Your obligations as an approved sponsor, and what happens if you slip
Approval as a Standard Business Sponsor comes with nine ongoing legal duties under the Migration Regulations, not a one-off form. What they are, how long they run, and what Home Affairs can do if you miss one.
Reviewed MARN 0317382Jul 2026 published7 min read
Becoming an approved sponsor doesn't end at approval, it starts a set of ongoing legal duties under the Migration Regulations. You must keep records, pay reasonable travel costs, notify the Department within 28 days of listed changes, ensure the worker is paid and treated no less favourably than an equivalent Australian employee, cooperate with inspectors, and never recover certain costs from the worker. These run for as long as the sponsorship lasts and typically for five years after it ends. Miss one and Home Affairs can bar you from sponsoring again, cancel your approval, issue an infringement notice, or refer the matter to the courts for a civil penalty.
The obligations, in plain terms
| Obligation | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Cooperate with inspectors | Let Home Affairs or Fair Work inspectors on site, answer questions, and hand over documents when asked. |
| Keep records | Employment contracts, tasks performed, work location, salary paid, and the terms of any equivalent Australian worker, kept in a form an independent person could check. |
| Provide records and information | Produce those records to the Department on request, not just hold them in a drawer. |
| Equivalent terms and conditions | Pay and conditions no less favourable than an equivalent Australian worker doing the same job, at or above the market salary rate. |
| Nominated occupation only | The sponsored worker does the job you nominated them for, not a different role you've quietly moved them into. |
| No discriminatory recruitment | Don't favour or exclude candidates based on citizenship or visa status when filling the role, and keep records showing you didn't. |
| Pay travel costs | Reasonable, usually economy-class, travel costs for the worker and their family to leave Australia when the sponsorship ends. |
| Pay costs of removing an unlawful non-citizen | If the person becomes unlawful, you can be billed for the Commonwealth's costs of locating, detaining and removing them. |
| Notify the Department | Tell Home Affairs within 28 days of listed changes: the worker's employment ending, their duties changing, or changes to your business. |
A tenth rule sits alongside these nine: you cannot recover certain costs from the worker, directly or through a side arrangement. That one causes enough trouble on its own to earn its own section.
The costs you can never pass on
Recruitment costs, migration agent fees, the nomination fee and the Skilling Australians Fund levy are the sponsor's by law. You can't deduct them from wages, badge them as a "training fee," or agree informally that the worker will cover them. Doing so is a sponsorship breach in its own right, on top of whatever underpayment or Fair Work issue it creates alongside it.
Telling the Department when things change
Most notifiable events are due within 28 days: the worker's employment ending or their duties changing, your business restructuring, changing its legal name, becoming insolvent, or a change to who owns or directs it. Notify by emailing sponsor.notifications@abf.gov.au or through the sponsor changes form in ImmiAccount. This is the obligation businesses trip over most, usually an admin gap rather than a deliberate breach, but an audit doesn't distinguish between the two.
How long the obligations run
They start when your sponsorship or the worker's visa is granted. Most continue for the length of the sponsorship and for five years after it ends, so record-keeping in particular outlives the job itself. A worker leaving, being made redundant, or your business ceasing to sponsor doesn't switch these off retrospectively.
What happens if you slip
Home Affairs has a ladder of responses, and it can use more than one at a time. At the lighter end sits a compliance notice, requiring you to address an alleged breach. From there it can escalate to an infringement notice with a set financial penalty, an Enforceable Undertaking (a binding written agreement to fix your practices), being barred from sponsoring anyone new for a set period, or cancellation of your sponsorship approval altogether. The most serious matters go to court as civil penalty proceedings, where the amounts run well into six figures for a company. Penalties are set in penalty units rather than fixed dollars, and the value of a penalty unit is indexed, so check the current figure on the Home Affairs website rather than relying on a number you saw last year.
None of this requires the worker to complain first. Audits, tip-offs, and data-matching with the Fair Work Ombudsman and the ATO all trigger reviews on their own.
Keeping this manageable
The obligations aren't a trap for a business acting in good faith. Most breaches Home Affairs finds are administrative: a missed 28-day window, a record that was never set up, rather than deliberate exploitation. A simple checklist at nomination time, and a standing reminder for anything that changes in the role or the business, closes most of the gap before it opens.
General information only, current at 18 July 2026. Not immigration assistance or advice for your circumstances. Visacorp Pty Ltd — MARN 0317382 · 1799004.
Common questions
Do these obligations apply to every kind of sponsor?
The detail varies by sponsor type. This article covers Standard Business Sponsors, the category behind the Skills in Demand (482) visa and most 186 nominations. Accredited sponsors and Temporary Activities sponsors work to a related but not identical set of obligations.
What if the change I need to report seems too minor to matter?
Report it anyway. The 28-day notification duty doesn't carry a materiality threshold, and "it didn't seem important" isn't a defence at audit.
Can our sponsorship be cancelled without warning?
Cancellation and barring generally follow a process that gives you a chance to respond, but Home Affairs doesn't need the worker to have been harmed, only for an obligation to have been breached.
Do the obligations end when the worker leaves or the business stops sponsoring?
No. Most obligations, record-keeping in particular, continue for around five years after the sponsorship ends, regardless of why it ended.
We think we've already breached an obligation. What now?
Get advice and address it directly rather than waiting to be found in an audit. This article is general information, not advice on your specific circumstances, a registered migration agent or lawyer can assess what applies to your situation.
Unsure where your situation fits?
Twenty minutes with a registered agent is the fastest way to a straight answer.