The household test asks three questions: whether you share responsibility for any children, what your living arrangements are, and how you share the housework. The strongest answer to the middle one is both of your names at one address over time. Stronger still is an outside organisation holding that address for each of you separately, like your bank, your insurer, your super fund or a government agency. Those records are hard to arrange and easy for a case officer to trust.
There are three sub-elements, not one. Children, living arrangements, and the sharing of housework. The housework one has no document behind it, which is exactly why it gets skipped.
Third-party records beat your own paperwork. A joint lease is one document you produced. Five organisations independently holding the same address for both of you is a pattern you could not have staged.
A parcel is not evidence. Courier cards, delivery notes and order confirmations prove that somebody typed an address into a checkout form. Anyone can send a parcel anywhere.
Australia Post mail redirection records are underused. A redirection order names the address you left, the address you moved to, and the date. One application can carry up to six names.
A lease in one partner's name is not a knockout. The regulation asks about your living arrangements, not about whose signature is on the tenancy agreement.
Couples who lived together overseas have a household document most never think to ask for: a residence certificate from that country's civil registry.
The lease is in your partner's name because they signed it two years before you met. The electricity account is in yours. There is a pile of parcel slips on the hall table and neither of you has any idea whether it counts for anything.
Of the four areas the Department weighs, the household one is the one people guess at most. It is also the one with the clearest rules, which makes it the easiest to fix.
What does "nature of the household" mean on a partner visa?
It means three specific things, and they are written down. The Migration Regulations 1994 set out the household pillar at reg 1.15A(3)(b) for married couples and reg 1.09A(3)(b) for de facto couples. The wording is word for word identical in both:
any joint responsibility for the care and support of children
the living arrangements of the persons
any sharing of the responsibility for housework
That is the entire list. It is the shortest of the four pillars and the one most often reduced to "send us a lease".
The three are not a menu. The Full Federal Court held in He v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection [2017] FCAFC 206 that each of the specific matters listed in the regulation is effectively a question the decision-maker has to answer. A file that says nothing at all about one of the three leaves that question for a case officer to answer without you.
Each part asks something different:
Children. Not just children you have together. Children from an earlier relationship count if you both take responsibility for them: school pickups, medical appointments, paying for things, being named as a contact.
Living arrangements. Where you live, who lives there with you, and how long that has been true. This is where most of the documents go.
Housework. How you divide the running of the home. There is no form for this one and no document to upload, which is why it is the sub-element that quietly goes unanswered.
The household pillar is one of four the case officer must consider, alongside the financial, social and commitment pillars. For the four-pillar framework as a whole, see our ultimate guide to the partner visa.
What is the strongest household evidence?
Both of your names attached to one address, across months rather than days, in records kept by organisations outside your relationship.
That last part is the bit people miss. A joint lease is good evidence. But a joint lease is a single document, signed once, and you are the one who produced it. When your bank, your super fund, your insurer, your phone company and Services Australia all hold the same address for each of you individually, a case officer is reading five organisations' own records. You cannot arrange that in an afternoon, and a case officer knows it.
So collect mail and statements addressed to each partner separately at the shared address:
Bank and credit card statements
Superannuation statements (each fund sends one at least annually, and it carries a date and an address)
Insurance: home and contents, car, health, life
Electricity, gas, water, internet and mobile accounts
Letters from Services Australia or Medicare, and ATO notices of assessment
Electoral roll enrolment with the Australian Electoral Commission
Driver licence records showing the address change
Council rates notices
Correspondence about children: school enrolment, immunisation records, appointment letters naming both partners as contacts
Two documents deserve a special mention because they put both of you on one piece of paper. Joint home and contents insurance names both partners as insured at a single address, which is a commercial organisation accepting risk on the basis that you both live there. And Services Australia can put you and your partner on the same Medicare card, which takes a few minutes in a Medicare online account once both of you are enrolled.
This cuts both ways. A record held by an outside organisation is powerful because you did not write it, which also means it can contradict you.
The lesson runs wider than leases. The addresses organisations hold for each of you are part of your file whether you submit them or not. If your driver licence, your bank or the electoral roll still shows an old address, update it now, and expect the current one to matter.
Spread it across time, not across a single week. Ten documents all dated the month before submission tell a case officer when you gathered evidence, not when you started living together. Two documents per quarter, going back as far as your shared address does, reads completely differently.
What does not count as household evidence
A parcel is not evidence. Courier cards, delivery notes, tracking screenshots and order confirmations show that somebody typed an address into a checkout form. Anyone can send a parcel to any address, including you, to yourself, this afternoon.
The same goes for unaddressed marketing mail, a screenshot of a food delivery app with a saved address, and a photo of one of you standing in a kitchen. None of them involve an organisation that holds a record about where a person lives, which is the whole point of the exercise.
The test to apply before you upload anything: does an organisation outside your relationship keep this address on file for this person? If yes, it is household evidence. If not, it is paper.
The mail redirection record almost nobody submits
An Australia Post mail redirection is one of the few documents that evidences a move into a shared address, rather than presence at it once you are already there.
When you set one up, you tell Australia Post the address you are leaving, the address you are going to, and the date it starts. You get a receipt or confirmation letter with a nine-digit customer reference number. Australia Post asks for proof of identity to set one up, which is part of why the record carries weight: it is not a form you filled in anonymously.
One application can carry up to six names. A redirection covering both partners is therefore a single dated document, issued by a third party, placing two named people at one address. Most people delete the confirmation email the week they move.
Tern Tip
Go and find the confirmation now, before you need it. Search your inbox for "redirection" and "Australia Post" and save the PDF. The same rule applies to the removalist invoice, the receipt from your state's rental bond authority, and the connection confirmation from your electricity retailer. All three are dated third-party records of a move, all three are usually sitting in an inbox, and all three get thrown away by couples who then tell us they have no household evidence from that year.
How do you prove you share the housework?
You cannot upload it. This sub-element lives in your relationship statements and in what your witnesses say, and it is the most common gap in an otherwise strong household pillar.
Because there is nothing to attach, it usually goes unanswered altogether. That is the gap He v MIBP points at. A file that covers the address in forensic detail and says nothing about how the home is run has left one of the three questions blank. A case officer will then answer it from whatever else is in front of them.
The decision below runs a separate sub-heading for exactly that question: "Is there sharing of the responsibility of housework?"
What to write instead:
Describe the real division of labour in both relationship statements. Who cooks and how often. Who does the laundry. Who takes the bins out. Who books the plumber. Who does the grocery shop, and whose account pays for it.
Say it as it really is, including when it is lopsided. Two statements that both claim "we share everything equally" say nothing, and they read as coordinated. One partner doing most of the cooking because they finish work earlier is a detail only a real household produces.
Explain the odd arrangements. Shift work, a fly-in fly-out roster, one partner living at their parents' place two nights a week for a study commute: none of these sink a file. An unexplained version of any of them might.
Ask at least one witness who has actually been to your home to describe what they saw. Whose things were in which room, who cooked when they came for dinner, who cleared up. Our Form 888 guide covers who can write one and what makes a statement persuasive.
What if the lease or the bills are in one partner's name only?
Very common, and not a knockout. The regulation asks about your living arrangements, not about whose signature is on the tenancy agreement. Plenty of couples never get both names on a lease: one partner signed it before they met, or had no Australian rental history, or was on a temporary visa shorter than the lease term.
Three things go in the file instead:
Contribution records. Regular transfers from the non-tenant partner covering rent or bills, with a reference on the transaction that a bank statement will show. Regularity matters more than the amount. This overlaps with the financial pillar, and it is fine for one document to do work in two places.
A letter from the landlord or property manager. On letterhead, signed and dated, confirming who actually lived at the property and for which dates. Real estate agents write these routinely for rental references, so the ask is not unusual. Include the agent's contact details so the Department can verify it if it wants to.
An explanation in both relationship statements. One or two sentences on why the lease is in one name. A case officer who is told the reason stops wondering about it.
Then fix it going forward. Adding a partner to a utility account is often a phone call, and it starts a dated record from that day. Some leases can be varied to add a tenant; some cannot. Do whichever is available now rather than the month before submission, so the record has time to build.
Never alter, backdate or recreate a document to fill a gap. A tenancy letter with the dates nudged is the fastest route to a finding under PIC 4020. That carries a three-year bar on most visas, which is far worse than the thin pillar it was meant to fix. See our guide to PIC 4020.
Household evidence when you live outside Australia
If you have lived together overseas, the civil registry of that country is usually your strongest household document. In our experience it is also the one couples applying from outside Australia most often miss.
Many countries maintain a population register that records where each resident lives, and will issue a certificate on request. This is a formal certificate from a civic authority, not a piece of addressed mail, and some versions list every person registered at the address. That puts both of you on one government-issued document. For a couple applying from outside Australia, it is often the only real household proof they have. Ask the civil registry or town hall where you lived whether it issues one, and ask for the household version if it has one.
Two cautions. Some registers record a registered address rather than where a person actually lives, so check that the certificate shows the home you really shared. And not every country keeps a residence register; where there is none, the standard proof-of-address documents for each partner at the address do the job.
Every certificate needs an English translation. Where a document is translated outside Australia, the translator does not need to be NAATI accredited, but the translation has to carry their full name, address, phone number and details of their qualifications. Inside Australia, use a NAATI-accredited translator.
What if you have never lived together at all?
The household pillar is still assessed, and it can still be satisfied. The Tribunal looks at whether you have shared a home in the past, how you run daily life across the distance now, and whether you intend to live together again.
If this is your situation, the household section of your file has three jobs. Document the period you did share a home. Show how the household runs now across the distance. And evidence the concrete plan to live together again. Our post on long-distance and online-met relationships goes deeper on the distance question, and our thin-evidence guide covers what to do when several pillars are light at once.
If you have moved: build an address timeline
If you have moved during the relationship, the dates are the thing to get right. You each declare a full address history: the applicant in the visa application, and the sponsor in their sponsorship application. The dates for every address you shared have to agree across the two histories, and with your documents.
Mismatches get put to you to explain.
A one-page table is an optional way to keep this straight. It shows which documents cover each address and period, and it lets you check that your dates line up before submission:
Gaps are fine as long as you explain them. Three months living with a parent while you saved for a bond is normal. Three unexplained months looks like a separation, and a case officer will read it that way unless you say otherwise.
Four addresses in five years did not hurt that couple, because they moved together and the paper followed them. The risk is in dates that do not agree, between your two address histories or between those histories and your documents.
Keep the timeline updated after the application is submitted. Median processing on the subclass 820, the onshore partner visa applied for from inside Australia, runs well over 18 months. The address history a case officer eventually reads is not the one that existed at submission. Our evidence refresh guide covers the schedule.
How Tern handles household evidence
Every plan on Tern's partner visa service starts with your address histories. You and your partner each give a full history with no gaps, and we match the two to find which addresses you shared and for which dates, so you don't have to work out which ones count. For each shared period we ask for evidence of living there together. Your documents are matched to the addresses they show, so you can see which periods are covered and which still have nothing behind them. We also look at how much of each period the documents actually cover: four years claimed at one address with one month of bills reads as one month. For documents like residence certificates, we check that both of you appear at the address, not just one.
We draft both relationship statements from each partner's own answers. They cover how your home runs day to day, including how you split the housework and other domestic jobs, and where something is missing, each of you gets follow-up questions separately. You each sign your own statement as your own account, and the two agree on the facts. If your plan includes lawyer review, an immigration lawyer then works through the file before we submit it and gives you a signed, written review of what to add or fix. On the household side, that review asks whether the documents place each partner at the address, whether they are spread across your time there rather than bunched just before submission, and whether the housework question is answered anywhere in the file.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as proof that you live together for a partner visa?
Our lease is only in one name. Will the partner visa be refused?
Do parcel delivery notes and Amazon orders count as household evidence?
How does the Department assess the sharing of housework?
We live overseas. What household evidence can we use?
Can we get a partner visa if we have never lived together?
How much household evidence should we submit?
Does adding my partner to my Medicare card help a partner visa application?
The bottom line
The household pillar is three questions, not one. Answer all three. Put both names at one address across time, prefer records that organisations outside your relationship keep about you, and say plainly in both statements how the home actually runs.
If your lease is in one name, or the bills are, or you have never shared an address at all, none of that is fatal. What sinks the household pillar is leaving it to a case officer to work out. Do the work for them: address dates that agree across both of your histories, third-party records spread across that time, and a straight explanation of anything that looks odd. If you want to see where your own evidence actually lands, our free partner visa evidence checker gives an indicative read across all four pillars in a few minutes.
If you would rather have someone check that your household evidence covers all three sub-elements before it goes in, choose a plan on Tern's partner visa service that includes lawyer review, where an immigration lawyer gives you a signed, written review of the file before submission.
