The Department of Home Affairs has confirmed that ImmiAccount—the online portal used for almost all Australian visa and citizenship submissions—will be taken offline from 18:00 AEST Tuesday 30 June until 08:00 AEST Wednesday 1 July 2026. A notice buried on multiple visa information pages, including the Electronic Travel Authority (subclass 601), cites “scheduled maintenance” and warns that users will be unable to start, pay for or finalise applications during the 14-hour outage.
Travellers looking for a workaround during the downtime can turn to third-party services such as VisaHQ, which monitors outage notices and fee changes in real time and can queue applications to lodge the moment ImmiAccount comes back online. Through its dedicated Australian portal (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) the company offers step-by-step document checks, courier passport delivery and agents who track lodgement windows—helping clients avoid the scramble and ensuring the correct fees are paid.
The blackout coincides with the annual reset of visa application charges and back-end rule tables. Home Affairs IT contractors will deploy a new payment gateway, update hundreds of fee codes and migrate legacy data to support the department’s expanded automation strategy. The timing is no accident: taking the system offline before midnight prevents applicants from inadvertently paying the wrong amount as fees tick over.
![Overnight ImmiAccount shutdown 30 June – 1 July to roll out new pricing engine]()
For would-be travellers and employers the maintenance window is more than an inconvenience. Those racing to lodge before the 1 July fee hikes now have a hard stop at 18:00, effectively losing six hours of the financial year. Registered migration agents have rescheduled staff and booked late-night office sessions to lodge files the moment ImmiAccount reopens.
Home Affairs says urgent medical evacuation, maritime crew and humanitarian cases can still be processed manually at border posts, but routine visitor and student visas must wait. The department recommends printing off confirmation pages before the outage and clearing browser caches on 1 July to avoid duplicate payments.
The shutdown is also a dry-run for a broader modernisation push. Later this year Home Affairs will migrate the Student (subclass 500) and ETA mobile app streams to a real-time processing platform touted as “one-click visas.” If tonight’s fee-engine cut-over proceeds smoothly, officials hope future upgrades can be completed in narrower overnight windows, reducing disruption to Australia’s AUD 200 billion international education and tourism sectors.
Travellers looking for a workaround during the downtime can turn to third-party services such as VisaHQ, which monitors outage notices and fee changes in real time and can queue applications to lodge the moment ImmiAccount comes back online. Through its dedicated Australian portal (https://www.visahq.com/australia/) the company offers step-by-step document checks, courier passport delivery and agents who track lodgement windows—helping clients avoid the scramble and ensuring the correct fees are paid.
The blackout coincides with the annual reset of visa application charges and back-end rule tables. Home Affairs IT contractors will deploy a new payment gateway, update hundreds of fee codes and migrate legacy data to support the department’s expanded automation strategy. The timing is no accident: taking the system offline before midnight prevents applicants from inadvertently paying the wrong amount as fees tick over.
For would-be travellers and employers the maintenance window is more than an inconvenience. Those racing to lodge before the 1 July fee hikes now have a hard stop at 18:00, effectively losing six hours of the financial year. Registered migration agents have rescheduled staff and booked late-night office sessions to lodge files the moment ImmiAccount reopens.
Home Affairs says urgent medical evacuation, maritime crew and humanitarian cases can still be processed manually at border posts, but routine visitor and student visas must wait. The department recommends printing off confirmation pages before the outage and clearing browser caches on 1 July to avoid duplicate payments.
The shutdown is also a dry-run for a broader modernisation push. Later this year Home Affairs will migrate the Student (subclass 500) and ETA mobile app streams to a real-time processing platform touted as “one-click visas.” If tonight’s fee-engine cut-over proceeds smoothly, officials hope future upgrades can be completed in narrower overnight windows, reducing disruption to Australia’s AUD 200 billion international education and tourism sectors.
