From 1 July 2021, the Department of Home Affairs will update citizenship application fees to more accurately reflect the cost of delivering the citizenship program.
This is the first change to citizenship application fees since 2016 and has been determined by citizenship application processes and costs. The new fees are commensurate with the comprehensive approach to end-to-end processing of citizenship applications and reflect inflation costs, staffing costs and the increased complexity of applications, which take longer to process. Based on existing fees, the Government is only recovering approximately 50 per cent of the costs of processing citizenship applications.
The cost of citizenship applications remains comparable with other countries. From 1 July 2021, the cost of citizenship by conferral will still be lower than in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.
