Reference guides for Indian students in Australia — student visa conditions, health cover requirements, work rights, and the published rules that apply while you study.
Australia replaced the old Genuine Temporary Entrant test with the Genuine Student (GS) requirement in March 2024, and Indian student visa refusal rates have since climbed to the highest levels in the two decades of published Home Affairs data. This guide sets out what the published GS criteria direct a decision-maker to weigh, what happened to India's evidence-level rating in January 2026, and what the department's own refusal-rate dataset on data.gov.au shows — without offering visa advice.
Before you can lodge an Expression of Interest for a points-tested skilled visa (189, 190 or 491), you need a positive skills assessment from the specific authority nominated for your occupation — a separate process with its own fee, document checklist, and multi-week-to-multi-year timeline that most Indian applicants under-budget. This guide sets out, authority by authority (ACS, Engineers Australia, VETASSESS, CPA Australia, CA ANZ, ANMAC, AMC and Trades Recognition Australia), what each currently charges, how long each takes, and the documentation or eligibility gotchas that catch Indian applicants most often — including ACS's ICT-relevance experience thresholds, Engineers Australia's Washington Accord/CDR split, and why a positive ANMAC or AMC outcome is only the first of several steps for nurses and doctors. It also clarifies that this is a different process from the Department of Education's general qualification-comparison service, which stopped taking new applications on 20 July 2026 and was never usable for migration.
