Prospective Marriage visa (subclass 300): the Australian fiance visa explained

If you have ever typed "fiance visa Australia" into Google and come away more confused than when you started, that is fair. The Prospective Marriage visa (subclass 300), known as the PMV or sometimes the engagement visa, sits awkwardly between the well-trodden partner visa pathways and gets explained mostly through US fiance visa norms that do not apply here.

This post is the version we wish more couples had read before paying. It covers what the PMV actually is, when it is the right strategic move versus going direct on a 309 or 820, the cost and timing trade-offs, and the refusal patterns we see most often.

What is the Prospective Marriage visa (subclass 300)?

The Prospective Marriage visa is a temporary Australian visa, typically granted for 9 months, that lets an offshore applicant enter Australia, marry their nominated sponsor, and then lodge an onshore Subclass 820 partner visa at a reduced second-stage fee. It is governed by Schedule 2 Part 300 of the Migration Regulations 1994.

It sits inside the broader partner pathway as the "engaged but not yet eligible for a partner visa" entry point. Of the four practical ways into Australia's partner-pathway system, only one of them does not require an existing marriage or a 12-month de facto record at the time of application:

1. Subclass 820/801 onshore: applicant in Australia, already married or de facto with 12+ months of cohabitation (or a registered relationship).
2. Subclass 309/100 offshore: applicant outside Australia, already married or de facto with 12+ months of cohabitation (or a registered relationship).
3. Subclass 300 offshore: applicant outside Australia, engaged, intending to marry inside the visa period.
4. Subclass 820/801 onshore via a prior PMV 300: the discounted second-stage entry into the partner-pathway track.

Read in that order, the PMV stops looking like a separate product and starts looking like what it really is: a temporary bridge into the 820/801 partner-visa track for couples who cannot yet meet the marriage or de facto test.

One visa, two stages

A PMV is really a two-payment partner visa. You pay AUD $9,365 for the PMV, enter Australia, marry, then lodge the onshore 820 at a discounted second-stage fee. The 820 then progresses to permanent residence (the 801 stage) roughly two years after lodgement under current policy.

For a deeper look at the partner pathway as a whole, see the ultimate guide to the Australian partner visa.

When is the PMV the right path (and when is it not)?

The PMV is the right path when you are offshore, engaged, do not yet have 12 months of cohabitation, and you want to marry in Australia. In most other situations, going directly to a 309 or 820 is cheaper, lower-variance on timing, or both.

The most common mistake we see is couples paying for a PMV when they were already eligible for a direct partner visa, or when an overseas wedding would have been more efficient. Here is the decision tree as we use it in practice.

The framing we keep coming back to: PMV is narrowly indicated. It is the right answer for a smaller cohort than marketing copy suggests. If marrying overseas is logistically and culturally fine, the 309 saves you a payment cycle and the operational overhead of a two-stage application, with broadly similar median processing times and a tighter long tail.

For couples whose relationship started online or across borders, the partner visa for couples who met online or long-distance walks through the evidence implications in more detail. If 12 months of cohabitation is the only thing missing, the de facto vs married partner visa comparison sets out the registration and waiver options.

What are the eligibility criteria for the PMV?

The PMV has two sets of criteria: things you have to satisfy when you lodge, and things you have to satisfy when the Department decides. The application criteria define who can lodge. The decision criteria define who actually gets granted.

When you lodge, you have to be at least 18, sponsored by an Australian citizen, permanent resident, or eligible NZ citizen, and you have to satisfy two relationship tests that often get conflated. The first is that you have met your fiancé in person, as adults. The second is that you know each other personally. Departmental policy treats these as two separate tests, not one. A single meeting plus thin ongoing contact can satisfy "met in person" but fail "personally known."

You also have to establish that you both genuinely intend to marry, and that the marriage is intended to take place within the visa's validity. That intention is what case officers spend the most time on, and where most refusals land. When the decision is made there has to be no impediment to the marriage in Australian law.

At decision time, you have to be outside Australia. The rule applies to the moment of grant, not to the whole processing window. Visiting Australia on a visitor visa while your PMV is being processed is explicitly allowed and common, and given the 12 to 27 month wait most applicants do visit at least once. The thing to watch is being onshore when the case officer is ready to grant: at that moment the visa cannot be granted, so the safer pattern is to time visits earlier in the wait and be offshore by the time your file feels close to a decision. The Department does not tell you when decision day is, so if your file feels close, be offshore.

Sponsorship and the 5-year limitation

Sponsors are approved under the same partner sponsorship rules in regs 1.20J to 1.20KC that apply to 820 and 309 sponsors. The same 5-year limitation periods apply: if your sponsor has previously sponsored another partner or held a PMV themselves, there are cooldowns and prior-sponsorship checks that can delay or block sponsorship approval.

For an overview of what the sponsor is signing up for, see the sponsor's role in an Australian partner visa.

What has to happen inside the 9-month window?

Once your PMV is granted, three things have to happen before it expires: you enter Australia, you marry your sponsor under Australian law, and you lodge the onshore Subclass 820 partner visa application. Missing any of these resets the pathway and loses you the discounted second-stage fee.

Lodging the Notice of Intended Marriage

Under section 42 of the Marriage Act 1961, a Notice of Intended Marriage (NoIM) must be given to an authorised celebrant no less than one month and no more than 18 months before the wedding. Since June 2024, the NoIM can also be witnessed remotely, which makes the form itself straightforward for an offshore applicant to lodge with an Australian celebrant when the time comes.

The cleanest sequence is to wait until the PMV is granted, then lodge the NoIM. You will still have around 8 months to marry inside the 9-month window. Some couples are tempted to lodge the NoIM at PMV lodgement time as extra evidence of intention to marry. The form expires after 18 months and PMV processing routinely runs longer than that, but re-lodging is just paperwork. The real reason to wait is to avoid committing to wedding logistics (venue deposits, family travel, celebrant relationships) for a visa that has not been granted yet.

Marrying under the Marriage Act 1961

In practice the marriage happens in Australia under the Marriage Act 1961. Marrying overseas after grant is technically permitted but introduces complications around recognition and timing. Marrying before the 300 is decided means you no longer meet the 300 criteria, and the correct response is to notify Home Affairs in writing immediately and ask that the application be treated as a Subclass 309/100. Done before a decision is made, the conversion preserves your original application date and no further VAC is payable. Done too late, the 300 will be refused on the changed circumstances and a fresh 309 at full VAC is your only route forward.

Lodging the 820 before the PMV expires

This is the step that quietly determines whether the PMV paid off. The reduced second-stage fee only applies if the 820 is lodged before the PMV expires. Miss the window and a fresh 820 costs the full AUD $9,365, plus any Schedule 3 issues if the applicant has gone unlawful in the meantime. For what happens after that 820 is in the queue, see after you lodge: managing your partner visa during the wait.

How much does the PMV path really cost?

In Australian government fees, the PMV pathway is two payments: AUD $9,365 for the PMV upfront, then a reduced second-stage 820/801 fee paid after marriage (currently AUD $1,560, indexed annually on 1 July). The same applicant going direct via a 309 or onshore 820 pays a single AUD $9,365, so the PMV pathway ends up more expensive by that second-stage amount. The premium is the price of optionality: the ability to bring an offshore fiance into Australia without yet having a marriage certificate or 12 months of cohabitation evidence.

The piece couples most often miss when budgeting is that second-stage fee. People plan for the AUD $9,365 PMV alone and discover the 820 conversion fee with weeks left on their visa. It is reduced, but it is real, and it must be paid before the PMV expires.

If the PMV path adds a meaningful premium and you have a route to either marry overseas or build de facto evidence, the cheaper move is almost always to go direct. The PMV pays off when the direct routes are not available, not when they are inconvenient.

Is the PMV faster than a 309?

It depends where in the queue your case lands. At the median, the 300 actually moves slightly faster than the 309: around 14 months for the 300 vs around 15 months for the 309 as of mid-2026. At the 75th percentile both subclasses sit in the 20 to 22 month range. The gap opens in the long tail: the slowest 5% of 300s take around 34 months, versus around 27 months for the slowest 5% of 309s. So the typical 300 is not slower than the typical 309, but a 300 that gets stuck takes meaningfully longer to clear.

The reason for the long tail is structural. PMV case officers run an additional assessment layer on "genuine intention to marry within the visa period" on top of the relationship-genuineness assessment that 309 officers run. When something on that limb needs more evidence, the file sits longer. The Department publishes per-subclass percentiles on its Global Visa Processing Times page and they shift quarterly, so always check the current figure before relying on a number.

The practical implication: PMV is not the fast path. It is the path you take when the alternative is "wait years to build a de facto record" or "marry abroad without ever having visited Australia together." When 309 is genuinely on the table, 309 will usually clear faster.

What evidence does a PMV need?

A PMV refocuses the evidence stack away from cohabitation and joint finances (the pillars of an 820) and onto two forward-looking pillars: that the couple has met in person and personally knows each other, and that they genuinely intend to marry inside the visa period.

For the met-in-person and personally-known limbs, case officers look for passport stamps showing physical co-presence, dated photos with both faces visible across varied locations, boarding passes and joint hotel or flight bookings, and statements from third parties who have met the couple in person. Sparse contact and a single meeting are the most common reason the "personally known" limb fails.

For intention to marry, the single strongest piece of evidence is a lodged NoIM with an Australian authorised celebrant. Backed up by a booked venue, a concrete date, engagement announcements, planning correspondence, and statutory declarations from both partners, that intention becomes hard for a case officer to refuse.

A relationship-genuineness layer still applies, but at a lower threshold than the 820. The Department is not yet asking you to prove a backwards-looking shared life. It is asking you to prove a forward-looking commitment. That asymmetry cuts both ways: PMV is easier to evidence than 820 for newer relationships, and harder than 820 for established couples who have to articulate why they are not already de facto.

Common PMV pitfalls

Refusals on the PMV cluster around a few patterns, and most of them are avoidable with planning rather than evidence.

The first is marrying before grant. Once you are married the 300 can no longer be granted, so the correct move is to notify Home Affairs in writing straight away and request the application be treated as a 309/100. Done before the 300 is decided, that conversion is fee-free and your application date is preserved. Done after a decision has issued, the 300 will be refused and you start over at the full 309 VAC. Either way, the evidence bar shifts: the 309 is assessed on a backward-looking genuine-and-continuing relationship, not a forward-looking intention to marry, and couples who married early are often light on the shared-life evidence a 309 officer expects.

The second is missing the 820 lodgement window. The PMV expires, the applicant goes onshore unlawful, and the next partner visa costs the full AUD $9,365 with potential Schedule 3 issues. Section 48 and Schedule 3 on a partner visa covers what happens when an applicant is onshore without a substantive visa.

The third pattern we encode against in our intake: underweighting the "personally known" limb. Two adults, one in-person meeting, sparse messages, large language barrier with no translator history, large age gap with no shared cultural anchor. That combination drives refusals not because the relationship is not real, but because the evidence does not establish the limb the regulations require. Genuine relationships still get refused if they are not proven, and PMV is one of the subclasses where that is most visible. The thin-evidence partner visa playbook walks through how to prove a real relationship that does not have a long paper trail yet.

Can same-sex couples apply for a PMV?

Yes. The Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 commenced on 9 December 2017 and extended Australian marriage law to same-sex couples. The PMV has applied equally since.

This is one of the highest-value strategic uses of the PMV. For same-sex couples whose home country does not recognise same-sex marriage, or where marrying locally is unsafe or unlawful, the PMV lets the couple marry in Australia under Australian law and then enter the partner-pathway track. The 309 typically is not available in that situation because there is no legally recognised marriage to lodge under, and a de facto 309 needs 12 months of provable cohabitation that the couple may not have been able to safely build.

How Tern handles the PMV pathway

Tern's partner pathway, which covers the 300, 820/801, and 309/100, is designed and reviewed by Antonious Nehme, an immigration lawyer. The service fee for the partner pathway starts at AUD $1,400. The lower price is a consequence of the modern, software-led workflow we run, not a discount on the same lawyer review you would get elsewhere.

For PMV applicants specifically, the intake encodes the offshore-at-decision rule, the "met in person" and "intention to marry" tests, and the NoIM timing question as live eligibility checks. You see whether PMV is actually the right pathway before you pay, and the workflow flags the 820 lodgement deadline so the second-stage fee discount does not get lost to a calendar miss.

Start your partner-pathway application with Tern and the platform will tell you whether the PMV, the 309, or the 820 fits your situation before you commit to any of them.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line on the PMV

The Prospective Marriage visa is a precision tool, not a shortcut. It is the right move for offshore engaged couples who want to marry in Australia, for couples whose cultural or religious context requires marriage before cohabitation, and for same-sex couples from countries where marrying locally is unsafe. For everyone else, a direct 309 or 820 will usually be cheaper or faster or both.

If you are weighing the PMV against the alternatives, the question to start with is not "which visa do I want." It is "where am I, where is my partner, are we married, and how long have we lived together." The answer to those four questions almost always tells you which subclass fits before you read a word of the eligibility rules.

Start your partner-pathway application with Tern and we will branch you into the right subclass before you pay anything.