Home Affairs. The ART has the power to affirm, vary or set aside the Department’s decision, or to return the matter to the Department for reconsideration with specific directions. The ART is able to consider a wide range of visa-related decisions, including refusals and cancellations. Decisions are based on the merits of each particular case.

Your application for review MUST be lodged with the ART within the required time frame. The letter that you receive from the Department of Home Affairs about the decision to refuse or cancel your visa will state the exact time frame within which you must apply. In most cases where you are in Australia, the time frame is 28 days from when you are notified of the decision, and it is much shorter if you are in immigration detention. See the Time limits tab below.

The ART can decide to:

affirm the Department’s decision, meaning that it agrees with the decision and it will not be changed;
set aside the Department’s decision, meaning that the decision will be changed. In this situation, the ART has the option of substituting a new decision, or returning the matter to the Department for reconsideration (see below);
remit the Department’s decision, meaning that the matter will be returned to the Department for reconsideration. The ART may give the Department directions that it must take into account when reconsidering the application.

You MAY qualify for a bridging visa when you lodge your review application. The type of bridging visa that you qualify for (if any), along with the conditions of that visa, will depend upon your circumstances at the time that you lodged the visa application that is under review (if the review relates to a refusal decision).

Please note that it can take many months, and in some cases more than a year, for the ART to complete its review and make a decision, depending on the type of visa, the amount of material it must consider and the complexity of your case.

Merits Review Overview

Merits review of immigration decisions has been available since 1982 through the Immigration Review Panel. That panel was created by executive action and was replaced by the legislatively established Immigration Review Tribunal (the IRT) in 1989, later renamed the Migration Review Tribunal (the MRT) on 1 July 1999, to become part of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) on 1 July 2015. The former Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) established in 1993 also merged with the AAT on 1 July 2015 in its Migration and Refugee Division, and reviews decisions in relation to applications for refugee status and refugee protection visas. In addition, the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) was created in April 2015, as a separate office within the Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT), which from 1 July 2015 also became an independent authority within the AAT. Limited appeals lie from the Tribunal to the courts. On 14 October 2024 the AAT, including its Migration and Refugee Division and the IAA, was abolished and replaced by the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART), which now reviews migration and protection decisions.

The work of the former Migration Review Tribunal (MRT) and Refugee Review Tribunal (RRT) is now done by the ART, which has primary jurisdiction to provide merits review of specified decisions made under the Migration Act and Regulations. The ART reviews migration decisions on their merits. The tribunals’ task is to make the “correct and preferable” decision in the particular case before it. This is a much wider task than that of a judicial review court, which is concerned only with whether a legal error occurred in the making of the decision under review.

In contrast, merits review is concerned with remaking the decision under review (‘standing in the same shoes’), not with correcting errors made by the original decision maker.

Merits review tribunals decide all questions of fact and discretion for themselves. They can consider any evidence that will help them come to the correct and preferable decision, including evidence that the applicant failed to put before the original decision maker. In light of that new evidence, they can substitute their own findings of fact-even if the original decision maker’s findings were “correct” on the basis of the evidence available at the time.

Further, even if the tribunal does not identify any errors of fact (or law) in the original decision, they may substitute their own judgment of how any discretion should be exercised in order to come to the preferable decision. The tribunals can also form their own views as to the desirability of applying departmental policy in a particular case.

These tribunals’ factual and discretionary decisions are subject to judicial review in the Federal Circuit and Family Court, the Federal Court and the High Court. However, the general principle that a judicial review court cannot substitute its decision for that under review applies. If a factual or discretionary decision is found to be infected by legal error, the court will remit the decision back to the relevant tribunal to be redecided. Therefore, in practice the merits review tribunals have the final say in the migration decision-making process on questions of fact and discretion, including how any relevant policy should be applied in the exercise of a discretion.

In order to determine the correct and preferable decision in a particular case, the tribunals will often be required to also decide questions of law (especially to interpret provisions of the Act and Regulations). However, constitutional (separation of powers) principles limit the extent to which the tribunals can be given the power to make binding determinations of legal principles without Parliament having invalidly conferred the judicial power of the Commonwealth on them. However, these precise limits remain unclear.

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Notification of decisions

A decision maker of the Department of Home Affairs must notify a decision by:

Sending a notice of the decision to, or leaving a notice of the decision at, the last residential address given to the Minister by the applicant, or
Handing a notice of the decision to the applicant or a person specified by the applicant as a person who may be given notifications about an application

Today most decisions are sent by email or to your ImmiAccount, and these are generally taken to be received on the day they are sent. A notification posted within Australia is taken to be received seven working days after the date of the document, while notification sent to or from an address outside Australia is taken to be received 21 days after the date of the document. As the Migration Act refers to ‘the address at which the applicant intends to live while the application is being processed,’ the sending of a notice to a post box address will not bring the deeming provisions of the Migration Act into force.

Reviewable decisions

Reviewable decisions:

The following are examples of decisions that are reviewable by the ART:

Decisions refusing most visas applied for in Australia, including student, partner, skilled, employer sponsored, visitor and bridging visas
Decisions cancelling most visas held by people in Australia
Decisions refusing certain visas applied for outside Australia, where the visa requires an Australian sponsor or nominator, or a relative in Australia. In these cases the sponsor, nominator or relative applies for review
Decisions refusing to approve a sponsor or a nomination, including employer nominations
Decisions refusing or cancelling protection visas, including fast track decisions that were previously reviewed by the Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA)
Decisions refusing or cancelling visas on character grounds under section 501, when made by a delegate rather than the Minister personally, and decisions not to revoke a mandatory cancellation
Decisions cancelling business visas under section 134

Your decision letter will say whether the decision is reviewable and who can apply.

Non-reviewable decisions

Non-reviewable decisions:

Offshore decisions refusing to grant visas where there is no criterion requiring nomination or sponsorship in that subclass, such as most visitor visas applied for outside Australia, are not reviewable. A decision that an application is not valid is not a decision to refuse to grant a visa and so is not reviewable. Decisions made personally by the Minister are not reviewable by the ART.

In addition, the Minister has the power to issue a conclusive certificate preventing review of a decision if the Minister believes that it would be contrary to the public interest:

To change the decision, because any change in the decision would prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia, or
For the decision to be reviewed because such review would require consideration by the Tribunal of deliberations or decisions of the Cabinet or of a committee of the Cabinet

If a decision is not reviewable, you may still have other options, such as a new visa application, ministerial intervention in limited cases, or judicial review in court.

Right to review:

Right to review

The Migration Act strictly defines the persons who can seek merits review of a migration decision. An applicant for review must be physically present in Australia when the application for review is made.

For off-shore decisions, rights of review are confined to sponsors or nominators in Australia or Australian relatives of the visa applicant rather than being conferred on the applicant himself or herself. The applicant for review must also be a relative as the term is defined in the Regulations.

Time limits for review

Time limits for review:

If you have recently been refused a visa you should have received a letter from the Department of Home Affairs stating the number of days you have to apply for review.

As a general guide, the time limits for applications to the ART are:

28 days after notification of the decision, for most decisions where the visa applicant was in Australia when the application was made;
70 days after notification of the decision, where the visa applicant was outside Australia and an Australian sponsor, nominator or relative applies for review;
7 working days after notification, where the applicant is in immigration detention;
2 working days after notification, for decisions refusing or cancelling a bridging visa held by a person in immigration detention;
9 days after notification, for some character decisions under section 501.

Time does not run for the purposes of review until a person is notified of a decision, although a failure to give notification of a decision does not affect the validity of the decision. The Tribunal has no power to extend the time for applying, so always check the exact deadline in your decision letter and seek advice early.

Powers on review

Powers on review:

The ART may affirm, vary or set aside a decision under review, or remit an application to the Department with directions, for example that the applicant must be taken to have satisfied a specified criterion for the visa.

The ART has all the powers and discretions conferred on the person who made the decision under review. It must not make a decision that is not authorised by the Migration Act or the Migration Regulations.

The ART can also review:

Decisions cancelling business visas
Criminal deportation decisions
Decisions refusing or cancelling visas on character grounds made by a delegate of the Minister, and
Decisions refusing or cancelling protection visas on the grounds referred to in articles 1F, 32 or 33(2) of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (s 500)

However, if it is in the national interest, the Minister acting personally may:

Refuse or cancel a visa on character grounds, and
Refuse or cancel a protection visa

and these personal decisions cannot be reviewed by the ART. Character reviews are conducted in a more formal way than most other migration reviews, and the Department is usually represented.

Ministerial discretion

Ministerial discretion:

The Minister has the discretion to substitute a more favourable decision for that of the ART (for example under section 351 of the Migration Act, or section 501J for protection decisions). The Minister is under no duty to consider whether to exercise these powers in a particular case, and these decisions are not subject to merits review.

New ministerial intervention guidelines apply from September 2025. A request is only referred to the Minister if it meets one of the published criteria, and repeat requests within two years are generally not referred. Read more about ministerial intervention.

What happens at a hearing

What happens at an ART hearing?

After you apply, the ART asks the Department of Home Affairs for its file on your case. You can request a copy of the file so you know what the Department relied on.

Before the hearing: you can send written submissions and new evidence. This is your chance to fix the problems identified in the refusal letter.
Invitation to a hearing: the ART will usually invite you to a hearing, which may be in person, by video or by phone. Some reviews are decided on the papers without a hearing.
At the hearing: a single Tribunal member asks you and any witnesses questions. An interpreter is provided free of charge if you need one. Your migration agent or lawyer can attend and make submissions.
The decision: the member may give the decision at the end of the hearing, but usually decides later and sends a written decision with reasons.

Good preparation makes a real difference. We can review the refusal, prepare submissions and evidence, and attend the hearing with you. Request a visa refusal appeal assessment.

Fees

Review of migration decisions

Application fee

From 1 July 2026, an application fee of A$3,727 is payable for review of most migration decisions. A lower fee of $100 applies in some concessional circumstances, and no fee is payable for review of a bridging visa decision that resulted in a person being held in immigration detention. Fees are indexed each year on 1 July.

How to make a payment

The fee is usually paid online by credit or debit card when you lodge the application with the ART.

Please note: payment is not considered to have been made if a card payment is not approved, and your application is not valid if the fee is not paid by the deadline.

Fee reduction

The fee may be reduced by 50% (to $1,863.50) if the ART is satisfied that paying the full fee has caused, or is likely to cause, severe financial hardship to the review applicant.

The reduced fee must be paid and the fee reduction request lodged before the deadline for lodging the application for review.

Refunds for a favourable decision, invalid application, or withdrawal of the application

The ART will generally refund 50% of the application fee if you receive a favourable decision, such as the decision being set aside or remitted. If an application is invalid, the fee paid will generally be refunded.

For withdrawn applications, the application fee can only be refunded in limited circumstances, for example:

The death of the review or visa applicant or a member of the visa applicant’s family unit.
In relation to the review of a visa refusal decision, the visa applicant has been granted a visa of the same class.

Review of protection decisions

No fee is payable when lodging the application. However, if the review is not successful, a fee of A$2,293 (from 1 July 2026) is payable, usually within seven days of being invoiced.

See our ART fees page for more detail.