Specialist Skills Pathway

The first pathway is the Specialist Skills Pathway. This pathway recognises highly skilled migrants are hugely beneficial to Australia’s national productivity, including through their support of critical sovereign capabilities and potential to grow the skills and expertise of the Australian workforce.

List of potential occupations for Specialist Skills stream

This pathway will be a new streamlined approach for highly skilled specialists, to ensure Australia can quickly and easily recruit top talent in areas of need. It will, for example, help Australia attract highly skilled Engineering Managers who develop electrolysers to help with our transition to a net zero economy, Cyber Specialists who assist banks to respond to cyber-attacks and Software Engineers who help Australia embrace the artificial intelligence transformation.

The Specialist Skills Pathway will be available to applicants who meet the general eligibility criteria (for example, be nominated by an approved employer, meet the health and character requirements) and who are:

• in any occupation except trades workers, machinery operators and drivers, and labourers
• earning at least $135,000 (the Specialist Skills Threshold) and no less than Australian workers in the same occupation.

This Specialist Skills Pathway will recognise that migrants entering through this pathway meet a national need that is broader than filling a narrowly defined gap in the labour market. Highly skilled migrants bring significant economic benefits. They are more likely to bring productivity enhancing knowledge and ideas, create jobs for locals and generate significant fiscal returns through taxation. They help meet labour needs that exist at an individual firm level and assist companies in acquiring specialist knowledge, niche technologies or research expertise unavailable in Australia, and skillsets not picked up in occupational definitions. These migrants are prime candidates to choose other countries if we do not provide competitive visa offerings and better compete in the global race for talent.

The Specialist Pathway threshold of $135,000 closely corresponds with the 90th percentile earnings for all workers. It is forecast that this pathway could lead to $3.4 billion in benefit to the underlying cash balance over the next 10 years, not accounting for the broader significant economic benefit to their employers and to the Australian economy.

The Government will commit to a service standard of 7 days median visa processing time for workers in the Specialist Skills Pathway. The achievement of this standard will ensure Australia’s migration system is among the most attractive in the world for highly skilled migrants.

This Specialist Skills Pathway will, in its scale, remain a modest part of the temporary skilled program over time. The Government is committed to protecting the integrity of this pathway to ensure that the skills involved are genuinely specialised and in high demand.

• The Specialist Skills Threshold will be indexed annually through legislation to maintain the intent of the pathway over time.
• Jobs and Skills Australia will have dedicated resourcing to monitor labour market impacts of this pathway to ensure it supports job creation and upskilling of local workers. Tripartite mechanisms will be regularly advised and consulted on the use and impacts of this pathway.
• The Department of Home Affairs will establish a monitoring mechanism to ensure that employees are not paid less than their nominated salary. Employers who pay migrants less than this amount may be barred from sponsoring any additional migrants for a period of time, including migrants through the Specialist Skills Pathway, and may be subject to other penalties under the Migration Act 1958.
• The salary threshold will be calculated to ensure employers cannot artificially inflate a salary or rely on excessive overtime to meet the threshold.