Australia Partner Visa (820/801 or 309/100): Eligibility and De Facto Calculator

How the partner visa actually decides your case

Australia does not have one partner visa. It has two paired applications, and the pair you use is fixed by where you are standing on the day you lodge. The subclass 820 is the temporary onshore visa and it is lodged together with the subclass 801 permanent visa. The subclass 309 is the provisional offshore visa and it is lodged together with the subclass 100 permanent visa. In both pairs you submit one application for two subclasses, and the permanent decision is not made at lodgement.

The relationship test is the same in both pairs. You must be the spouse or de facto partner of an Australian citizen, an Australian permanent resident, or an eligible New Zealand citizen, and that must be true both when you apply and when the application is decided. The sponsor must be eligible to sponsor you. Health, character, the Australian values statement and any government debt are separate hurdles that sit alongside the relationship test, and failing one of them sinks an application that is otherwise well evidenced.

The single most common planning question is the clock. A married couple does not run a clock. A de facto couple usually does, and the length of that clock is not a guideline or an average. It is 12 months, measured backwards from the day you lodge. That one sentence decides when a large share of applications can be filed, and the rest of this page is about applying it correctly to your dates.

Do you have to live together for 12 months before you apply?

For a de facto applicant, usually yes. Home Affairs states that you must be in a de facto relationship for at least 12 months immediately before you apply. The wording matters in three ways. First, the 12 months is continuous time in the relationship, not time since you met. Second, the measurement point is the lodgement date, so the clock keeps running while you collect documents. Third, the department adds that time spent dating or in an online relationship might not count as being in a de facto relationship at all, which is why couples who have known each other for years can still fall short.

For a married applicant, the 12-month clock does not apply. A marriage certificate, or other evidence that the marriage is valid in Australia, takes its place. That is not a shortcut around the relationship test: the same four evidence areas are still assessed, and the department can still refuse an application where the marriage is not accepted as genuine and continuing. A wedding does not answer the question the case officer is asking.

There is a third group that gets missed. Couples sometimes assume the clock starts when they signed a lease together, when they opened a joint account, or when they told their families. None of those events is the legal trigger. The relationship starts when the facts of a de facto relationship begin, and the evidence you gather later has to be consistent with the date you claim. Back-dating a relationship start to fit the clock is the kind of inconsistency that damages credibility across the whole application.

If you are sitting at eight or ten months, the honest answer is usually to wait and lodge a stronger application rather than to lodge early and argue. The exceptions below are real, but each one has to be established on evidence, and a failed early attempt costs a fee, months of processing, and a refusal record that has to be declared afterwards.

Where the 12-month rule comes from, and the four situations that switch it off

The rule is not departmental policy invented for the website. It sits in the Migration Regulations 1994, and the provision that governs the duration requirement for partner visas is regulation 2.03A. The department summarises the effect of that regulation on its visa pages, and the summary below is limited to what those pages state. We have deliberately not added grounds that we could not read on an official page, because a wrong exception is worse than no exception.

Two cautions about this table. The registered relationship ground is the only one that can be created by an administrative step you take yourselves, which is why it is the most useful planning lever for a couple at nine months. The compelling circumstances ground is the one most often misunderstood: Home Affairs does not set out a list of qualifying circumstances on its visa pages, so nobody can promise an outcome in advance, and any adviser who does should be treated carefully. Where a case turns on a close reading of regulation 2.03A, the regulation itself and a registered migration agent matter more than any summary, including this one.

Which route applies: 820/801 onshore or 309/100 offshore

The route is decided by your physical location at lodgement, not by preference, and not by where you plan to live afterwards. Getting this wrong is not a technicality; an onshore application lodged while you are overseas, or the reverse, is exposed to refusal for failing a time-of-application criterion that cannot be fixed later.

The subclass 300 is worth knowing about but is not a shortcut. It requires you to be outside Australia when you apply, to intend to marry your prospective spouse, and later to marry within the period specified in the grant, which Home Affairs describes as within 9 months of the grant. You then apply for the 820/801 pair from inside Australia after the wedding. It suits couples who are not yet married and cannot satisfy the de facto duration test, not couples looking to skip evidence.

One practical consequence of the table: a couple who are both overseas and want an onshore application cannot simply lodge from abroad. They either lodge the 309/100 from overseas, or one of them travels to Australia on a visa that permits it and lodges the 820/801 from inside the country, subject to whatever that entry visa allows. The 820 page also states that if you do not hold a substantive visa at the time you apply, and did not previously hold a subclass 300 visa, you must demonstrate that compelling reasons exist for the grant.

The four evidence areas, and what actually satisfies each

Home Affairs asks for evidence of the relationship under four headings, and a strong application is one where each heading is answered with documents rather than assertions. The department also asks for a written relationship history covering how, when and where you met, how the relationship developed, when you moved in together, got engaged or married, what you do together, time spent apart, significant events, and your plans. That history is the spine; the four categories are the proof.

The witness statements deserve their own note. Home Affairs specifies two witnesses, aged 18 or older, who know both of you and know about the relationship. If a witness is an Australian citizen or permanent resident, the department asks for evidence of that status, such as a passport or birth certificate. A statement from someone who knows only one partner, or who has never seen the couple together, adds length without adding weight.

Two further document points that are easy to miss. If either of you has previously been married, widowed, divorced or permanently separated, the department asks for divorce documents, death certificates, separation documents or statutory declarations. If you have dependent children applying with you, identity documents, evidence of the relationship to the child, health examinations and, for children aged 16 or 17, character documents are all in scope.

What to do next: order of operations

1. Step 1 — Fix your route by location. Confirm where you will physically be on the lodgement date, then commit to 820/801 or 309/100. Do not prepare documents for one pair while planning to lodge the other.
2. Step 2 — Fix the relationship start date honestly. Write the date you became a de facto couple, or the date you married, and check that every document you hold is consistent with it.
3. Step 3 — Decide whether the clock is a problem. If you are short of 12 months, check the registration option first, because it is the one lever you control, then consider whether compelling circumstances genuinely exist.
4. Step 4 — Write the relationship history. Cover met, developed, moved in, engaged or married, what you do together, time apart, significant events and plans. Keep it chronological and specific.
5. Step 5 — Fill the weakest of the four evidence areas first. Most couples over-collect photographs and under-collect financial and household documents.
6. Step 6 — Line up two Form 888 witnesses. Ask people who know you as a couple, brief them on what to cover, and collect status evidence where the witness is an Australian citizen or permanent resident.
7. Step 7 — Book health examinations and police certificates. Police certificates are valid for 12 months from issue for immigration purposes, and health results are valid for 12 months from completion, so timing them too early wastes money.
8. Step 8 — Lodge, then diary the two-year permanent stage. Do not send permanent-stage documents before the two years have passed; the department explicitly asks you not to.

Dates, deadlines and the two-year permanent stage

A partner visa application is one lodgement with two decisions separated by time. Home Affairs states that the permanent stage is assessed two years after you applied for the temporary and permanent visas together, and that the 801 or 100 may be granted in less than two years where you were in a long-term partner relationship with your sponsor when you applied. Outside that situation, the two-year mark is the point at which the permanent-stage documents are considered, not the point at which a decision is guaranteed.

The clock that catches people is not the two-year one. It is the 12-month validity of police certificates and health examinations, which is short enough that documents obtained at the start of a slow application can expire before a case officer looks at them. The department says it will tell you if something needs to be provided again, but re-obtaining certificates costs money and adds delay. Sequence them after the bulk of the relationship evidence is assembled.

Processing times are not fixed and should not be treated as a planning input. Home Affairs publishes a visa processing time guide that shows recent decided applications, warns that partner visa applicants may experience longer processing times than expected, and notes that applications are processed according to Ministerial Direction 117. Anyone quoting you a firm number of months for a partner visa is quoting something the department itself does not promise.

Why partner visa applications get refused

Refusals cluster around a small number of failure points, and most of them are visible months before lodgement. The relationship not being accepted as genuine and continuing is the largest category, and it is usually an evidence problem rather than a factual one: the couple are real, but the file does not demonstrate the four areas. The duration test failing is the second, and it is entirely preventable by checking dates before you pay a fee.

Sponsorship problems come next. The sponsor must be eligible, and a sponsorship that is withdrawn or refused takes the visa application with it. A sponsor who is not eligible to sponsor sinks the application regardless of how strong the relationship evidence is. Health and character requirements are separate and can fail independently of the relationship. Providing false or misleading information is fatal in a way that is difficult to recover from, which is why the relationship history has to match the documents even where the truth is unflattering.

There is also the status problem. If you are in Australia without a substantive visa, and you did not previously hold a subclass 300 visa, the 820 page requires you to demonstrate that compelling reasons exist for the grant. That is a different test from the relationship duration waiver, and the two are often confused. One concerns how long you have been de facto; the other concerns your immigration status at lodgement.

Costs, and why this page does not quote a number

The visa cost is set by the department and changes, and the amount is loaded dynamically on the Home Affairs visa pages rather than printed in the text. Rather than publish a figure that may be stale by the time you read it, this page points you to the source: the “About this visa” section of the 820, 801, 309 or 100 page, and the department’s Visa Pricing Estimator. The estimator does not capture costs that sit outside the visa charge, such as health examinations, police certificates, translations and biometrics, so budget for those separately.

Home Affairs also notes concessions in limited circumstances, including a lower visa cost from 1 July 2026 for eligible Pacific Island and Timor-Leste citizens who lodge a valid application. Whether a concession applies to you is a question for the department’s page and the estimator, not for a third-party calculator, including this one.