What Is The Annual Market Salary Rate? Your Own Payroll Already Decided It

The annual market salary rate is the annual earnings an equivalent Australian worker would be paid for the nominated occupation, worked out under a method the Minister sets by legislative instrument. It is not a band you pick. Where someone in your business already does that work, what you pay them is the rate. Outstaffer employs people in the country they already live in, so treat this as an interested account.

Most employers lodging a nomination have never opened the method.

The method, and the instrument nobody reads

The document is IMMI 18/033, and the current compilation took effect on 1 July 2026. It is made under subregulation 2.72(17) of the Migration Regulations 1994.

Two sections carry the whole method. Section 7 applies where an Australian worker is employed in the same workplace, at the same location, performing equivalent work to the nominee. Section 8 applies where there is no such person.

Which one are you in?

Section 7, almost certainly, if you are adding to a role you already run in Australia.

The instrument that carried the number stopped carrying it

Until this year the same instrument specified the income threshold as well as the method. On 1 July 2026 it was amended and renamed, and the threshold came out. The title no longer carries the words “Income Threshold”.

What is left is the method and one figure: section 5 specifies an amount of annual earnings of AUD 250,000 for the purposes of paragraphs 2.72(15)(b), 2.72C(15)(b) and 2.79(1A)(b).

So the field spent this year watching the thresholds move while the part that decides most nominations sat untouched. The floor those thresholds set is the number everyone quotes. The method is the one that binds.

Why the market salary rate is a payroll question

Read section 7 slowly. Where a fair work, state industrial or transitional instrument applies to that Australian worker, the rate is the earnings specified in it, or a figure from relevant employment documents provided it is not less than that. Where no such instrument applies, the rate is what an equivalent Australian worker earns, taken from relevant employment documents.

Relevant employment documents, defined in section 4, means pay slips and the contract of employment.

Your pay slips. Not a market study.

Run it. If an Australian doing equivalent work at the same site is on $118,000, that is the number the nomination is measured against, and a nominee at $96,000 is $22,000 short of a figure your own payroll produced. No survey rescues that, because section 7 never asked for one.

What counts as evidence where nobody comparable exists?

Section 8 opens a wider list, shorter than most employers expect: Jobs and Skills Australia occupation and industry profiles, job advertisements in English from a national recruitment website or national print media that specify the salary, written advice from registered employer associations or unions, and remuneration surveys generated across the industry by a reputable body.

Three of those four are free. A recruitment agency salary guide is not on the list at all, and those guides have their own problems long before a delegate reads them.

The honest case for buying the survey anyway

A remuneration survey is the cleanest evidence for a thin occupation with no local comparator. Delegates assess them easily. If your occupation is unusual, buy one.

It stops being money well spent the moment a comparable Australian employee sits at the same address, because section 7 removes the question.

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What I would check before the nomination goes in

Pull the pay slips and the contract for whoever already does this work in the same workplace. That document set is what the nomination gets measured against, and it may already sit above the figure in your offer. Migration turns on facts a post cannot see, so get advice for your own case before you lodge.

Then ask whether the role needs to be in Australia at all. If it does not, price the same job where the person already lives and compare the two honestly.

So before you quote anyone a number: have you actually read what your own payroll says the market salary rate for that job already is?