DIY Parent Visa Kit

Lodge it yourself with confidence

Get the kit, $399

The honest reality, before you buy

Parent visas are slow and they are expensive. There is no fast, cheap parent visa, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something. The choice, broadly, is between paying a large contribution to wait years, or paying very little to wait decades. Both waits are long.

  • The contributory pathways move in years, but the second instalment is a large charge, paid per parent, so a couple pays it twice. See current fees.
  • The non-contributory pathways cost little to lodge, but the wait is measured in decades. See current fees and the wait estimator.
  • A sponsor and an assurer take on real, long-lasting obligations, including an assurance of support held for years.

Knowing the shape of all this early is exactly what makes doing it yourself safe to attempt. That is what this kit is for.

Who the kit is for

It is built for families with a straightforward case, where the facts are clean and nobody is in a hurry. If that is you, a parent visa is careful form-filling, patient document-gathering and a long wait, and there is no reason you cannot do it yourself.

What makes that safe is going in with your eyes open. The kit gives you the whole process in plain English, the templates to work from instead of a blank page, and a tracker that keeps every document and date in order across the years a parent visa can take. You stay in control, and you keep professional fees for the moments that genuinely need them.

What is inside

A plain-English manual

Every parent visa subclass, the balance of family test, costs, documents, and lodging online. It lives on the web, so the version you read is always current as fees and rules change.

Editable templates

Document templates you complete yourself, so you are not starting from a blank page.

A document tracker

A parent visa means dozens of documents, across several people, sometimes over years. The tracker keeps every one of them straight. Families tell us this is the part that does the most work.

Every figure in one place

Charges, bonds and indicative waits all live on one current-fees page, kept up to date at the source, so nothing quietly goes stale.

A wait time estimator

Members only: estimate your parent’s realistic queue wait from live Home Affairs release-date data, by subclass.

Who should not do this alone

Some situations are the wrong ones to attempt yourself. In these cases a mistake is not a minor setback: it can cost years in a queue, a large non-refundable contribution, or the application itself. If any of these describe your family, treat the kit as background reading and get advice before you lodge anything.

  • Your balance of family position is close, contested, or complicated by step-children, estranged children or children who move between countries.
  • An applicant has a health condition, now or likely to develop, that could fail the health check.
  • There is any criminal history, or a residence history across several countries with difficult police clearances.
  • There has been a prior visa refusal or cancellation for anyone involved, or your parent is onshore on a visa close to expiring.
  • The family structure is unusual: blended families, guardianship, unregistered relationships, or documents that do not agree with each other.

None of that means a case is hopeless. It means the stakes are high enough that professional representation is worth it, and the kit alone is not the right tool.

If you later decide you want a registered migration agent to act for you, the price you paid for this kit credits in full against a MigrationBuro representation fee. So the kit is never money wasted, whichever way your family goes.

Written by a registered migration agent

Andy Heathcote is a registered migration agent, MARN 0850840, and has been registered since 2008. The kit carries his name and registration number because someone should be accountable for what you are reading.

Get the kit

A one-off price, inc GST. Instant access to the manual, templates and tracker.