How we check
Every answer on this site is produced by one rules engine that encodes the actual legislative instruments — not summaries of summaries. This page explains the method, so you can decide whether to trust it and verify anything yourself.
The sources we encode
The specified work rules live in two legislative instruments made under the Migration Regulations 1994. We transcribe the current authorised compilations — work categories and every postcode range in Schedule 1 — directly from the Federal Register of Legislation:
Migration (Specified work and areas for subclass 417 visas) Instrument (LIN 22/012) 2022 — Compilation No. 3
Federal Register of Legislation · in force from 5 April 2025
View official government source ↗Migration (Specified work and areas for subclass 462 visas) Instrument (LIN 22/013) 2022 — Compilation No. 3
Federal Register of Legislation · in force from 5 April 2025
View official government source ↗Migration (Specified Subclass 417 Work Exemption) Instrument (LIN 24/039) 2024
Federal Register of Legislation · in force from 1 July 2024
View official government source ↗
Day requirements and evidence guidance come from the Department of Home Affairs visa pages. Third-party sites are never used as authorities for an eligibility conclusion.
How a check works
- Your job is matched to a specified work category (79 occupations with their common synonyms). Where a job title alone can't determine the category — a cleaner, an electrician — we ask one follow-up question instead of guessing.
- Your location is resolved to a postcode and classified against the Schedule 1 areas: Regional Australia, Northern Australia, Remote and Very Remote Australia, and the four extra tourism-and-hospitality postcodes.
- Your visa subclass selects which rules apply — the 417 and 462 instruments differ (mining counts for 417 only; fishing and forestry are Northern-Australia-only for 462).
- Your passport is checked against exemptions — currently the UK exemption for second and third 417 visas.
The engine currently encodes 17 rules and 1 passport exemption, each carrying its source, effective date and the date we last verified it. An automated test suite covers boundary postcodes, subclass differences and ambiguous occupations, and a data-integrity check runs on every deployment — a rule without a source fails the build.
When we say “uncertain” — and mean it
We return an uncertain result whenever the rules don't support a confident answer: job titles that depend on duties, bushfire and disaster recovery areas (which the instruments define by local government area, not postcode), and even a printing anomaly in the instruments themselves — the NSW remote list prints one range as “2832 to 283”, so we refuse to guess about postcodes 2833–2836 rather than silently pick an interpretation. A green answer you can't rely on is worse than an honest “check first”.
How the rules stay current
We re-verify the instruments and Home Affairs pages against the Federal Register of Legislation and record every change in the rule change log. The “rules last checked” date shown across the site — currently 12 August 2026 — is that verification date, not a publication date.
What this site is not
We're not the government, a job board, or a migration agency, and nothing here is immigration or legal advice. Every result links the official sources so you can verify the conclusion — and for decisions that matter, confirm with the Department of Home Affairs or a registered migration agent.