The list is republished every year, and the person waiting finds out afterwards
Occupation lists are republished each program year. A person who paid for a skills assessment against an occupation, lodged, and is waiting for an invitation can find their occupation has moved — with no decision made about them and no notification that anything changed.
Steps this would change
Rationale
A person entering the points-tested pathway makes a sequence of irreversible investments against a single fact: that their occupation is on a list.
They pay for a skills assessment against that occupation. They sit an English test. They lodge an expression of interest. Then they wait — 629 days on this model, and for many, indefinitely.
Meanwhile the list is republished every program year, and occupations move between lists. Planning levels move too: Skilled Independent rose from 16,900 to 21,090 places for 2026-27, in a program of 185,000. And under state nomination there are nine further lists, each set independently, each republished, allocating 35,500 places.
So the criteria a person is competing against can change while they are competing, without any decision being made about them, and without notification. The investment is sunk against a fact that is no longer true.
Why the usual answer does not work here. Grandfathering — assessing people against the rules in force when they lodged — is standard in migration law and is the obvious fix. It cannot simply be applied to occupation lists, because the whole purpose of an annually revised list is to stop inviting people in occupations that are no longer short. A list that grandfathers indefinitely stops being a shortage list.
So the idea is narrower, and it is about notice rather than entitlement:
- Tell people when a change affects them. The department knows which expressions of interest name an occupation that has moved.
- Publish list changes with lead time before the program year, so a person deciding whether to pay for a skills assessment can see what is coming.
- Where an occupation is removed, say what happens to existing expressions of interest — lapse, remain but uninvited, or be considered under transitional arrangements. At present the answer is not obvious to the person affected.
Filed as an idea. Whether occupations should be grandfathered at all is a migration policy question about the purpose of a shortage list, and this project has no standing on it. What it can say is that the current arrangement puts the cost of an unannounced change on the person least able to see it coming.
What is being traded away
Notice periods reduce the responsiveness the lists exist for. An occupation list is meant to track labour market shortage. Committing to publish changes well in advance means running a list that is knowingly out of date for the notice period, and inviting people in occupations already identified as no longer short. The tension is real and it is not resolvable by better administration.
Advance notice creates a rush. Publishing that an occupation will be removed in six months guarantees a surge of expressions of interest before the deadline — from exactly the people the removal was intended to stop inviting. The announcement becomes a signal to act rather than a warning to plan.
Grandfathering, if it crept in, would be expensive and long-lived. Points- tested queues are years deep. A grandfathering rule creates a cohort competing under superseded criteria for as long as their expressions of interest survive, and every subsequent list change would have to be administered against multiple generations of rules.
And this proposal helps people plan to fail as much as to succeed. Better notice mostly tells people to stop — that their occupation has moved, that their score will not reach the cut-off, that the investment they have made will not pay off. That is genuinely valuable information and it is not a benefit anyone campaigns for, which is probably why nobody has built it.
Precedent
Grandfathering arrangements are ordinary in migration law: applicants are routinely assessed against criteria in force at the time of lodgement rather than at the time of decision. The principle exists; it is not applied to occupation list movement between expression of interest and invitation.
Sources
- Occupation lists republished each program year; an occupation eligible in one year may move between lists
- 2026-27 Migration Program planning levels: 185,000 total, 132,240 skilled; Skilled Independent rising from 16,900 to 21,090 places; state and territory nominated 35,500
- Department of Home Affairs SkillSelect: an expression of interest is not a visa application