Studying in Australia

What a year costs

Verified from the University of Sydney's 2026 schedule, which sits at the expensive end (Group of Eight, most expensive city):

• Bachelor's: AUD 49,200-60,600. Arts and social sciences at the bottom, engineering, computer science, health and dentistry at the top.
• Master's: AUD 46,400-83,500. Dentistry is the outlier at AUD 83,500.

Regional and smaller universities typically sit materially lower, commonly AUD 30,000-45,000 for a bachelor's.

Living costs. The government's benchmark of AUD 29,710 works out to about AUD 2,475 a month, and Study Australia itself warns actual costs "may be much higher." Median rent across the capitals is AUD 724 a week.

• Sydney, Melbourne: AUD 2,300-3,300 a month
• Brisbane, Perth, Canberra: AUD 2,000-2,700
• Adelaide, Hobart, regional cities: AUD 1,700-2,400

Perth and Brisbane have been the fastest-rising rental markets, so the old "cheap alternative" framing is weakening.

The visa

Subclass 500. The fee is AUD 2,500 from 1 July 2026, the third sharp rise in three years: AUD 710, then 1,600 in July 2024, then 2,000 in July 2025, now 2,500. Australia now has the most expensive student visa in the English-speaking world by a wide margin. A concession keeps the prior charge for applicants from ASEAN nations, Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste, and for independent ELICOS students.

The money: AUD 29,710 for twelve months of living costs, unchanged since 10 May 2024. Anything quoting AUD 24,505 is two revisions stale. This is the living-costs component only: the full test also requires your first year's tuition and travel, so a student on AUD 50,000 tuition must show roughly AUD 82,000 in total.

Overseas Student Health Cover is mandatory and your visa will be refused without proof of it. Six approved insurers; budget roughly AUD 650-1,100 a year for single cover. It excludes dental, optical and physiotherapy and caps pharmaceuticals.

Processing times are not reliably published: allow four to twelve weeks for higher education from offshore, and considerably longer for vocational, where scrutiny is now heavy.

Working while you study

48 hours a fortnight, and only in a fortnight when your course is in session. Unlimited during scheduled breaks. Masters by research and doctoral students have no limit at all once they have started that degree. Work that is a formal requirement of the course does not count.

A proposal to raise the cap to 60 hours a fortnight has been discussed in 2026 but is not law. Plan on 48.

After you graduate

Subclass 485, Temporary Graduate visa, in three streams: Post-Higher Education Work, Post-Vocational Education Work, and a second stream for graduates who studied regionally.

• Degree level or higher: 2 to 3 years depending on qualification
• Vocational, trade, diploma: up to 18 months
• Second regional stream: 1 to 2 years
• Hong Kong and BNO passport holders: 5 years. Indian nationals get extended periods under the Australia-India trade agreement.

Age limit 35 or under, cut from 50 on 1 July 2024. English: IELTS 6.5 overall with no band below 5.5, no more than a year old at application. Note this is higher than the 6.0 that got you the student visa, so plan your test timing.

The fee more than doubled twice in 2026, AUD 2,300 to AUD 4,600 on 1 March, then to AUD 5,750 on 1 July.

Language

Visa requirement, IELTS 6.0 overall, or 5.0 if you package an ELICOS course first. TOEFL iBT was reinstated as an accepted test on 4 May 2024.

Institutional requirement is usually higher and is what actually gates your offer, typically IELTS 6.5 at research-intensive universities, 7.0+ for law, nursing, teaching and medicine, 6.0 at some regional universities and for vocational courses. Meeting the visa floor does not get you a place: these are two independent tests and you must clear both.

When to apply

Two intakes: Semester 1 starts late February or early March and is the major one; Semester 2 starts in July. Some providers run three trimesters.

Begin 10 to 12 months ahead. Apply to institutions 8 to 10 months out, roughly April to June for the following February. Lodge the visa as soon as you have your Confirmation of Enrolment, realistically three to five months before your course starts.

Early application matters more in Australia than elsewhere right now, for two reasons. Enrolment caps mean providers hit their allocation and stop issuing offers mid-cycle. And under Ministerial Direction 115 your processing priority depends on how your chosen provider is tracking against its allocation, so a late application to a provider near its cap can sit in a slow queue for months.

What to watch out for

CRICOS registration can be withdrawn, and it just was, at scale. An institution and each individual course must be registered on CRICOS to enrol international students. On 4 September 2026 the government used new powers for the first time to cancel an entire course, automatically suspending or cancelling CRICOS registration for the Graduate Diploma of Management (Learning) across 452 providers, affecting 41,033 active enrolments and 15,772 students currently studying. Existing students may finish; no new international enrolments are permitted. Separately, ASQA is cancelling the registrations of critically non-compliant providers and cancelling the qualifications those providers issued, students can be left holding a certificate that no longer legally exists. Verify both your provider and your specific course at cricos.education.gov.au before you pay anything.

The vocational sector is a genuinely dangerous place to enrol right now. In the October-December 2025 quarter the visa grant rate was 85.8% for higher education but 41.8% for vocational, down from 60.2% a year earlier. More than half of VET applicants are refused, after paying a non-refundable AUD 2,500. On 19 May 2026 the government froze new CRICOS registrations from private VET and ELICOS providers for twelve months, citing integrity concerns; TAFEs and universities are exempt. If someone is steering you toward a cheap private college diploma as a migration route, the odds are against you and the sector is being dismantled around those courses.

The Genuine Student requirement is applied hard. Officers assess your circumstances at home and in Australia, your immigration history, whether the course is relevant to your background, and your prior course-hopping, with broad discretion and little predictability. Offshore higher education refusal rates in early 2026 ran around 69% for Nepal, 45% Bangladesh, 42% India, 41% Sri Lanka, 37% Pakistan, against low single digits for China. A template-written response, or a course that does not obviously follow from your background, is the most common reason for refusal.

Enrolment caps mean a good application can fail for reasons nothing to do with you. The 2026 National Planning Level is 295,000 new commencements. Your visa speed, and effectively your odds, are tied to your provider's quota position when you lodge.

The cost stack has moved faster than most planning assumes. The visa fee went from AUD 710 to 2,500 in two years and the 485 from 2,300 to 5,750 in five months. Budget for further increases each 1 July. Meanwhile the AUD 29,710 financial requirement has not risen since May 2024, so the amount the government asks you to prove is now noticeably below what it costs to live in Sydney or Melbourne. It is a floor for a form, not a budget.

Where these numbers come from

Rules change, sometimes at short notice. Every figure above carries the date we checked it. Check the official source before you rely on it, and note that Home Affairs does not publish reliable processing times, so treat any figure you see for those with caution.