Student visa holders make up a meaningful slice of Australia’s casual and temp workforce - hospitality, warehousing, aged care support, events. For a labour hire agency, they’re often exactly the flexible workforce your clients need. They’re also a compliance obligation that sits with you, not your client: as the employer of record, your agency wears the risk if a worker exceeds their permitted hours or their visa status changes.

The rules that matter

  • Work-hour caps apply during study periods. Student visa holders are limited to a capped number of hours per fortnight while their course is in session - currently 48 hours per fortnight - with unrestricted hours during scheduled course breaks.
  • The cap is a rolling fortnight, not a calendar one. Any 14-day period matters. A worker who did 20 hours last week can’t do 30 this week during term time, even across different hosts - and hours worked through other agencies count too.
  • Checking once isn’t checking. Visa conditions change: courses end, visas expire, statuses shift. An entitlement check at registration that’s never repeated is how agencies end up employing someone unlawfully without knowing it.
  • Penalties land on the employer. Allowing a visa holder to breach their conditions can mean civil penalties and, for the worker, visa cancellation. “The client rostered them” is not a defence for the entity that pays them.

Where agencies get caught

The pattern is nearly always the same: the paperwork was right on day one, and nothing watched it after that. The course finished. The visa was renewed onto different conditions - or wasn’t renewed at all. Term ended and restarted, and the unrestricted-hours window quietly closed while the roster stayed heavy.

None of that is a people problem. It’s a systems problem: visa compliance is a date-driven, hours-driven obligation, and spreadsheets don’t watch dates or add up rolling fortnights.

How RecruitOnline handles it

Work rights are part of the candidate record, not a side spreadsheet: entitlement documents and expiry dates live on the profile with compliance alerts before they lapse, work-rights requirements can screen applicants at the point of application, and because bookings and timesheets live in the same system as the candidate, the hours a visa holder is actually working are visible in one place - not discovered at audit time.

If student visa workers are part of your workforce and the tracking still lives in a spreadsheet, talk to us - this is one of the most common things we set up for new agencies.

This article is general information, not immigration or legal advice - visa conditions change, and your obligations depend on your circumstances.