What Is The Core Skills Income Threshold? It Is $73,150, And It Is Not What You Have To Pay

The core skills income threshold is $73,150. It sits in regulation 1.03 of the Migration Regulations 1994 as in force on 1 July 2026, and it is the floor a Core Skills stream nomination has to clear on the Skills in Demand visa. It is not the salary you have to pay. Outstaffer employs people in the country they already live in, so treat this as an interested account.

The number most Australian employers have been handed is also the wrong one.

What is the core skills income threshold, next to the two figures it gets confused with

Three thresholds live in the same definition, close enough to swap by accident. The compilation in force on 1 July 2026 sets the core skills income threshold at $73,150, the specialist skills income threshold at $135,000, and the temporary skilled migration income threshold at $79,423.

Where does the $79,423 figure come from?

It is the temporary skilled migration income threshold, a different line in the same regulation. An Australian migration advisory page currently states the core skills figure “rises to $79,423 from 1 July 2026” and puts the specialist threshold at $146,576. The regulation says $73,150 and $135,000. A delegate applies the regulation.

The Department’s own salary requirements page renders in the browser and served no figure at all when we fetched it this morning. Under regulation 5.42A the first indexation day is 1 July 2027, so these three numbers are fixed for eight months.

The threshold is a floor under the market rate, not a budget

Regulation 2.72 does not say pay the threshold. Where the nominee’s earnings will not reach the specified amount, the delegate must be satisfied of two things: that the annual market salary rate for the occupation, excluding non-monetary benefits, is not below the core skills income threshold, and that the nominee’s earnings will not be below that market rate.

The threshold screens the occupation. The market rate sets the pay.

So the question is never whether you can afford $73,150. It is what an Australian employer pays for that job, because that is the figure your nomination is measured against.

The arithmetic of budgeting against the wrong line

Take a role where the market rate in your business runs at $95,000, ordinary for a mid-level professional hire in a 30-person firm. The threshold is $73,150 and you pay $95,000. The gap is $21,850 a year, per head, and it appears in no threshold table anywhere.

Now add the misreading. A founder who budgeted to $79,423 because that was the number on the adviser’s page is $15,577 light before the nomination is lodged. That shortfall surfaces when the nomination is assessed, after the recruitment, which is the same queue problem already sitting behind your start date.

The threshold was never the constraint. Your own pay bands were.

The honest case for sponsoring anyway

Plenty of nominations clear this without anyone thinking about it, because the business was already paying the market rate and the floor sat harmlessly underneath. On a senior hire the core skills income threshold is academic and the paperwork is the only cost. That covers a lot of hires.

It stops covering them at the junior and mid end, where the market rate and the floor sit close together.

Should you check the number your adviser gave you?

Yes, and it takes a minute. Open the regulation, find the definition in 1.03, and confirm which of the three figures you were quoted. Get proper migration advice for your own situation, because a nomination may turn on facts this post cannot see.

Related reading

• Visa Sponsorship Is A Choice, And Canberra Just Narrowed The Road
• Moving Your Best Hire To Australia Is A Payroll Decision

The deeper question is whether the role has to be done here. The same work, done by someone employed where they already live, carries no threshold, no nomination and no market salary test, and the cost comparison is not close. Sponsorship buys a person in your time zone and your office, which is worth paying for when you need it.

If you were about to sponsor a role, price the other version first: put it through and see what it costs. So before budgeting against a threshold, which of the three numbers did your adviser actually give you?