Visa appeal success rates: the Tribunal's own numbers

Every percentage below is the Tribunal's own: the share of total finalisations in that category during 2025-26. Set aside includes decisions varied, substituted, or remitted to the Department with a direction — favourable outcomes, but a remittal is not itself a visa grant. Affirmed includes dismissals where the applicant did not appear at hearing. Withdrawn and jurisdictional outcomes make up the rest, and they matter: a category with a modest set aside rate and a huge withdrawal rate is telling you about the cases lodged, not the Tribunal's disposition.

One overall number is worth holding onto: across 23,830 finalised migration reviews, roughly one decision in three that reached the Tribunal was changed. The Department's first decision is reviewable in a forum that changes it often — and how often depends heavily on the decision type, which is what the tables below are for.

The gap between a 61% set aside rate for 820 partner refusals and 6% for 407 training refusals is not the Tribunal being kind to couples and hard on trainees. Partner refusals often turn on relationship evidence that can be substantially rebuilt and supplemented on review; 407 refusals cluster around applications that were weak when lodged, which is also why more than half of them are withdrawn. The set aside column measures what happened to the cases that ran — the withdrawal column tells you how many should not have run at all.

Cancellation and character matters invert the baseline. Section 501CA revocation refusals were affirmed at 60%, and student cancellations at 48%, against a statutory framework and Ministerial Direction 110 that weight community protection heavily. These are the matters where the difference between a submission that engages the Direction properly and one that does not is starkest — and where the expedited track leaves the least time to fix a bad start.

And the backlog is itself strategic information. With 80,855 cases on hand, time at the Tribunal is measured in months to years for most cohorts. That window is where strong reviews are built: fresh evidence, changed circumstances, and expert material all remain admissible in a merits review, because the Tribunal stands in the shoes of the original decision-maker and decides afresh.

In FY 2024-25, 8.5% of the Tribunal's migration decisions were taken to judicial review, and of 3,276 migration appeals finally determined by the courts, 195 were allowed — 6%. Judicial review tests only whether the Tribunal made a legal error; it does not re-run the merits, which is why the numbers are an order of magnitude below the Tribunal's set aside rates.

The spread inside that 6% carries the real signal: character and citizenship appeals were allowed at 53.4%, family and partner at 11.9%, skilled and employer matters at 4.8%, and study matters at 3.4%. Character litigation genuinely turns on contested legal questions; most student appeals do not. The practical lesson sits upstream: the merits review is where a migration case is usually won, and it should be run as if it is the last chance — because statistically, it is. Where a genuine jurisdictional error exists, our judicial review practice takes it to the Federal Circuit and Family Court.