MATES Visa Australia (Subclass 403): The Ballot, the NIRF List and Who Qualifies

MATES is the only Australian visa built for a single nationality. The Mobility Arrangement for Talented Early-professionals Scheme is a stream inside the Temporary Work (International Relations) visa, Subclass 403, and the pre-application process that feeds it is required by law to be run in relation to the Republic of India. Up to 3,000 places a year, two years of open work rights in Australia, no employer sponsor, and no Australian study anywhere in the requirements.

It is also the most inaccurately reported visa in the Indian market. The list of eligible institutions is not the current NIRF ranking, it is a fixed list of 100 colleges written into an Australian legislative instrument in November 2024 and never amended since. The eligible fields are seven, not eight. The graduation cut-off moves with every ballot. And the ballot you pay AUD 25 to enter does not check your degree at all. Every figure below was read at Home Affairs or the Federal Register of Legislation on 23 July 2026.

What is the MATES visa, and who is it actually for?

MATES gives Indian graduates and early career professionals up to two years in Australia with full work rights. Home Affairs will grant up to 3,000 MATES stream visas a year, and those 3,000 places are for primary applicants only. If you bring a spouse or children as members of your family unit, they do not eat into the cap.

The scheme runs under the Migration (Subclass 403 (MATES Stream) Visa Pre-application Process) Determination (LIN 24/069) 2024, made under section 46C(14) of the Migration Act 1958 and registered on 11 November 2024. Division 2 of that determination is one sentence long and says the process must be in relation to the Republic of India. That is why no other country has a MATES.

Once you hold the visa, the terms are unusually open for a temporary work visa.

• You can do any kind of work and study. Home Affairs’ own factsheet states there is no strict requirement to work in the field you nominated.
• The visa starts on the day you first enter Australia and then runs 24 months. You can travel in and out as often as you like, and time spent outside Australia does not extend it.
• Your first entry date is 12 months from the date of grant. Miss it and the visa ceases.
• You cannot extend it, and you will not be eligible for a second MATES stream visa afterwards.

How does the MATES ballot work, and what does it actually test?

Registering in the ballot is not applying for a visa. It buys you a lottery ticket, nothing more. Home Affairs is blunt about it, saying that submitting a registration and paying the fee does not guarantee you will be selected, and that a registration is not a visa application and will not get you a bridging visa.

To register you need an ImmiAccount, a valid Indian passport, a valid PAN card, a working email address, and AUD 25. You must be aged 18 to 30 inclusive on the day the registration period opens, you may only register once in a given ballot, and the fee is not refunded whether you are selected or not. You can be inside or outside Australia to register.

Now the part almost nobody writes down. The statutory eligibility requirements for registration, at section 9 of LIN 24/069, are only two. A valid Indian passport, and the age band at the moment the registration period opens. Your degree, your college, your English score and your bank balance are tested nowhere in the ballot. The registration form does collect your qualification and field of study, and section 8 requires you to declare that you meet the requirements, but the draw itself is random over everyone who registered and paid. You can win the ballot and still be refused the visa.

Selection is done by a computer program, at random, in several rounds through the program year rather than in one draw. If you are picked, you get a Notification of Selection letter and you have 30 calendar days from the date of selection to lodge a complete application online, with a hard cut-off at 11:59PM AEDT on the last day. The instrument sets a floor of 28 days, so 30 is the department being slightly generous, not a promise. Miss it and your registration goes to Selection expired and you wait for a future ballot.

Two administrative details are worth fixing before you register. You must lodge the visa using the same passport you registered with, so tell Home Affairs through ImmiAccount if it is renewed in between. And the PAN details on your registration and your visa application must match exactly, or you will not be able to apply.

Is your institution eligible, and how do you check it properly?

This is what fails the most people, and it fails them for a reason nobody warns them about.

The eligible institutions are not whatever NIRF publishes this year. They are a closed list of 100 colleges, each named with its city and state, written into Schedule 1 of the Migration (Specification of Study and English Language Requirements (Subclass 403 (MATES Stream) Visa) (LIN 24/072) Instrument 2024. That instrument was made on 8 November 2024, took effect on 11 November 2024, and the Federal Register’s version history for it shows no compilations and no amendments. The list in force today is the list made in 2024.

Where did the 100 come from? We checked Schedule 1 line by line against the NIRF India Rankings 2024 Overall list name by name. Ninety nine of the hundred match exactly. The only divergence is item 52, which the instrument spells “Symbiosos International” where NIRF spells it Symbiosis International, with the same city and state. It reads as a typing slip in the drafting rather than a different college.

Four consequences follow, and each one catches somebody.

• It is the Overall list, not the subject lists. Being ranked by NIRF in Engineering, Management or Medical does not help you. Of the 100 institutions in NIRF 2024’s Engineering top 100, 48 are not on the Overall top 100. Every Engineering rank from 1 to 44 is also on Overall. From Engineering rank 45 downwards, roughly half are not.
• Some very well known technical institutes are simply absent. No IIIT appears anywhere on the 2024 Overall list, which rules out IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Bangalore, IIIT Delhi and IIIT Allahabad. Seven IITs are missing too, namely Bhubaneswar, Tirupati, Jammu, Palakkad, Bhilai, Goa and Dharwad. So are NSUT Delhi, NIT Delhi, NIT Patna, SVNIT Surat, MNNIT Prayagraj, IIST Thiruvananthapuram and IIEST Shibpur.
• A newer NIRF edition does not rescue you. NIRF released its 2025 Overall rankings on 4 September 2025, and Home Affairs updated the MATES visa page on 24 October 2025 and still wrote “Overall 2024 List”. IIT Bhubaneswar (2025 rank 80), IIIT Hyderabad (89), Mumbai University (92) and Manipal University Jaipur (98) all climbed into the 2025 Overall hundred and are still not eligible. The reverse holds too. Indian Statistical Institute Kolkata, NIT Durgapur, Gujarat University, TISS Mumbai, AIIMS Patna and Periyar University fell out of the 2025 hundred and remain eligible, because the law still points at 2024.
• Affiliated colleges do not inherit eligibility. Home Affairs states that institutions are specified by name and city or state, and that affiliated educational institutions not on the list do not qualify. A degree from a college affiliated to Anna University is not a degree from Anna University, Chennai.

So the check is simple. Find your institution’s exact name in the table below, and confirm the city and state match the campus that awarded your degree. If it is not there, MATES is closed to you for now, and the route worth reading instead is the Subclass 500 student visa followed by the Subclass 485 post-study work visa.

The 100 institutions specified in Schedule 1 of LIN 24/072, reproduced in the instrument’s own order and spelling.

What must you prove once you are selected?

Selection unlocks the right to lodge. Everything below is then assessed on the application itself, and Home Affairs will not refund the visa charge if it refuses you.

You graduated recently enough. The rule is that you graduated from a listed institution within two years of the beginning of the ballot registration open period. For the 2025-26 ballot, which opened on 1 November 2025, that produced a cut-off of on or after 1 November 2023, and Home Affairs states that date on the visa page. Treat 1 November 2023 as the answer for that one ballot, not as a permanent rule. The window slides forward every time a registration period opens.

Your qualification is at the right level. It must be equivalent to an Australian Qualifications Framework level 7 degree or higher. Schedule 2 of the instrument lists a Bachelor Degree, a Bachelor Degree with Honours or Research, a Postgraduate Diploma, any Masters and any Doctoral Degree.

Your qualification relates to one of seven industries. Section 8 of the instrument names renewable energy, mining, engineering, information communications technology, artificial intelligence, financial technology and agricultural technology. Seven, not the eight that several widely shared summaries report.

Your English test is current and in one sitting. It must have been taken within the year before you apply, or within the year before the decision if you did not supply it at lodgement, and the score must come from a single sitting unless the test is an OET.

Those thresholds sit below what most Australian university offers ask for, so a test you already sat for admissions will usually do. Our page on PTE and IELTS scores for Australia sets out how the same tests are read elsewhere in the system.

You can support yourself. Either you produce a written job offer or employment contract with an Australian business, showing the position, wages no less favourable than an Australian citizen doing equivalent work at that location, and the employer’s ABN. Or you show money. Home Affairs puts the figure at about AUD 5,000 for your initial stay, held for at least the three months immediately before you apply, in your own name or a close family member’s, or evidenced as a loan made to you by a financial institution.

The rest of the standard bar. Health requirement, character requirement, adequate health insurance for the whole of your stay, no unpaid debt to the Australian Government, and a genuine intention to stay temporarily. You must also be outside Australia both when you apply and when the decision is made, and you must not have previously entered Australia on a MATES visa.

What it costs, and how fast it moves, as at 23 July 2026.

Those processing figures come from the Home Affairs processing time guide for the MATES stream and describe applications already decided, so they move. Re-read them when your own turn comes. Charges are usually re-indexed on 1 July.

Where does the MATES ballot stand right now?

As at 23 July 2026, the Home Affairs ballot page publishes one program year and one only.

The Australian High Commission in New Delhi put the same cycle in plain words, six weeks of registration, first random selection on 15 December 2025, further selections through the year until every registration expired on 30 June 2026.

No dates for the 2026-2027 program year had been published as at 23 July 2026. Home Affairs says only that there will be an annual ballot process, and that the status of a ballot moves through PENDING, ACTIVE, CLOSED and EXPIRED as the year runs. If the 2025-26 pattern repeats, a new registration window would open around November, but that is a pattern and not an announcement. The only reliable move is to watch the Home Affairs ballot registration page, which is where the department is legally required to publish the registration open period and any extension of it.

One honest gap while you wait. Home Affairs does not publish how many people register in a MATES ballot, or how many are selected in each round. Only the ceiling of 3,000 places is public, so any site quoting you a selection percentage is working from a number the department has not released.

Use the closed period. Sit the English test, since it must be within a year of application and selection gives you only 30 days. Check your institution against the schedule above, and align your PAN and passport details.

What MATES is not

Three misreadings do real damage, so the negatives are worth stating plainly.

It is not a student visa. MATES does not admit you to an Australian course and no Australian institution is involved. If your plan is to study in Australia, the visa is the Subclass 500, covered on our Australia student visa guide.

It is not the 485. The Temporary Graduate visa is for people who studied in Australia. MATES is for people who studied in India. They sit at opposite ends of the journey, and they price very differently.

The full picture on the Australian side sits on our Subclass 485 post-study work visa page.

It is not permanent residence, and it is not designed to become permanent residence. One of the grant criteria is a genuine intention to stay temporarily. You cannot extend the visa and you cannot get a second one. Home Affairs’ conditions tool also lists 8503, the no further stay condition, among the conditions that may be attached to a 403 MATES stream visa, alongside 8501 requiring you to maintain adequate health insurance and 8526 requiring you to keep the department informed of where you live. Conditions are decided case by case, so your grant letter is the only authority on which ones apply to you, and it is worth reading the day it arrives.

What MATES does give you is two years of Australian work history, superannuation you can claim when you leave, and a professional network, for a fraction of what the study route costs. That is a real head start for anyone who later chooses a different visa on the merits, and it is not a shortcut.

Sources

• Department of Home Affairs, Mobility Arrangement for Talented Early-professionals Scheme 403 (up to 3,000 visas a year, pre-application ballot, eligible fields)
• Department of Home Affairs, Subclass 403 MATES stream visa (full eligibility criteria, AUD 470 charge, graduated on or after 1 November 2023, NIRF Overall 2024 list, English table, about AUD 5,000, 30 days to apply, 12 month first entry, 24 month stay)
• Department of Home Affairs, MATES ballot registration (AUD 25 fee, ballot status definitions, 2025-2026 registration and selection dates)
• Department of Home Affairs, MATES ballot eligibility (ImmiAccount, Indian passport, PAN card, age at registration open, one registration per ballot, annual ballot process)
• Department of Home Affairs, after you register (registration statuses, 30 calendar days, same passport, PAN must match, registration is not a visa application)
• Department of Home Affairs, MATES visa applicant factsheet (NIRF Overall list only, affiliated institutions do not qualify, no strict requirement to work in the nominated field)
• Migration (Subclass 403 (MATES Stream) Visa Pre-application Process) Determination (LIN 24/069) 2024 (India only, statutory ballot eligibility, random selection by computer program, minimum 28 days to apply, when a registration lapses)
• Migration (Specification of Study and English Language Requirements (Subclass 403 (MATES Stream) Visa) (LIN 24/072) Instrument 2024 (Schedule 1, the 100 institutions; Schedule 2, qualifications; section 8, seven industries; Schedule 3, English scores)
• NIRF India Rankings 2024, Overall (the source list Schedule 1 was copied from)
• NIRF India Rankings 2025, Overall (the newer edition that does not govern MATES)
• NIRF India Rankings 2024, Engineering (used to identify the 48 engineering institutions that are not on the Overall list)
• Australian High Commission New Delhi, MATES ballot for program year 2025-26 (six week window, first selection 15 December 2025, further selections until 30 June 2026)
• Department of Home Affairs, current visa pricing (AUD 470 and additional applicant charges for the MATES stream, AUD 5,750 for the 485 Post-Higher Education Work stream)
• Department of Home Affairs, visa processing times guide (Subclass 403 MATES stream percentiles, read 23 July 2026)
• Department of Home Affairs, see your visa conditions (conditions that may attach to the 403 MATES stream, including 8501, 8503 and 8526)
• Department of Home Affairs, Subclass 485 Post-Higher Education Work stream (age 35 bar, must be in Australia, CRICOS registered course, 2 to 3 year stay)

Related reading. If your institution is not on the MATES schedule, start with the guide to studying in Australia, then work through the Subclass 500 student visa and the Subclass 485 post-study work visa, which is the Australian side of the same two year work opportunity.