482 SID Sponsorship Costs: What Employers Can't Pass On
On the Subclass 482 SID visa, some sponsorship costs are the employer's by law and cannot be passed to the worker. Here is who pays what, and why.
If you are sponsoring someone on a Subclass 482 Skills in Demand (SID) visa, some costs are yours as the employer and you cannot lawfully claw them back from the worker. The nomination charge, the Standard Business Sponsorship charge, and the Skilling Australians Fund levy sit with you. The worker pays for their own visa application. That split is not a matter of negotiation. It is written into the sponsorship rules, and breaching it is one of the faster ways to lose your sponsor status.
I get asked about this constantly, usually by an employer who has been told by a mate that “the worker can just pay it back.” They cannot, and the arrangement to do so is itself the problem. Here is how the cost allocation actually works.
The legal rule most sponsors don’t know about
When you become an approved sponsor, you take on a set of sponsorship obligations under the Migration Regulations 1994. One of those obligations is a prohibition on recovering certain costs from the person you sponsor. The costs that are the sponsor’s responsibility must stay with the sponsor.
This is deliberate. The scheme is built on the idea that if you want the benefit of overseas skilled labour, you carry the administrative cost of bringing that labour in. Parliament did not want those costs shifted onto workers who are in a weak bargaining position and often desperate to keep their visa.
The prohibition is broad. It catches direct repayment, wage deductions, “loans” that conveniently match the fee, inflated bonds, and informal handshake deals. If the practical effect is that the worker bears a cost the law assigns to you, you have a problem regardless of how it is dressed up.
What the employer must pay and cannot pass on
Three cost categories are the sponsor’s by law.
The Standard Business Sponsorship charge. To become a standard business sponsor you pay a sponsorship application charge, which is $420 as at 5 July 2026 (see the Department of Home Affairs current visa pricing page). This is the cost of your sponsorship approval, not the worker’s, and it cannot be recovered from them.
The nomination charge. Each nomination you lodge for a SID position carries its own charge, and the total depends on the sponsorship period and your business turnover. The Department publishes the current amounts on its visa pricing page, and I would always check there before quoting anyone. The nomination charge is an employer cost. It stays with you.
The Skilling Australians Fund (SAF) levy. This is the big one, and the one employers most often try to sidestep. The SAF levy is payable by the sponsor at the time you lodge the nomination. The amount scales with your business size and the number of years you nominate the worker for, and it is set by the Department rather than by any figure I would put in a blog post, so check the current levy on the Home Affairs pricing page. What matters legally is simple: the SAF levy is yours. You must not ask the worker to pay it, refund it to you, or absorb it through their wages. It also cannot be paid in instalments by the worker.
Here is the part I want you to circle. The prohibition is not just about the dollar figure. It is about who bears the cost in substance. If you pay the levy on Monday and dock the worker’s pay on Friday to recover it, you have breached your obligation.
What the visa applicant pays
The worker is responsible for the costs of their own visa application. That is a genuinely separate expense from your sponsorship and nomination.
The main one is the visa application charge, which is $4,015 for the primary SID applicant as at 5 July 2026 (Home Affairs current visa pricing). Each additional adult applicant is also $4,015, and each applicant under 18 is $1,005, both as at 5 July 2026 on the same Home Affairs page. On top of that the applicant usually pays for their own health examinations, police clearances, English test if required, and any document translation.
You are allowed to help with these applicant costs if you want to. Some employers do, as a recruitment sweetener. That is a commercial choice and it is lawful, because these are the worker’s costs to begin with. The prohibition runs one way only: you cannot shift your costs onto the worker, but you can voluntarily pick up theirs.
What happens if a sponsor breaks the rule
The consequences are not trivial. If the Department finds you have recovered a sponsorship, nomination, or SAF levy cost from a sponsored worker, it can bar you from sponsoring, cancel your sponsorship approval, and in some cases pursue civil penalties. A cancelled sponsorship puts every worker you sponsor at risk, which is a far bigger problem than the fee you were trying to recoup.
I have seen sponsors trip over this without any bad intent. A payroll officer sets up a deduction “to cover the visa,” nobody checks which cost it relates to, and it turns out to be the levy. Intent is not much of a defence here. The test is what actually happened to the money.
My standard advice to employers is to keep a clean paper trail that shows you paid the sponsorship charge, the nomination charge, and the SAF levy yourself, from business funds, with no offsetting deduction from the worker. If you want to assist with the worker’s own visa costs, document that separately and label it clearly as a benefit, not a loan.
A quick sanity check before you lodge
Before any nomination goes in, ask yourself three questions. Who is paying the SAF levy, and is it coming purely from the business? Is there any deduction, bond, or repayment arrangement that touches the worker’s pay? And are the worker’s visa application costs being kept genuinely separate from your sponsorship costs? If any answer is unclear, fix it before lodgement, not after.
If you want the mechanics of the visa itself, our Subclass 482 SID page walks through the streams and eligibility, and our employer-sponsored visas page covers how sponsorship, nomination, and the visa fit together. If your longer plan is permanent residence, the same cost-allocation principles carry through, so it is worth getting the structure right from the first nomination.
Visa Plan Lawyers advises employers on getting these arrangements compliant from day one, so a cost-saving idea today does not become a sponsorship bar tomorrow. If you are about to sponsor someone and want the cost split reviewed properly, get in touch with our team before you lodge.