Your First 30 Days in Australia: The TFN → Bank → Super → Medicare Chain

Why the order matters more than the list

Most "settling in Australia" checklists give you a list of things to do — SIM card, bank account, tax file number (TFN), superannuation, Medicare. What they don't explain is that these aren't independent tasks. They form a dependency chain: several of them are physically or legally impossible until you've finished an earlier one.

An Australian bank generally won't open a full-service account without an Australian address to send a card to. The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) posts your TFN to an Australian postal address, so you need somewhere to receive mail before you apply. Your superannuation fund taxes contributions at a punitive rate until you give it your TFN. And if you're arriving from India, there's a structural gap almost no generic checklist flags: India has no Medicare reciprocal health care agreement with Australia, so unlike an Irish or UK arrival, you cannot fall back on Medicare while you wait for a permanent visa to come through — you need private cover from day one on most temporary visas.

This guide sequences the tasks in the order each one makes the next possible, with what each step costs, where you do it, and how long it takes.

The 30-day sequence at a glance

Before you land: what to bring from India

A few documents are worth having as originals and certified copies before you board, since certifying them from Australia later is slower and more expensive:

• Passport, with the visa grant notice printed or saved separately (airlines and Australian Border Force ask for both).
• Birth certificate and marriage certificate (if applicable) — used later for Medicare enrolment, super beneficiary nominations, and OCI or PIO paperwork.
• Education and professional qualification certificates — for skills assessments and employer HR onboarding, not for the TFN or bank steps.
• Indian driving licence, plus an International Driving Permit if you hold one — most states still require an English translation or a knowledge/practical test regardless (see the driving licence section below).
• If you hold or are applying for OCI status, note OCI applications from Australia go through VFS Global's Indian Consular Application Centres (relaunched 22 July 2026 across six cities) and need an Australian address for document return. From 1 July 2026 biometric enrolment is mandatory for all OCI applications and appointments are required — so this is easier to action once you're settled than before you leave India.

Step 1–2: SIM card and bank account (Week 1)

Australian telcos are legally required to verify your identity before activating a prepaid SIM, under the Telecommunications (Service Provider — Identity Checks for Prepaid Mobile Carriage Services) Determination 2017. In practice this means a 100-point-style photo ID check, done in person at a store or an Australia Post outlet, or online through a provider's digital verification system — a passport alone is generally sufficient at this stage.

For the bank account, the big four (Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, ANZ) all serve new arrivals, but their pre-arrival processes differ:

• Westpac lets you start an application online if you're arriving within the next 14 days, and will verify identity online for citizens of India, China or New Zealand through its Smart Verify tool; other nationalities complete verification in branch after arrival.
• Commonwealth Bank lets you verify your identity digitally using your ePassport's NFC chip when opening an account; as at the cited April 2026 newsroom article this was available to applicants in Australia, with extension to overseas-based applicants flagged as a forthcoming step rather than yet live. The physical card is posted to your Australian address once your identity is confirmed.
• NAB requires you to be physically in Australia to open an account; you'll need your passport and proof of address. Per NAB's own FAQ, a Tax Identification Number (TIN) is only required if you're a US tax resident, under the FATCA rules — most Indian arrivals, who aren't US tax residents, don't need to supply a foreign TIN to open the account.
• ANZ also requires identification once you've arrived, using either one primary photo ID (a foreign passport qualifies) or two secondary ID documents alongside proof of an Australian address and mobile number.

Banks size up identity documents against Australia's 100-point check, used across the financial sector under the Financial Transaction Reports Act 1988: a passport is generally worth 70 points, and Australian-issued paperwork you don't have yet — a Medicare card, a signed lease, a domestic bank statement — adds the rest. Several migrant-focused banking guides describe an informal window of around six weeks after arrival during which a foreign passport alone is treated as enough; none of the big four's own published pages commit to that figure as a fixed rule, so treat it as a rule of thumb, not a guarantee. Either way the practical takeaway is the same: open your account as early as possible, since the Australian-issued paperwork that makes verification easier only exists once you've been here a while.

One AUSTRAC provision worth knowing: banks may, under a risk-based approach, open an account and complete full identity verification within a short window afterwards rather than requiring it to be finished upfront — part of why some new arrivals can start banking the day they land.

Step 3: Apply for your TFN (Week 1, once you have an address)

Your TFN is free and applied for online through the ATO once you're physically in Australia and hold a valid work-rights visa — the ATO's online registration for permanent migrants and temporary visa holders takes about 20 minutes. It's posted to the Australian address on your application, and takes up to 28 days to arrive, so put down an address you're confident about — even a share house or a friend's place — rather than waiting until you've signed a lease.

You can start work before the TFN arrives. Tell your employer you've applied; you typically have 28 days to provide it — and that 28-day clock runs from when you complete your TFN declaration with the employer, not automatically from your first day. Miss that window and the consequences are blunt and identical across three different parts of the system:

• Wages: your employer must withhold 47% from your pay (45% for non-residents for tax purposes) once the 28-day grace period lapses.
• Super contributions: your fund pays an extra 32% tax on top of the standard 15% contributions tax — 47% total — until you quote your TFN. For any super account opened on or after 1 July 2007 (which covers every new migrant), there is no $1,000 threshold — the extra tax applies from the first dollar contributed.
• Bank interest: banks must withhold tax at the top marginal rate (47%) on interest earned in accounts without a TFN attached.

These are default withholding rules rather than optional grace periods: they only unwind once you provide the number, and in the super case you can claim back the extra tax you paid once you do, though only for the three most recent income years.

Step 4: Give your TFN to your super fund (Week 1–2)

When you start work, your employer will ask you to nominate a super fund (or default you into one). Since 1 July 2025, employers must contribute 12% of your ordinary time earnings into that fund — the final step of a long-scheduled increase from the original 9.5% rate. Add your TFN to the fund as soon as you have it; beyond avoiding the 47% no-TFN tax rate described above, it also means the ATO can find and consolidate any small guarantee amounts if you later change jobs or funds.

Step 5: Medicare or OSHC/OVHC — the reciprocity gap

This is the step where nationality, not just visa subclass, changes the calculus for Indian arrivals. Australia has reciprocal health care agreements with 11 countries — Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom — under which visitors from those countries can access some Medicare-funded treatment while in Australia (cover under some of these agreements is time-limited — Italy's, for example, is capped at six months). India is not one of them. A UK citizen on a visitor visa can walk into a hospital and access limited public care; an Indian citizen on the same class of visa cannot.

What you're eligible for instead depends entirely on your visa:

• If you hold, or have applied for, a permanent visa (other than a parent visa), a permanent protection visa, or fall under specific partner visa pathways (subclasses 309/100, 820/801), you can generally enrol in Medicare once in Australia, using your passport or ImmiCard plus proof of permanent residence status from the Department of Home Affairs.
• You can enrol online, by mail, or in person — Services Australia's current guidance notes you don't need to visit a service centre to enrol. Once enrolled you're given a Medicare number you can start using with a GP, hospital or pharmacist; the physical card follows by post in 3–4 weeks.
• Temporary visa holders — including many arrivals on skilled work visas such as subclass 482 — are typically not Medicare-eligible and instead carry a visa condition (condition 8501 on 482/TSS visas) requiring health insurance for the full length of their stay. That cover — usually Overseas Visitor Health Cover (OVHC) from an Australian-registered insurer — needs to include hospital treatment, ambulance transport, PBS-listed medication and Medicare Benefits Schedule items to satisfy the condition. A lapse in cover is a breach of visa conditions the Department can act on under section 116(1)(b) of the Migration Act 1958.
• Students on subclass 500 visas are separately required to hold Overseas Student Health Cover (OSHC) as a visa condition for the duration of study.

Because insurers compete on price and inclusions rather than on any single "best" product, compare policies on what condition 8501 or your OSHC requirement actually specifies — hospital cover, ambulance, PBS medication, MBS items — rather than by brand.

Step 6: A Centrelink CRN, if you need one

You only need a Customer Reference Number (CRN) if you're going to claim a Centrelink payment or service — Family Tax Benefit and Child Care Subsidy are the two most common reasons a newly arrived family needs one; most working migrants on their own won't touch Centrelink in the first month at all. If you do need one, the most direct route is in person at a Services Australia service centre with your visa grant letter as proof of identity; some people can also establish one over the phone.

Step 7: Your driving licence — a state-by-state clock

Every state and territory lets you keep driving on your Indian licence for a fixed window after your permanent visa is granted (or, in some states, from the date you first entered Australia) — but the window length differs, and once it lapses you're driving unlicensed if you haven't converted:

India isn't on any state's recognised-country list for licence conversion (those lists are mostly European countries plus the UK, the US, Canada, Japan and Singapore — they vary by state and get revised), so most Indian licence holders sit knowledge and practical tests regardless of how long they've held their Indian licence. For the full state-by-state process, document requirements and how the international driving permit fits in, see our dedicated Indian driving licence conversion guide.

Money from India: what to expect in week one

Two culture-shock moments show up almost immediately for Indian arrivals:

• PayID isn't UPI, but it rhymes. Australia's New Payments Platform (NPP) settles bank-to-bank transfers in real time, 24/7, and PayID is the addressing layer on top of it — it lets someone pay you using your phone number or email instead of a BSB and account number, the same underlying idea as UPI. It's a separate system built on Australia's own banking rails, not an extension of UPI, and by May 2026 more than 37 million PayIDs had been registered.
• Remittance limits sit with India's rules, not Australia's. Under the Reserve Bank of India's Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS), resident Indian individuals can remit up to USD 250,000 per financial year for permitted purposes, a limit that remains unchanged for FY2026–27. Remittances above ₹10 lakh in a financial year attract Tax Collected at Source under current rules. If you're moving money to Australia to cover setup costs, this is a limit to be aware of before you leave, not a product to shop for — check current LRS and TCS mechanics with your remitting bank or the RBI's own FAQ page, since thresholds are revised in Indian Budget cycles. As at early July 2026, AUD/INR was trading around 1 AUD ≈ 66 INR, useful context if you're converting a larger sum and want a rough sense of scale, though this moves daily.

How this connects to renting and cost of living

A signed lease is one of the fastest ways to add points to your bank ID file and gives you a stable address for your TFN and Medicare paperwork — but rental applications in Australia typically ask for exactly the kind of local rental history you won't have yet. Our renting in Australia without rental history guide covers how to build a competitive application without it. For a sense of what ongoing costs look like once you're set up, see cost of living for an Indian family in Sydney and Melbourne.