How to Check a Migration Agent Is Licensed, Country by Country

Checking whether an immigration agent is registered takes about ten minutes and follows the same four steps everywhere. First, ask the agent for their full legal name as it appears on the register and their registration or licence number, in writing. Second, open the public register run by the regulator of the destination country: the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants for Canada, the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority for Australia, the UK immigration advice regulator (long known as the OISC and renamed the Immigration Advice Authority) for the United Kingdom, and the Immigration Advisers Authority for New Zealand. Third, search the register by the number, then search again by the name, and confirm the two results are the same record. Fourth, read the status line on that record: it will say whether the registration is current, expired, suspended, cancelled, or carries conditions limiting what the person may do.

The register is the only source that counts. A certificate photographed and sent on WhatsApp, a logo on a website, a plaque on an office wall and a membership badge for a trade association are all things a person can obtain or fake without ever being registered. If a name and number do not appear on the regulator's own site, treat the person as unregistered and stop.

This is general information. Confirm the current regulator, the current register address and your own case with a registered or licensed adviser or a qualified lawyer before you pay anyone.

Who needs to run this check

Anyone about to pay a person or a company to advise on, prepare or lodge an immigration application. That includes consultants who charge a fee for eligibility assessments, agents who offer to submit an Express Entry profile or an expression of interest for you, recruiters who bundle "visa processing" into a job placement, and study agents who also handle the visa.

Run the check before the first payment. Running it afterwards protects nothing. Money sent to an unregistered agent is very difficult to recover across borders, and the damage is rarely limited to the cash: an unregistered person who lodges a misleading application in your name creates a misrepresentation record that follows you for years. Immigration authorities in these countries publish their own misrepresentation and inadmissibility rules, and the bans they impose run for a fixed number of years. Check the current period with the authority itself, for example Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada for Canada or the Department of Home Affairs for Australia, because the length and the trigger differ by country and change over time. If you have already been refused once and are trying to recover, our guide on declaring a previous visa refusal explains how a bad first filing constrains the second.

Nobody being paid is the one narrow case where the check does not apply. Friends and community volunteers giving unpaid help usually sit outside the regulated category, though the rules vary and some countries still restrict who may act as a representative on the form.

What you need before you start

Four things, all of which a legitimate adviser will hand over without hesitation:

• Full legal name as registered. Many agents trade under a business name or a shortened name. The register lists the legal name. Ask for the exact spelling that appears on the regulator's record.
• Registration, licence or membership number. Every regulated system issues one. An adviser who cannot produce a number instantly is telling you something.
• The regulator they are registered with, named. "Government approved" and "licensed" mean nothing on their own. You want the name of the body.
• The name of the person who will actually sign the form. This is the detail that catches the most common structure: a registered agent lends their number to an office staffed by unregistered salespeople.

Write to them and ask for all four in one message. Keep the reply. If they answer by phone only, send a summary email back and ask them to confirm it in writing.

The registers, country by country

The table below lists the regulator and the public register for each destination NextMigrate readers most often use. These were accurate as far as we could establish at the time of writing in August 2026. Regulators are periodically renamed, merged or moved to a new domain, and the UK body is a live example of exactly that. Before you rely on any row, search for the regulator's current name on the destination government's own domain (gc.ca, homeaffairs.gov.au, gov.uk, govt.nz, and so on) and follow the link from there to the register.

Two structural points to take from that table.

The destination country regulates the advice, and the origin country regulates the recruitment. They are separate systems with separate registers, and a company can be legitimate in one and unregistered in the other. An agency in Manila can hold a valid DMW licence to recruit for a hospital in Riyadh and still have nobody registered to give Canadian immigration advice. Check whichever register matches what you are actually paying for.

Lawyers sit outside the immigration-specific register in most of these systems. An Australian solicitor with an unrestricted practising certificate will not appear on the OMARA register, and a Canadian lawyer will not have an RCIC number. That is normal. The check simply moves: you verify the lawyer on the relevant law society or legal services board directory instead. Anyone who tells you their profession exempts them from being on any public list is describing something that does not exist.

How to run the check, step by step

Step one: search by number first

Registers are usually searchable by name and by number. Search the number first, because it returns exactly one record and removes the guesswork that comes with common names and transliterated spellings. If the number returns nothing, try one variation for formatting (some registers want the R prefix on a Canadian RCIC number, some do not) and then stop.

Step two: search by name second, and compare

Now search the surname on its own. You are looking for two things: that the record you found by number carries the same name the agent gave you, and that there is not a second, different person with a similar name whose credentials the agent has been quietly borrowing. Common surnames across South Asia and West Africa make this step worth the extra minute.

Step three: read the whole record

A green tick tells you very little on its own. Register entries carry more than a yes or no, and the detail underneath is where the useful information sits. Depending on the country, an entry can show:

• Status. Current, active, registered, licensed. Also expired, lapsed, suspended, cancelled, struck off, surrendered.
• Expiry or renewal date. Registration in these systems is generally time limited and has to be renewed on the cycle the regulator sets, which is commonly annual. Confirm the cycle on the regulator's own page. Whatever the cycle, a record that expired four months ago describes an unregistered adviser today.
• Licence type or level. New Zealand distinguishes full, provisional and limited licences. The UK system works in numbered levels, with the more complex categories of work, including appeals and tribunal representation, reserved for the higher levels. The exact scope of each level is set by the regulator and has been revised over the years, so read the current level definitions on the regulator's own site instead of assuming. An adviser working above the level they hold is working outside their authorisation.
• Conditions. A line noting supervision requirements, restrictions on categories of work, or a limit on taking new clients.
• Business or firm details. The trading name and address the person is registered at.
• Disciplinary history. Several regulators publish decisions, sanctions or a complaints record, sometimes on a separate page of the same site.

Step four: check the person matches the record

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is where the real risk sits. A registered agent's number can be attached to an office where the person you meet, message and pay is an unregistered assistant working from a script. The registration is genuine. Your adviser is not the registered person.

Three checks that close it:

1. Ask the person in front of you to state their own registration number and full legal name, out loud, before you search. Do not show them the record first. Someone reciting a number they use every day sounds different from someone reading a colleague's off a card.
2. Use whatever identifying detail the register publishes. Registers vary in what they show: some publish a photograph, most publish the registered business name, address and contact details, and some publish the languages the adviser works in. Look at the entry and see what is there, then put it next to a video call and a business card. If the office will not put the registered person on a video call at all before you pay, that is your answer.
3. Ask whose name goes in the representative section of the application form. Every system has one: Canada uses the Use of a Representative form, Australia has a form for appointing an agent or exempt person, the UK and New Zealand capture adviser details on the application. Check the current form name on the government's own site, then ask to see the completed representative section before it is submitted. If the name there is different from the person advising you, or if the box is left blank because "it is faster that way", the arrangement is not what you were told.

What a suspension or a condition actually looks like

Readers expect a dramatic warning banner. Real register entries are undramatic. What you are looking for is small text near the status line.

A suspension typically shows the status word changed, for example from Registered to Suspended, with a start date and sometimes an end date. During a suspension the person may not give immigration advice for a fee. An agent who is mid-suspension will often describe it as an administrative renewal delay, or ask you to sign with a colleague "for now" while continuing to run your file personally. Both are the same problem.

A condition appears as a sentence attached to an otherwise current registration. Typical forms include a requirement to practise under supervision, a restriction to certain visa categories, a cap on client numbers, or a requirement to complete additional training. Conditions are not automatically a reason to walk away, and a newly registered adviser under supervision can be perfectly competent. They are a reason to ask directly: what is this condition, when was it imposed, and does it cover the work I am asking you to do.

A cancelled, struck off or surrendered entry sometimes stays visible in a register's historical or disciplinary section after the person has left the profession. Read the dates. A screenshot of a register entry from three years ago is a true document about a past state of affairs.

If the register offers a separate decisions or disciplinary page, spend two minutes there. Published decisions name the adviser and describe what happened. That is the single most informative page on any regulator's site.

What it costs and how long it takes

The check itself is free everywhere. No regulator charges you to search its own public register, and any site that asks for a payment or an account to look up an agent is not the regulator. Budget ten minutes for the search, and a day or two of waiting if you have had to email the agent for their number and legal name first.

The fees that follow are a separate question. Registered advisers charge what they charge, and the range across these markets is wide. Our guide to what a migration consultant should reasonably cost sets out how to read a quote, and do I need a migration agent covers the cases where the answer is no. What regulation gives you is a complaints route: a registered adviser can be complained about to a body with the power to investigate, impose conditions and remove them from the register. That is the whole practical value of the check.

Two cost rules worth holding to regardless of who you hire. Fees are paid to a business account in the firm's registered name against a written agreement and a numbered invoice, never to a personal account, never in cash without a receipt, and never through a third-party individual. And nobody legitimately charges you a fee for a job offer itself; charging a worker for placement is prohibited in many of these corridors and is the core mechanic of the most damaging scams. Our guides on how to verify an overseas job offer and how to avoid immigration scams go through the payment patterns in detail.

If you are weighing whether to pay for advice at all, start with the free quiz. It matches your occupation, qualifications and documents against the routes that plausibly fit, so you walk into any conversation with an adviser knowing roughly what you are asking about. NextMigrate's personal migration roadmap is $499, down from $999, started with a $99 deposit with the balance settled afterwards, and we would rather tell you your route is not viable before you pay an agent for a filing that was never going to work.

When this check does not work

The register check is necessary. It leaves four gaps, and here are the situations where it will not protect you on its own.

The agent is offshore and unregistered by design. Most of these regulators cover advice given to people applying to that country, but enforcement against a person operating from a third country with no assets there is limited in practice. A person outside every register can still take your money. The check tells you they are unregistered; it does not give you a recovery route.

The service is genuinely outside the regulated category. Document translation, courier services, CV writing, coaching for a language test and general information (including this page) do not require immigration registration in most systems. Paying for those from an unregistered provider is normal. The line is advice on your application and acting as your representative.

The registration is real and the advice is still bad. Registration is a floor. It confirms a person passed an entry standard, carries insurance in some systems and can be complained about. It does not confirm they know your occupation, your country's document conventions, or the assessing body that will judge your qualifications.

Recruitment, where the destination register is irrelevant. If what you are actually buying is a job placement in the Gulf or a seasonal scheme, the immigration adviser registers do not cover it. The relevant checks are the recruitment licence in your own country, the employer's existence, and whether any fee is being charged to you at all.

Common mistakes

• Accepting a certificate image instead of a register search. Certificates are trivially edited. Always end at the regulator's own domain, typed in yourself. Treat a link the agent sent as unverified.
• Searching a link the agent supplied. Cloned register sites exist. Navigate from the destination government's main domain to the regulator, then to the register.
• Checking the company instead of the person. Registration attaches to individuals in most of these systems. A registered company name with no registered individual named on your file is not a check.
• Stopping at "found, active". The conditions line, the expiry date and the licence level carry the information that matters most often.
• Not repeating the check. Registration lapses and suspensions happen mid-case. Re-check before each major payment and before the final submission.
• Assuming a visa office or a government building implies approval. Proximity is not accreditation. Neither is an office full of framed testimonials.
• Treating a promise as a credential. Guaranteed approval, guaranteed processing time and guaranteed job placement are all outside anyone's power to give. A registered adviser making those promises is a registered adviser you should still refuse.
• Paying before you have anything in writing. No written service agreement, no scope, no fee schedule, no refund terms means no case for anyone to take up on your behalf later.

Applying the same standard to everyone, including us

The transparency test that catches unregistered agents is short, and it is worth applying to every provider you consider, including the free ones and including this site.

Ask any adviser or service four questions:

1. Are you registered or licensed to give immigration advice for the country I am applying to, and with which body?
2. If you are not, what exactly are you selling me, and who will act as my representative on the application?
3. What is the total fee, what is in scope, and what happens to my money if I stop?
4. What have you told me I cannot do, or that will not work?

That last question is the most revealing one. A provider whose answer to everything is yes is selling you optimism.

Our own answer, for completeness: NextMigrate is a research and planning service. We publish general information and we sell a personal migration roadmap that maps your profile against routes, documents, assessing bodies and sequence. We are not a registered immigration adviser in Canada, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland or the Gulf, we do not act as anyone's representative on an application, and we do not lodge applications on your behalf. Where a case needs regulated advice, the roadmap says so and tells you which register to search. Any provider, ours included, that will not state plainly what it is and is not licensed to do has failed the test on this page.

What to do next

If the check came back clean, keep the evidence. Screenshot the register entry with the date visible, save the written service agreement, and pay to the business account named on the invoice. Then move on to preparing the file itself: the documents you need to migrate abroad and the safe migration checklist before you leave cover what a competent adviser will ask you for anyway, and having it ready saves you billable time.

If the check came back empty, stop paying and do not send further documents. Ask for your file and your originals back in writing. Report the person to the regulator whose register they claimed to be on, because those complaints are what produce the published decisions the next reader will rely on. If money has already moved, contact your bank immediately, and report to the fraud or anti-trafficking authority in your own country as well as the destination regulator.

If the check produced something ambiguous, a condition you do not understand or a licence level that may not cover your case, ask the regulator. Most publish a public enquiry address and will confirm whether a specific registration covers a specific type of work. That email is free and it is faster than guessing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I check if an immigration agent is registered?

Ask for their full legal name as registered and their registration or licence number in writing, then search the destination country's regulator register: the CICC for Canada, OMARA for Australia, the UK immigration advice regulator (formerly the OISC, renamed the Immigration Advice Authority), or the Immigration Advisers Authority for New Zealand. Search by number, then by name, and read the status, expiry date and conditions on the record. Reach the register by typing the government domain yourself. Treat any link the agent sends you as unverified. Confirm the current regulator name before relying on any of these, since these bodies are periodically renamed or merged.

What if the agent says they are a lawyer rather than a migration agent?

Then they will usually not appear on the immigration-specific register, and that is expected. Verify them instead on the legal profession's own register: the provincial law society in Canada, the state or territory legal services board in Australia, the Law Society Find a Solicitor service or the Bar Standards Board register in the UK, the New Zealand Law Society, the Law Society of Ireland, or the federal bar's national directory in Germany. Ask for the practising certificate number and confirm it is current and unrestricted. Our guide on when you need an immigration lawyer covers which situations justify the higher cost.

Is a registered agent required, or can I apply myself?

You can apply yourself to every one of these systems. IRCC, the Australian Department of Home Affairs, UKVI, Immigration New Zealand and the German missions all accept applications made directly by the applicant, and none of them give an application priority because an agent lodged it. Paying for advice buys help with judgment and paperwork. It does not buy access. Any claim that applications must go through an agent, or move faster through one, is false.

The register shows a condition on the agent's licence. Should I walk away?

Not automatically. Conditions cover a wide range, from routine supervision on a newly issued licence to a restriction imposed after a complaint. Ask the adviser directly what the condition is, when it was imposed and whether it permits the work you need. Then check the regulator's published decisions page for the underlying reason. Walk away if the answer is evasive, or if the condition excludes the category of work you are hiring them for.

What does an unregistered agent actually risk for me?

Three things. Your money, which is hard to recover across borders. Your record, because an application containing misstatements made in your name can produce a misrepresentation finding and a ban lasting several years, whether or not you wrote the words. And your time, because a badly built first application constrains every later one, and refusals must be declared on every subsequent form.

How do I know the person I am speaking to is the registered person?

Ask them to state their own number and legal name before you search. Compare the register's published photograph and business contact details where the regulator publishes them. Insist on a video call with the registered person before payment. Ask to see the completed representative section of the application form with their name in it. An office that routes you only through sales staff and never puts the registered person on a call is running the exact structure this check exists to detect.

Do these registers cover recruitment agencies and job offers too?

No. Immigration adviser registers cover advice on applications. Recruitment is licensed separately, usually in your own country, through bodies such as the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers, India's eMigrate system under the Protector General of Emigrants, Pakistan's Bureau of Emigration and Overseas Employment, Bangladesh's BMET, Nepal's Department of Foreign Employment or Kenya's National Employment Authority, and in the destination through labour ministries such as MOHRE in the UAE. Check the licensed-agency list on the relevant government domain, and treat any request that you pay a fee for the job offer itself as a stop signal.

The bottom line

The check is four steps: get the name and number in writing, search the regulator's own register by number then by name, read the status and conditions rather than stopping at a green tick, and confirm the person advising you is the person on the record. It costs nothing and it takes ten minutes. Repeat it before every significant payment, and verify the regulator's current name each time, because these bodies get renamed and merged.

Then apply the same transparency standard to every provider you consider. Ask what they are licensed to do, what they are not, and what they have told you will not work. If you want to know whether your route is viable before you pay anyone anything, start with the free quiz, and treat any answer that sounds like a guarantee as the least reliable thing you have heard that week.