Australia’s Department of Home Affairs has switched its skilled-visa conveyor belt to a brand-new order. A legislative instrument—Ministerial Direction 122—took legal effect on 19 September 2026 but was publicly unpacked on 20 September by analytics site EOI Checker. Direction 122 (together with the companion Direction 121 for temporary Subclass 482 visas) replaces the short-lived Direction 119 and tells case-officers which lodged files to pick up first. The headline change is a much broader Priority Group 1. As well as health care, teaching and construction, the list now explicitly covers resources, agriculture, aquaculture, fishing, law-enforcement and AUKUS-related defence roles. Crucially, an occupation in a priority sector will receive top billing whether the applicant is onshore or offshore—a departure from Direction 119, which rewarded location over sector. Priority Group 2 is now reserved for on-shore applicants in all other occupations, while unaccompanied offshore cases are shunted to Group 3. All remaining applications sit in Group 4. The temporary Subclass 482 “Skills-in-Demand” visa gets its own Specialist Skills Stream priority, provided the role meets the AUD 146,576 income threshold. For employers this means faster decisions—sometimes in days—when sponsoring engineers for mining projects, agronomists for regional ventures or cyber-security specialists for defence contracts. Conversely, an offshore accountant travelling with family may slide to the back of the queue. Migration agents warn of short-term turbulence as the Department re-allocates thousands of pending files, but expect overall processing times to fall once the dust settles. Practically, HR teams finalising 186, 482, 494 or 491 nominations this week should double-check whether the role falls into a new priority sector—and whether family members need to lodge separate, combined or subsequent-entrant applications. Direction 122 does not alter points tests or occupation lists, but it radically changes when a file will be opened, which can make or break start-dates for mission-critical hires.
Source: EOI Checker
