Is There a List of Aged Care Employers Who Can Sponsor a 482 Visa?
You have probably read a dozen pages telling you no such list exists, or implying that one exists but is confidential, or offering to sell you access to one. The reason is not that the list is hidden. It is that the list does not do the thing most people searching for it are hoping for.
There Is a List. The Department of Home Affairs Publishes It, It Is Free, and It Is Updated at the End of Each Month.
It sits on the immi.homeaffairs.gov.au website and has a category called Industry, Aged Care. Filter to those rows and you are looking at the aged care providers that can sponsor a direct care worker on a 482 visa right now.
It is not a jobs board. It will not tell you who is hiring, who will nominate you, or who is worth your time. It tells you one thing, which employers hold the legal instrument, and that one thing is still the single most useful piece of public information available to an aged care worker trying to stay in Australia.
Everyone Else Can Apply to Any Approved Sponsor. You Cannot.
Aged care direct care occupations are not on the Core Skills Occupation List. For most care roles, the standard 482 route is closed, and sponsorship runs through the Aged Care Industry Labour Agreement instead. That means the question is not whether an employer wants to sponsor you. It is whether they hold an agreement at all.
Trying to Work Out Whether a Specific Aged Care Employer Can Sponsor You? A Confidential Review Settles It Faster Than Applying Blind.
Whether the employer you are looking at holds a current agreement, whether your occupation fits what their agreement covers, and whether there is time on your visa for this to complete, all turn on your specifics. A migration professional can confirm the position before you send another application.
The List That Already Exists
The page is called List of current labour agreements. It sits under the employing and sponsoring someone section of the immigration website, and it is a plain alphabetical listing with four columns.
| Column | What It Tells You |
|---|---|
| Company | The legal entity that signed the agreement. Not the trading name on the job ad. |
| Agreement type | Which agreement. Aged care providers appear as Industry, Aged Care. Others appear as a DAMA region, Company Specific, GTS, or another industry. |
| Start date | When the agreement commenced. |
| End date | When it expires. This column matters more than people realise. |
At the time of writing the page carried a note that the list was current as at 31 August 2026, with a last updated stamp of 25 September 2026, and the site states the list is updated at the end of each month. Across every industry there are roughly 5,600 agreements in force.
An employer that holds an Aged Care Industry Labour Agreement, the agreement usually shortened to ACILA, appears in these rows. If you have been told your employer is "applying for the aged care agreement" or "waiting on the labour agreement", this list is where you find out whether that has actually happened.
How to Search It Properly
Search the legal entity name, not the brand. Most aged care providers trade under a name that differs from the company on the agreement, and a group may run twenty sites under one entity or run each state under a separate one. Get the entity name and ABN from the free ABN Lookup at abr.business.gov.au first, then search the labour agreement list for that name. Searching the name on the uniform will often return nothing even when an agreement exists.
The Number That Should Change How You Apply
When you filter the list to the aged care industry category, the count is small. A third party mirror of the Department list counted 176 employers under that category in July 2026. Treat that figure as indicative rather than exact, and count it yourself on the official page, because it moves every month.
Now put it next to the other number. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission provider register lists approximately 5,276 registered aged care providers in Australia.
Ninety Seven Per Cent of Providers Cannot Sponsor You Today, Whatever They Say in an Interview.
If you have sent fifty applications to aged care providers and heard nothing about sponsorship, the most likely explanation is not your resume, your English, or your experience. It is that forty eight of those fifty had no instrument to sponsor anyone. Ten targeted applications to employers you have confirmed on the list is a better use of a month than fifty untargeted ones.
Five Things Being on the List Does Not Prove
This is where the honest answer costs you something, so read it before you build a plan around a company name you found.
| What People Assume | What the List Actually Supports |
|---|---|
| They are hiring | Nothing. There is no vacancy data on the list at all. An agreement can sit unused for a year. |
| They are a good employer | Nothing. The Department states the list is not a list of preferred providers. It is a record of instruments, not a recommendation. |
| The agreement is live | Check the end date column. Agreements run for a fixed term and are not always renewed. An agreement that expires next month is close to useless to you. |
| They can sponsor my occupation | Not necessarily. An agreement covers specified occupations, numbers and concessions. Your occupation may not be in theirs, or the ceiling for the year may already be used. |
| The list is complete | No. The Department says some details may not be published where that is needed to protect commercially sensitive business information or national security information. An employer can hold a valid agreement and not appear. |
That last point is worth sitting with. A missing name is weaker evidence than a present one. If your employer is not on the list, the probable explanation is that they do not hold an agreement, but it is not proof.
The Four Other Registers, and What Each One Actually Proves
The labour agreement list answers one question. Four other public registers answer the questions it leaves open, and each of them is also free.
| Register | Who Runs It | What It Proves | What It Does Not Prove |
|---|---|---|---|
| List of current labour agreements | Department of Home Affairs | This employer holds an agreement, of this type, expiring on this date | Vacancies, conduct, occupations, or whether they will nominate you |
| Register of sanctioned sponsors | Australian Border Force | This sponsor has been sanctioned for breaching sponsorship obligations, covering breaches since 18 March 2015 | That absence from the register means a clean record. The page notes sponsors subject to sanctions may not appear until updates are applied |
| Provider register and Find a provider | Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission | The organisation is a registered aged care provider, with a registration end date, and its compliance and rating history | Anything at all about visa sponsorship |
| NDIS Provider Register | NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission | The organisation is a registered NDIS provider, plus published compliance and enforcement actions | Anything at all about visa sponsorship |
| Aged care labour agreements page | United Workers Union | This provider has signed, or is signing, a memorandum of understanding with that union | That an agreement exists yet. This is an earlier stage |
Run together, those five sources give you a reasonable picture: whether the employer exists as a provider, whether it holds the instrument, whether it has been sanctioned, and whether it is in the middle of getting one. No single source answers all four, and no paid list answers any of them better.
The One List That Looks Forward Instead of Backward
The United Workers Union publishes a section listing aged care providers with existing labour agreements or currently in process, grouped by state. It runs to several dozen names across Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia, and it includes large groups alongside small single site homes.
This matters because union engagement comes first in the sequence. A provider cannot execute an aged care industry labour agreement without consulting the relevant union, so a provider that appears on the union page but not yet on the Home Affairs list is somewhere in the middle of the process. That is genuinely useful information if you are deciding whether to wait.
Three Caveats, and They Are the Union's Own
- The page states that the list does not reflect all the discussions the union is currently having, so it is not a complete picture of providers in process.
- The list carries no as at date for individual entries, and it does not separate providers that have signed from those still negotiating.
- The United Workers Union is one of three unions covering aged care workers. The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation and the Health Services Union also represent this workforce, and more than one may be party to an agreement. A provider dealing with a different union will not appear here at all.
If you have found your employer on the union page and want to know what the remaining timeline looks like, we have written that out step by step in our guide on what happens when your aged care employer does not hold an ACILA.
The Register That Is Coming, and Why It Is Not Here Yet
There is a second list on the way, and it would be better than the one that exists.
The Migration Amendment (Combatting Migrant Exploitation) Act 2026 was enacted in April 2026. It allows the Department to publish information about approved work sponsors on its website. Industry commentary on the amendments set out the likely fields: sponsor name, ABN, business postcode, the type of sponsorship approval, the number of workers nominated, and the occupations nominated.
Why Those Fields Matter
Read that list of fields again. Number of nominations and occupations nominated is much closer to the question you are actually asking than "holds an agreement" is. An employer with an agreement and zero nominations in two years is a different proposition from one with forty.
Commentary published in May 2026 expected the details to appear on the Department website by early September 2026. The Act commences on a day fixed by proclamation, or six months after Royal Assent if no proclamation is made earlier. As at 9 October 2026 we have not been able to confirm the register is live.
The Lists You Should Not Pay For
Everything Genuine in a Paid Sponsor List Is Already in the Free Home Affairs List, and Whatever Has Been Added to It Is Either Out of Date or Invented.
A spreadsheet or shared document titled something like "Australia aged care sponsors 2026", circulated on Facebook and WhatsApp. An agent offering access to a sponsor for a fee. A job ad promising sponsorship on payment of a processing or placement charge.
There is no private source of labour agreement data. The Department is the only party that knows who holds an agreement, and it publishes the answer at the end of every month.
A one question test for anyone selling you a sponsor list: ask them to name the four columns on the Department of Home Affairs list of current labour agreements. Anyone who works in this area knows them. If the answer is vague, they have never opened the official list, and whatever they are selling you was assembled from somewhere else.
Paying for a job offer is also a separate problem from paying for a list. Asking for or receiving a benefit in return for sponsorship is prohibited under the Migration Act, and the prohibition runs in both directions, which means an employer or agent who asks you for money for a nomination is committing an offence and you are not. We cover that, and what it does to your own visa if you have already paid, in our guide on what happens when an employer wants you to pay sponsorship costs.
If an agent is involved, check them before you check the employer. Our guide on how to check whether a migration agent is legitimate walks through the five things the register tells you, including the common situation where the person advising you is not the person who is registered.
A Twenty Minute Check You Can Run on Any Employer
This is the whole method. It costs nothing and it works on any aged care or disability employer in Australia.
- Get the legal entity name and ABN. Use the free ABN Lookup at abr.business.gov.au and search the trading name. Write down the entity name exactly as it appears. This step is the one most people skip, and it is the reason most people conclude wrongly that an employer is not on the list.
- Search the Home Affairs list of current labour agreements for that entity name. Note the agreement type and the end date.
- If it appears under Industry, Aged Care with an end date in the future, the employer holds the instrument. That is the strongest confirmation available to you.
- If it does not appear, check the United Workers Union aged care labour agreements page. A name there means in process, not able to sponsor now.
- Run the entity name through the Australian Border Force register of sanctioned sponsors. A hit is a serious finding. No hit is reassuring but not conclusive.
- Confirm the organisation is a registered provider at all, through the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission provider register, or the NDIS Provider Register if the role is disability support.
- Write down the date you ran the check. All six sources change, and the labour agreement list changes monthly.
If the employer has told you something that does not match what you find, that gap is the useful output of the exercise. It is worth raising directly and in writing before you turn down other work or let a visa run down.
What the List Solves, and What It Does Not
Being able to identify the small group of providers that can sponsor a carer takes the search from impossible to merely difficult. That is a real gain, and it is more than almost any aged care worker in Australia currently has.
It does not solve the two things that actually stop most people. The provider still has to have a vacancy it is willing to nominate, and the nomination still has to fit the occupations, numbers and concessions written into that particular agreement. An agreement is permission to sponsor, not a commitment to sponsor you.
And it does not solve time. If your visa is counting down in weeks rather than months, the list is a research tool, not a plan. The sequence from first contact to a granted 482 under a labour agreement is measured in months even when the employer already holds the agreement. If that is your position, start from our guide on what happens when your 485 is expiring and you work in aged care, because the order you do things in matters more than the list does.
If you want to know what the agreement itself actually contains, including the salary concession and the two year permanent residence pathway, our ACILA explainer covers it. For disability support specifically, where the position is different again, start at our NDIS support worker sponsorship guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
The List Takes You Twenty Minutes. The Rest of the Decision Needs the Specifics of Your Situation.
Whether a provider that holds an agreement has your occupation in theirs, whether a provider on the union page can realistically finish before your visa expires, and whether moving to a different provider is faster than waiting on your current one, all turn on your records. A confidential review can settle the position before you apply again.
Written by
Founder and Editor, Aussie Migration Guide
Karan Rawat is the Founder and Editor of Aussie Migration Guide. With nearly 4 years of experience in SEO and digital content, including work with Australian migration law clients, he specialises in turning complex Australian visa rules, fees and eligibility criteria into clear, practical guides. Every article is checked against current official sources such as the Department of Home Affairs before it goes live. Karan is not a registered migration agent, and the content on this site is general information, not migration advice.