At the time of writing this article the Department of Immigration’s website advises that ” … there can be long waiting times of up to 30 years before this visa is approved.”

We take issue with that statement, because so far as we are aware – and we have been looking after parent visa applications for many years – no subclass 804 visa application has ever taken 30 years to be processed to a decision.

While we acknowledge there are a limited number of visas available – 1,550 are available for the current program year under subclasses 103 and 804 – the Department of Immigration’s online queue calculator does not support such a long waiting time.

For example, an application for a subclass 804 visa with a queue date of 22 July 2015 has approximately 4,530 persons ahead of it in the queue. We do not see this as equating to a 30 year processing timeline.

More Details
At the present time the Department of Immigration’s Parents Visa Centre is processing to a decision subclass 804 visa applications with a queue date in November 2008.

The PVC is presently assessing applications lodged in November 2014 with a view to issuing a queue date.

Here are a few examples from our subclass 804 Aged Parent visa client list:

> Application lodged Sept 2013; medicals and police clearances requested Nov 2014; queue date Jan 2015

> Application lodged Dec 2013; medicals and police clearances requested Feb 2015; queue date July 2015

> Application lodged May 2014; medicals and police clearances requested May 2015; queue date June 2015

> Application lodged Sept 2014; medicals and police clearances requested June 2015; queue date July 2015

Remember that the time between the request for medicals and police clearances and the issuing of a queue date will depend on the time it takes the visa applicant to arrange the details requested. The quicker these are arranged the earlier will be the queue date, and hence the sooner the visa application will be assessed in due course.