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A booming number of people applying for student and family visas from within Australia has led to an explosion of bridging visas in the last three years, deepening Labor’s challenges in managing the migration system.
More than 412,000 people were on bridging visas at the end of last month – a temporary visa that is usually issued to people whose main visa expires while they are awaiting a decision on their next application, as well as unlawful non-citizens and asylum seekers.
This was more than double the figure from three years ago, when about 176,000 people were on the bridging-visa backlog in June 2023. People on bridging visas now represent 14 per cent of temporary visa holders in Australia.
Immigration expert Abul Rizvi said the ballooning bridging-visa backlog was the clearest sign that the migration system was clogged. “A bridging visa is effectively an admission that the department couldn’t cope, and couldn’t process the visa application fast enough,” he said.
“To keep [onshore visa applicants] legal, you put them on a bridging visa. The more people you put on bridging visas, the more you admit you can’t process visas quickly enough. It means people end up staying longer, with work rights. People who just want to delay departure are happy to be on a bridging visa for years and years.”
This backlog is also defeating the government’s efforts to bring down the net overseas migration intake – a growing issue of political contention – because it slows the rate of departure from Australia.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is working on a plan to better control migrant numbers, but the announcement was pushed back from earlier this month amid cabinet concerns that it was not watertight.
The bridging-visa boom has followed the uptick in temporary visas issued since borders reopened.
People on bridging visas are now the third-biggest group of the 2.9 million temporary visa holders in the country, after New Zealanders (736,500) and students (589,900). The fourth-biggest group was people on visitor or tourist visas (326,000).
Of those with a bridging visa, one in four had applied for a student visa.
The number of bridging visas held by aspiring students soared from 15,065 in December 2022 to 107,449 in December 2025, which is the most recent quarter for which the Department of Home Affairs has published data about the visa category that bridging visa holders applied for.
Rizvi said the huge increase had come after the government started refusing more student visa applications based on subjective criteria. It meant more visa refusals were being appealed in the Administrative Review Tribunal (ART).
There were 54,250 rejected study visas being appealed at the end of July – and cases were taking an average of 70 weeks to finalise.
“The ART has such a large backlog that it takes ages to get to them,” Rizvi said. “The better approach would be to stop them lodging a legally valid appeal.”
The government has already stopped student appeals being heard in person to make the process quicker.
During the same period, between December 2022 and 2025, the number of bridging visas held by people waiting for family visas also more than doubled – from 42,251 to 88,702.
Rizvi said that was because there were huge backlogs for parents and partners, now stretching beyond 100,000 people in each list.
Those people are waiting for a relatively small number of places each year. There were just 7060 places allocated to parents under the permanent family visa program for this financial year, down from 8500 last year. There were 41,500 places for partners, slightly up from 40,500 last year.
“There’s not enough places in the cap. That leads to long processing times. It means they sit there in the queue, in the bridging-visa backlog, until they get a visa – or die, in parents’ case,” said Rizvi.
“Parents are just stuck in the queue. There’s nothing much you can do. For partner-visa applicants, the key is to slow the rate of applications, so you could change the criteria.”
According to the Home Affairs website, the processing time for new parent-visa applicants is between 15 and 33 years. Most partner visas are processed within about 12 months.
Rizvi said all these numbers soared in the first place because of the high number of people who have come to Australia on temporary visas.
“A lot of people on temporary visas mean ongoing pressure on the permanent migration program, because large numbers of those are looking for permanence, but the number of permanent places is limited,” he said.
“[Bridging visas] are the worst category because it represents a mix of poor policy and poor administration.”
An additional group of bridging visas, almost 80,000, are held by unlawful non-citizens as well as people who have applied for asylum. Protection visas for refugees can take years to process and then years to appeal.
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Natassia Chrysanthos is Federal Political Correspondent. She has previously reported on immigration, health, social issues and the NDIS from Parliament House in Canberra.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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