Thirty-Three Years to Bring a Parent to Australia

When Amandeep Singh does the sum on how long his mother must wait to live with him in Melbourne, the number reads less like a processing time than a verdict. The visa she needs is the non-contributory Parent visa. The official estimate now sits at 33 years. Singh told SBS Hindi that “waiting more than 30 years for her to join me is deeply unfair.” His mother is already in her sixties. On the Department of Home Affairs’ own numbers, the grant will most likely never come in her lifetime.

That sum is no longer unusual. Tens of thousands of families, many of them Indian, have found that sponsoring a parent to settle in Australia can mean a wait longer than a whole working career. A slow visa category has hardened into something close to a standing policy of family separation, counted out in decades rather than months.

A queue measured in decades

Home Affairs does not hide the length of the wait. It just frames it carefully. The department’s parent visa page, updated on 31 May 2026, gives a processing estimate of 33 years for the Parent and Aged Parent visas, subclasses 103 and 804, and 15 years for the Contributory Parent visas, subclasses 143 and 173. Demand for parent visas is greater than the number of places available each year, the department says, and remaining applications stay in the queue until a place opens in a future program year.

The queue release dates show what that means in practice. As of 31 May 2026, the department was releasing contributory applications lodged up to November 2018, non-contributory Parent applications lodged up to March 2014, and Aged Parent applications lodged up to April 2014. An application filed the day a child became a citizen in 2014 is only now reaching the front of the line. By 2024 to 2025 the backlog had reached about 157,000 applications. It was roughly 151,600 in mid-2024 and around 137,000 in May 2023, according to figures published by SBS and by the analyst Peter Mares.

Two visas, two prices, one bottleneck

Australia offers two permanent routes for parents, and the distance between them is wide. The Contributory Parent visas, 143 and 173, cost close to 50,000 dollars per person across the process, a sum meant to offset the health and welfare costs a parent may later draw on. The non-contributory Parent visa, 103, and Aged Parent visa, 804, cost a little more than 5,000 dollars. The saving buys a far longer wait. Mares has noted that about 80 per cent of parent visa grants now go to those who can pay the contributory price.

Neither route gets past the real chokepoint. That is the cap. For 2025 to 2026, the Family stream of the Migration Program is set at 52,000 places. Of those, 8,500 are reserved for parents, split into 6,800 contributory and 1,700 non-contributory grants. The legislative instrument setting those limits commenced on 12 June 2026. Lodgements each year run well above 8,500, so the queue lengthens no matter how fast individual cases are decided.

A temporary visa that leads nowhere

There is a third option for families unwilling to gamble on a permanent grant. The Sponsored Parent, Temporary, visa, subclass 870, allows stays of up to five years at a time, to a lifetime maximum of ten years, and up to 15,000 may be granted each program year. The catches are serious. The 870 offers no pathway to permanent residence. Holders generally cannot work. The sponsoring child must show a taxable income above about 83,000 dollars, and the visa application charge runs to more than 10,000 dollars for the five-year option, before sponsorship and lodgement fees. It keeps a parent in the country as a long-term guest, never a settler.

Why the queue never clears

The backlog is a choice, not an accident. Successive governments have held the parent cap low because parents tend to arrive later in life and are expected to draw on Medicare, aged care and the pension without a long stretch of taxable earnings behind them. The Productivity Commission, the federal government’s independent research and advisory body, put a price on that worry in its 2016 Migrant Intake into Australia report. It estimated the lifetime fiscal cost of each parent visa at between 335,000 and 410,000 dollars per adult in net present value terms, and found that the visa charges recover only a fraction of it. The 2023 review of the migration system cited a comparable Treasury figure of about 393,000 dollars per parent. Those numbers turn up again and again in departmental and budget papers. They are the quiet reason the cap does not rise.

Abul Rizvi has watched the bind from the inside. A former deputy secretary of the immigration department who ran migration policy for years, he told SBS that parent visas “have always been difficult policy,” and that “it’s all a question of what we can afford.” His point is blunt. The contributory charge, large as it is, still falls short of the long-run cost to the budget, so every extra place carries a fiscal consequence that governments of both stripes have refused to wear. On his account, the backlog grew from around 35,000 applications in 2010 to about 120,000 by 2022. It lengthened under Coalition and Labor alike.

The human cost, and who carries it

The people in the queue are not abstractions. Peter Mares gathered their testimony in “The Parent Conundrum,” a 2023 report for the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute. One applicant described the toll. “Now I feel that I may lose my dad as well in this process. I get panic attacks and anxiety because of the visa processing time.” The report counted more than 137,000 applications on hand as of May 2023. It found that offering visas with such delays had been judged both cruel and unnecessary by the government’s own expert review panel. Demand, Mares found, came by far from China, then India, then Vietnam and the United Kingdom.

For Indian-Australians, the stakes keep growing. Home Affairs data records about 916,300 India-born residents in Australia at the end of June 2024, the second-largest overseas-born group after the United Kingdom and about 10.7 per cent of the overseas-born population. India ranks second only to China as a source of parent visa demand, and second overall in the Family and Child stream. Many in that community arrived as skilled migrants in their late twenties and thirties and started families here. Now the grandparents who might have helped raise their children are stuck in a queue that will outlast the childhood itself.

Calls for a fairer system

Most reform ideas come back to one word, which is honesty. Mares, an adjunct senior research fellow at Monash University who wrote his Scanlon report with the foundation’s funding, argues that a queue stretching past three decades misleads the people who join it, because it dangles a grant that will realistically never reach older parents. He points to New Zealand and Canada, where a capped number of parent places is handed out by ballot, as a cleaner method than a queue that quietly piles up. He has also suggested holding most annual places for those already waiting, while admitting a lottery would still leave families living on a mix of hope, anxiety and uncertainty.

Peak bodies have pushed the same case. The Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia, in its submission to the 2022 review of the migration system, called for shorter processing times, lower costs and a larger share of the program for family, partner and carer visas. Family reunion, it argued, works alongside the economic side of migration and is central to a society where everyone can belong and thrive. It said migrants raise the issue with the federation constantly when they weigh whether to stay or go. The warning was pointed. The skilled migrants Australia competes for will factor in whether they can bring their parents when they choose where to settle.

What families do while they wait

With no realistic permanent route, families improvise. Some cycle their parents through tourist and visitor visas, stitching together stays of a few months and repeated long-haul flights. Others take the 870 and accept a decade of temporary residence with no work rights and nothing settled at the end. A growing number look to be walking away from the permanent queue altogether. SBS reported that new parent visa lodgements fell to 18,434 in 2024 to 2025, down from 23,345 the year before, even as the backlog kept climbing. Fewer people, it seems, can see the point of joining a line that does not move.

A policy that speaks louder than its words

Australia calls family reunion a pillar of its migration program, and the parent visa stays formally open to anyone who qualifies. A category that quotes a 33-year wait, and that is still working through applications lodged more than a decade ago, does something else in practice. For a community as young and as fast-growing as the Indian-Australian diaspora, the parent visa backlog is where the promise of settlement runs into its limit. Until the cap and the queue are honestly squared with each other, the sum that stopped Amandeep Singh will keep handing thousands of families the same answer. Not in time.

Images in this article are AI-generated illustrations.