The visa comes through. Everyone exhales. The migration agent sends a congratulations email and closes the file, the new hire starts booking flights, and the folder that took four months to assemble gets dropped into a drive nobody opens again.
That is the moment your compliance risk starts climbing.
Sponsorship obligations after the visa is granted are ongoing, legally binding, and enforced against your business rather than the agent who lodged the paperwork. They land on whoever runs your payroll and keeps your employment records, which in most Australian SMEs means an office manager, a bookkeeper, or the owner. Very few of the sponsors who get into trouble are dodgy operators. Most are ordinary businesses that appointed a new director, moved offices, reshaped a role or ended someone’s employment, and had no idea a 28 day clock had started running.
The handover nobody schedules
Ask a sponsoring employer who owns their sponsorship obligations and you usually get a pause.
The migration agent was engaged to get the nomination and the visa approved. Their scope generally ends at grant. Your obligations do not. They run for the life of the sponsorship, and the Department of Home Affairs can monitor compliance during that period and for up to five years after it ends.
So there is a live file with no owner. Payroll knows the salary. The line manager knows the duties. Finance knows about the new shareholder. Nobody is joining those three facts together and asking whether Immigration needs to be told about any of them.
Here is a useful test. If your finance director resigned tomorrow, who in your business would know Home Affairs has to be notified within 28 days? If the honest answer is nobody, you do not have a compliance problem yet. You have a gap that will become one.
What sponsorship obligations after the visa is granted actually cover
These obligations apply to approved standard business sponsors employing people on Skills in Demand (subclass 482) and Skilled Employer Sponsored Regional (subclass 494) visas. They begin when the nomination is approved or the visa is granted, whichever comes later.
You must pay the sponsored worker at least the earnings set out in the nomination the Department approved, and their conditions of employment must be no less favourable than those you provide, or would provide, to an Australian doing equivalent work in the same location. That particular obligation only falls away where the worker’s annual earnings are $250,000 or more.
The worker must only perform the duties of the occupation they were nominated for. A quiet reshuffle where a marketing specialist ends up running the sales team creates a problem for both of you.
You have to cooperate with inspectors. Inspectors appointed under the Migration Act, including Australian Border Force officers and Fair Work inspectors, can enter business premises, inspect work and processes, and interview people on site. Blocking access, or attempting to, is a breach in its own right.
You have to keep records, and hand them over when the Department asks, in the format and within the timeframe requested.
You have to notify Home Affairs in writing within 28 calendar days when certain events occur.
You must not recover or transfer certain costs to the worker.
And if you lawfully operate a business in Australia, you must not use recruitment practices that discriminate against people on the basis of their citizenship or visa status, and you need records that show you did not.
Two more obligations only bite at the end of the arrangement. If the worker asks in writing, you must pay reasonable travel costs so they and their sponsored family members can leave Australia. And if a sponsored worker becomes unlawful, the Commonwealth can seek the costs of locating and removing them from you, up to a limit of $10,000.
What you must do
Pay the approved nominated earnings and equivalent conditions
Keep the worker in the nominated occupation
Notify Home Affairs within 28 calendar days of a notifiable event
Keep records in a reproducible format and produce them on request
Cooperate with Australian Border Force and Fair Work inspectors
What you must never do
Recover the SAF levy or sponsorship and nomination charges from the worker
Write a repayment or bond clause covering visa costs into a contract
Let duties drift outside the nominated occupation
Recruit in a way that shuts out people based on visa or citizenship status
Assume the migration agent is still watching the file
The 28 day list, and who in your business will notice first
Most breaches are not decisions. They are omissions. The event happens somewhere in the business, the person who sees it has no idea it matters to Immigration, and 28 days quietly pass.
The clock starts on the day of the event, not the day HR finds out about it.
It helps to work through the notifiable events by function rather than by regulation, because that is how information actually moves through a business.
Payroll and HR see it first when a sponsored worker’s employment ends, when they never start at all, when the expected end date moves, or when their day to day duties change.
Your office manager or company secretary sees it first when the business changes its legal name, trading name, structure or address.
Finance or the board sees it first when a director, owner, partner or principal changes, when the business enters administration or liquidation, or when it stops existing as a legal entity.
Finance also sees it when the business pays return travel costs for a sponsored worker, because that payment is itself a notifiable event.
The most reliable trigger a small business already has is the pay run. Someone reviews that list every fortnight. Put the check there. If a sponsored worker’s line has changed, or vanished, somebody asks why before the file is closed. That single habit prevents more breaches than any policy document will.
The costs you can never pass on
This is where careful businesses get caught by their own paperwork.
Sponsors must not recover, transfer or attempt to charge the sponsorship and nomination costs to the sponsored worker or to anyone else. That covers the Skilling Australians Fund levy, the sponsorship and nomination application charges, and the migration agent fees tied to them.
It does not only mean a deduction from a payslip. A clause saying the employee repays visa costs if they resign inside 12 months is a breach on the day the contract is signed, whether or not you ever enforce it. So is a side agreement, a starting salary quietly reduced to recoup the levy, or an arrangement where a labour hire intermediary passes the cost down the chain. The worker, in their own visa application, declares they have not paid and have not agreed to pay these costs. Two declarations pointing in opposite directions is precisely what a monitoring officer is trained to find.
If your employment contract templates were written before you became a sponsor, that repayment clause is the thing to go and check this week.
Not sure whether your sponsorship file would survive an audit?
An HR compliance audit checks your contracts, pay records and notification history against what the Department expects to see. You will know where you stand before anyone else asks.
Talk to VeiraMalRecords, and how long five years actually feels
The record keeping obligation is dull, which is why it is the one most often failed.
You need the written employment contract for each sponsored worker, records of what you actually paid them, the terms and conditions that applied, and, where an equivalent Australian worker exists in your workplace, the terms that applied to that person and the period they applied for. You need evidence that your recruitment did not discriminate on citizenship or visa status. You need proof the SAF levy was paid. And you need a record of every notification you sent Home Affairs and the date you sent it.
Records must be kept in a reproducible format, and some must be capable of verification by an independent person. A spreadsheet somebody maintained by hand does not clear that bar.
Five years sounds manageable until you count how many things change inside it. Payroll platform migrations are where these records tend to go missing, because historical payslips and pay condition histories do not always come across cleanly. Neither do the email trails sitting in a departed HR manager’s mailbox. If you have switched payroll systems since your first nomination, go and confirm you can still produce a payslip from that first year. That is the check people skip.
Our payroll services team treats sponsored workers as a separate reporting line for exactly this reason, so the nominated salary and the paid salary are reconciled by the same people every cycle.
Worker mobility changed the maths
Sponsored workers now have far more room to move. If employment with a sponsor ends, a subclass 482 holder can go up to 180 consecutive days without an approved sponsoring employer, capped at 365 days cumulatively across the life of the visa, and can work for other employers during that window while a new nomination is arranged.
For sponsors, this cuts two ways.
Retention is now a pay and culture question rather than a visa question. The worker you sponsored, trained and relocated can leave for a competitor without the immigration consequences that used to hold them in place. If your sponsored staff are sitting on salaries that have not moved since nomination while the market has, you are exposed.
The second consequence is quieter. Their mobility does not soften your obligations. When the employment relationship ends, the notification duty, the record keeping duty and the potential travel cost liability are still yours, and the 28 days still runs from the day employment ceased.
What monitoring actually looks like
It is rarely a raid. It is usually a letter asking for records within a set timeframe, or a site visit, or a mismatch flagged when payroll data does not line up with the nominated salary and occupation.
Where a sponsor does not meet their obligations, the Department can bar them from sponsoring further workers, cancel their sponsorship approval, issue infringement notices, seek civil penalties in court, require an enforceable undertaking, and publish the details of sponsors who have been sanctioned. The reputational cost of that last one usually outlasts the financial one.
None of this is about catching out businesses acting in good faith. It exists so sponsored workers are not underpaid or exploited, and so employers doing the right thing are not undercut by employers who are not. The Fair Work Ombudsman enforces the same underlying principle through workplace law, which is why the two regimes so often turn up together.
What to do in the first month after a grant
Give the file an owner by name, not by job title, and tell them what they own. Save the approved nomination and the grant notice somewhere the whole finance and HR function can reach, not in the inbox of whoever dealt with the agent.
Write the nominated salary and the nominated occupation on the employee’s payroll record so the number is visible at every pay run rather than buried in a PDF. Check the signed contract against the nomination, line by line, and strike out any clause that recovers visa costs. Diarise the visa expiry with a reminder six months out, because renewals and permanent residence nominations both need lead time.
Then agree, in one sentence, who is told when something changes. Not a policy. One sentence, and the name of the person it goes to.
01
We review the file
Approved nominations, contracts, pay history and every notification you have sent, checked against what the Department expects.
02
We fix the gaps
Repayment clauses removed, pay reconciled to the nomination, missing records rebuilt and late notifications addressed.
03
We run the rhythm
A standing check at every pay run, so notifiable events are caught inside 28 days without anyone having to remember.
Where VeiraMal fits
Most sponsors do not need another adviser. They need one team that already sees the payroll, the contracts and the org chart, because that is where every notifiable event shows up first.
VeiraMal has run HR services and payroll for Australian businesses since 2018, with a dedicated Labour Market Testing division that supports sponsoring employers through the whole process rather than stopping at lodgement. If you are earlier in the cycle, our guide to labour market testing and sponsoring a foreign worker covers what happens before the application goes in.
We work from Level 2, 480 Collins Street in Melbourne, Level 26, 44 Market Street in Sydney, and Level 6, Reserve Bank Building, 111 Macquarie Street in Hobart, and we support sponsors across the country. You can read more about the team or just book a call and ask us the awkward question about that repayment clause.
Frequently asked questions
When do sponsorship obligations after the visa is granted start and end?
They start when the nomination is approved or the visa is granted, whichever is later. Most end when the sponsored worker stops working for you or is granted another substantive visa. Record keeping and the Department's ability to monitor you continue well past that, for up to five years after the sponsorship ends.
What happens if we miss the 28 day notification deadline?
Late notification is a breach. Notify as soon as you realise, in writing, and keep a record of when and how you sent it. A single late notification handled openly sits very differently to a pattern of events that were never reported at all. Get advice before you send it if the underlying issue is more complicated than a change of address.
Can we ask a sponsored employee to repay visa costs if they resign early?
No. Sponsorship and nomination costs, including the SAF levy, cannot be recovered from or transferred to the worker by any means. That includes bond or clawback clauses, deductions, side agreements and reduced starting salaries. The clause is a breach whether or not it is ever enforced.
Our sponsored worker's role has changed. Do we need a new nomination?
It depends on how far the duties have moved. Minor evolution within the same occupation is usually fine and may still be notifiable. A genuine change of occupation needs a new nomination, and the worker cannot start the new duties until it is approved. Promotions and restructures are the most common trigger, so flag them before they take effect rather than after.
How long do we need to keep sponsorship records?
Plan on five years from the end of the sponsorship, in a reproducible format, with some records capable of independent verification. Contracts, pay records, equivalent worker terms, recruitment evidence and copies of every notification all need to be retrievable. Check this before you change payroll platforms, not after.
Sponsoring someone? Make sure the obligations have an owner.
Book a free, obligation-free 30 minute discovery call with VeiraMal. We will tell you honestly where your sponsorship compliance stands and what it takes to keep it there.
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