What Migration Advice Should Cost, and What You Get for Each Price

Immigration consultants and migration agents price their work in three broad tiers, and knowing which tier a quote belongs to explains almost every price difference you will see. Tier one is a one-off assessment or roadmap: an adviser reviews your profile, tells you which routes you qualify for, and writes the sequence down. Across the main destination markets this sits in a low hundreds of dollars planning band, and NextMigrate's own roadmap is $499, down from $999, started with a $99 deposit. Tier two is full end-to-end representation, where a registered agent or lawyer prepares and lodges the whole application and handles the correspondence with the department. That work commonly runs into the low thousands per adult applicant, and for complex employer-sponsored files into five figures. Tier three is litigation, appeal or review work by a qualified lawyer after a refusal, cancellation or exclusion finding, which is charged hourly or as a court-stage fixed fee and is the most expensive band by a wide margin.

Government fees sit outside all three. The visa charge levied by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, UK Visas and Immigration, the Australian Department of Home Affairs or Immigration New Zealand is payable whether you use an adviser or not, and an honest quote lists it as a separate line you pay to the government.

Every price band and government fee in this article is a dated planning range, checked in August 2026, and fee schedules are revised on a published cycle. Confirm each figure on the issuing authority's own fee page before you budget or apply. This is general information. A licensed or registered adviser should confirm your own case.

Who this article is for

You have collected two or three quotes and they disagree by an order of magnitude. One agent wants $400 for a consultation, another wants $6,000 to run your Express Entry file, a third quoted "15 percent of your first year salary" and a fourth said the fee is "all inclusive" without naming what is included. You want to know which of these is normal, which is a warning sign, and what you actually get for each price.

This is written for skilled workers, nurses, engineers and families moving from South and Southeast Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East to Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany, New Zealand, Ireland and the Gulf. The tier structure holds across those destinations. The currency and the regulator change.

The three tiers, plainly described

Tier one: assessment, eligibility opinion or roadmap

The deliverable is information and a plan. A competent tier one product tells you which visa routes your occupation, age, qualifications, language ability and family situation actually fit; which ones you are close to and what would close the gap; what the sequence is (which of the skills assessment, the language test, the registration application and the visa lodgement comes first); and what the whole thing will cost you in government fees and third party charges.

What tier one does not include: nobody prepares your forms, nobody lodges anything on your behalf, nobody corresponds with the department for you. You do the work. You get the map.

Tier one exists because many failed migration attempts fail at the strategy layer, before any form is filled in. People spend a year pursuing a route their occupation was never on, or sit a language test before checking the score their registration body requires. A roadmap that costs a few hundred dollars and prevents one wasted year is the cheapest thing in this market.

Tier two: full end-to-end representation and lodgement

The deliverable is a lodged application. A registered migration agent, immigration consultant or immigration lawyer takes the file, tells you which documents to obtain, checks them, drafts the forms and submissions, lodges the application, is recorded as your authorised representative, receives the department's correspondence, and responds to requests for further information until a decision is made.

This is a labour-heavy service and the fee reflects it. Expect it to be scoped to a specific visa, for a specific number of applicants, with named inclusions. Watch for the boundary conditions: many end-to-end quotes exclude the skills assessment application, the language test, medicals, police certificates, translation, courier costs and the government charge itself, and many exclude any response to a formal refusal.

Tier three: appeal, review and litigation

After a refusal, a cancellation, a misrepresentation finding or an exclusion period, the work becomes legal work with a filing deadline. In most destination systems this tier belongs to a qualified lawyer, and in some of them non-lawyer consultants are restricted from acting at the tribunal or court stage at all. Fees are hourly, or fixed by stage, and the tribunal or court charges its own filing fee on top.

Two things matter more than the price here. Appeal deadlines are short, often measured in weeks from the date on the decision letter, and they are usually strict. And an appeal is frequently the wrong instrument, because for many refusals a corrected fresh application is faster, cheaper and more likely to succeed. Our guide on what to do if your visa is refused sets out how to tell those two situations apart before you commit to a lawyer's retainer.

What it costs

The bands below are planning ranges observed across the main destination markets, checked August 2026, quoted in US dollars for comparability. Advisers quote in their own currency and price by complexity, jurisdiction and seniority, so treat these as a way to recognise an outlier, not as a quote.

Tier two prices scale with the number of applicants, though the second adult and the children are usually charged at a discount because the underlying file is shared. Tier three has no meaningful upper bound, because it depends on how far the matter runs.

Government fees are a separate line, always

The single most useful discipline when comparing quotes is to force every adviser to split their invoice into two columns: money that goes to them, and money that goes to a government or a third party. An adviser who will not do this is either disorganised or hiding a margin on the pass-through costs.

The pass-through column typically contains the visa application charge, the skills assessment or credential recognition fee, the professional registration fee, the language test fee, the medical examination, police certificates from every country you have lived in, biometrics, translation and certification, and in some systems a health surcharge or levy.

Every entry there is a pointer to where the figure lives, deliberately, because the numbers themselves are revised on a published cycle and any figure quoted in an article ages. Read the authority's own page on the day you budget. For a fuller picture of what the whole move costs once these are stacked together, see our breakdown of the real cost of migrating abroad.

Health charges are the line people miss. The UK Immigration Health Surcharge, set by the Home Office, is charged per person for each year of the visa granted and is payable up front for the whole visa length, as published. For a family on a multi-year visa it can exceed the adviser's entire fee. Check the current rate on UKVI's own surcharge page before comparing any UK quote.

Why percentage of salary and success fee models create bad incentives

Three pricing models turn up regularly and each one misaligns the adviser's interest with yours.

Percentage of first year salary. Charging you a share of what you will earn abroad makes the adviser's income depend on placing you in the highest-paying job that will take you, on the fastest timeline. It also produces a fee with no relationship to the work performed: the same forms, lodged for a nurse and for a specialist physician, generate wildly different invoices. Worse, it pushes the adviser toward routes that maximise salary over routes that maximise your odds of permanent residence, which are often different routes.

Success fees and no-win-no-fee promises. A fee contingent on the grant looks like the adviser sharing your risk. What it does in practice is reward the adviser for filing whatever gets approved, and it creates pressure at the exact point where honesty matters most: the moment your file is weak. An adviser who only gets paid on approval has a financial reason to overstate a claim, to omit an inconvenient fact, or to steer you into a route with a higher approval rate that is worse for you long term. Immigration decisions also depend heavily on factors nobody controls, including invitation round cutoffs and processing queues, so a contingent fee is priced with a risk premium you end up paying anyway.

Fees charged for a job offer. Paying an agent for the offer itself is where the most serious harm in this market happens, and it is a different transaction from paying a regulated adviser for visa work. In several major origin countries the recruitment side is separately regulated, and charging the worker a placement fee is restricted or prohibited. The Philippine Department of Migrant Workers licenses recruitment agencies and publishes rules on what may be charged to a worker, and the eMigrate system run by India's Ministry of External Affairs registers recruiting agents. The specific fee rules in each system are set by those authorities and change, so read the current rules on the regulator's own site. Check the licence on the regulator's own register before any money moves. Our guides on how to verify an overseas job offer and avoiding immigration scams cover the specific patterns.

The model that aligns properly is a fixed fee for a defined scope, paid in stages tied to delivery, with the government charges passed through at cost and shown separately. You know what you are buying, the adviser knows what they owe you, and neither side's incentive depends on the outcome of a decision that neither side controls.

Before you pay anyone at either tier, it is worth being certain you are buying help with the right route. Our free quiz matches your occupation, qualifications, experience and family situation against the routes that actually fit, and it will tell you where a paid adviser adds real value and where you are being sold work you do not need. If you want the whole sequence written out (which route, which assessment first, which test, in what order, at what cost), that is what NextMigrate's personal migration roadmap is for: $499, down from $999, started with a $99 deposit with the balance settled afterwards.

What you need before you start comparing quotes

Get these five things from every adviser, in writing, before you pay a deposit.

1. Their registration number and the register it appears on. Not a screenshot they send you. The number, so you can search the regulator's public register yourself.
2. A scope of work naming the specific visa subclass or route, the number of applicants, and the stages covered. "Migration services" is not a scope.
3. A separate schedule of government and third party fees, marked as pass-through and payable to the named body.
4. The refund and termination terms, specifically what happens if you withdraw, if your circumstances change, and if the application is refused.
5. The payment destination. Fees should go to a business account in the firm's registered name. Payment to a personal account, to a third country intermediary, or in cryptocurrency is a serious warning sign.

How to verify a provider through the regulator

Each destination has a public register and each register is searchable for free.

• Australia: registered migration agents appear on the Office of the Migration Agents Registration Authority register. Immigration lawyers are regulated through their state or territory legal admission body instead. Search the register before you engage.
• Canada: immigration consultants are licensed by the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, and lawyers by their provincial law society. IRCC publishes guidance on who may represent you and requires a representative to be declared on the file.
• United Kingdom: immigration advisers must be regulated, either by the statutory immigration advice regulator (the body formerly known as the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner) or as a solicitor or barrister through their own professional regulator. Check the relevant public register.
• New Zealand: advisers are licensed by the Immigration Advisers Authority and the register is public. Certain exemptions apply, and Immigration New Zealand publishes who may give advice.
• Germany: immigration legal advice is generally reserved to qualified lawyers, who are admitted through the regional bar (Rechtsanwaltskammer). Consultancies that are not law firms are limited in what they may advise on.

Registration is a floor. It tells you there is a complaints body and a professional obligation. It says nothing about whether the adviser is good or the fee is fair.

Three claims should end a conversation immediately, regardless of registration: a guaranteed visa, a guaranteed job, or an offer to improve your file with documents you know to be inaccurate. No adviser controls a decision, and a misrepresentation finding carries published exclusion periods measured in years across the major destinations.

How long each tier takes

Fee comparisons are incomplete without timelines, because a cheaper adviser who adds three months to your file can cost you an invitation round or an age points bracket.

The department's own processing time is published and is separate from anything an adviser does. IRCC, UKVI, the Australian Department of Home Affairs and Immigration New Zealand all publish current service standards, and those pages are the only reliable source for what a decision will take. No adviser can shorten a published queue, and any claim to have priority access to one should be treated as a red flag.

The genuinely long items are usually the skills assessment and the professional registration. Our guide to getting your qualifications recognised will tell you whether the slow part of your file is something an adviser can accelerate at all.

When paying for advice does not work for you

There are situations where the honest answer is that no tier is worth buying yet, and a reputable adviser will say so.

Your occupation is not on any relevant list and there is no adjacent route. No amount of representation creates eligibility. If your occupation is absent from the skilled lists of every destination you are considering and no employer-sponsored or study pathway realistically applies, a tier two fee buys you a well-prepared refusal. The useful spend at that point is a tier one assessment to find out whether an adjacent occupation code, a different destination or a study route changes the answer, and then to stop if it does not.

Your file is simple and you are a confident, organised reader. A single applicant with one country of residence, a clean immigration history, an occupation clearly on the list and a completed skills assessment can often lodge a points-tested application without representation. The forms are long and the evidence rules are fussy, and they are published. Paying several thousand dollars for form filling on a file with no complications is a legitimate thing to decline.

You cannot afford the whole sequence. The adviser's fee is one line in a total that includes tests, assessments, medicals, police certificates, translation, the government charge and the money you need to land with. Spending your entire budget on representation and arriving with no settlement funds is a worse position than delaying a year and going in funded.

There is an active exclusion period or a misrepresentation finding. If a published exclusion period is still running, the honest answer is that the route is closed until it expires, and paying a consultant to try anyway wastes the fee and can compound the record. That is a tier three legal question about the finding itself, and it comes before any new application.

The blocker is a document you cannot obtain. Missing birth records, name mismatches or unobtainable police certificates are document problems, and which substitute evidence is accepted is a tier one question. Paying for end-to-end representation before that is solved buys nothing.

Common mistakes

Comparing an all-in quote against an adviser-only quote. One firm quotes $6,000 including the government charge and medicals. Another quotes $2,800 plus disbursements. These may be the same total. Normalise every quote to adviser fee plus a listed pass-through schedule before you compare anything.

Paying the full fee up front. Staged payment tied to delivery is standard and protects both sides. A demand for the entire fee before any work begins removes your only leverage.

Treating the deposit as the price. A low deposit that unlocks a much larger balance is fine when the total is disclosed at the start. Ask for the full figure before the first instalment.

Assuming the adviser's fee includes the skills assessment. It usually does not. The assessing authority charges separately, and in several professions the registration body charges again after that.

Ignoring the family multiplier. Government charges scale per applicant, and health surcharges scale per person per year. An adviser fee that looks reasonable for one person can be dwarfed by the government column for a family of four.

Buying representation before choosing a route. Paying tier two prices while you are still undecided between Canada and Australia means paying twice, because the file work does not transfer.

Not getting the scope in writing. Verbal inclusions are unenforceable and disputes about what was covered are the most common complaint category at every regulator listed above.

What to do next

Work in this order. First, establish which routes you actually qualify for, because that determines whether you need tier two at all. Second, price the government column for those specific routes on the issuing authority's own fee pages, in the destination currency, on the day you budget. Third, collect two or three scoped quotes for the adviser column, each naming a visa route and a stage list, and verify every provider's registration number on the public register yourself. Fourth, decide honestly whether your file is complex enough to need representation, and buy tier two only if it is.

Take the free quiz and it will match your occupation, your qualifications and your family situation against the routes that genuinely fit, along with what the sequence and the government fees look like for each. If the honest result is that your occupation has no viable route right now, or that your file is simple enough that paying for end-to-end representation would be wasted money, we would rather tell you that than sell you something. If you want the full sequence written down, naming the route, the assessment, the test, the order and the cost, NextMigrate's personal migration roadmap is $499, down from $999, started with a $99 deposit with the balance settled afterwards.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much do immigration consultants charge?

Fees fall into three tiers. A one-off assessment or written roadmap is a fixed fee in a low hundreds of dollars band. Full end-to-end preparation and lodgement of a points-tested application is commonly in the low thousands per adult applicant, and employer-sponsored or complex family files run higher. Appeal and review work by a lawyer after a refusal is charged hourly or by court stage and is the most expensive tier. Government charges are payable on top in every case. These are planning ranges checked in August 2026 and they vary by jurisdiction, complexity and seniority, so ask for a written scoped quote.

Is a percentage of my salary ever a normal way to be charged?

For immigration advice, no. A fee tied to your future earnings has no relationship to the work performed and points the adviser toward the highest-paying placement when the strongest immigration outcome may lie elsewhere. Where recruitment fees charged to workers are separately regulated, as they are through the Philippine Department of Migrant Workers and the eMigrate registration system run by India's Ministry of External Affairs, check the applicable rules on the regulator's own page before agreeing to anything of this shape.

Should the visa fee be included in the consultant's price?

It should be shown, itemised and payable to the government. A quote that folds the visa charge into a single all-in number makes it impossible to see the adviser's actual margin and makes comparison between firms meaningless. Ask for two columns: adviser fee, and pass-through fees payable to named authorities.

Can I lodge a skilled visa application without any consultant?

Yes. All the major destinations allow applicants to lodge and represent themselves, and the forms, evidence rules and fee schedules are published by IRCC, UKVI, the Australian Department of Home Affairs and Immigration New Zealand. Self-lodging suits a simple file: one applicant or a straightforward family, clean immigration history, an occupation clearly listed, and a completed skills assessment. Get advice when there is a refusal history, a health or character issue, a document you cannot obtain, or a complex work history.

How do I check that a migration agent is genuine?

Search the regulator's public register yourself using the number the adviser gives you. Australia has the OMARA register for registered migration agents, Canada has the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, New Zealand has the Immigration Advisers Authority, and the UK has a statutory register for immigration advisers alongside the solicitor and barrister regulators. Lawyers appear on their own admission or professional registers instead. Never pay into a personal account, and treat a guaranteed visa or guaranteed job as a reason to walk away.

Why does a deposit and balance structure exist?

Staged payment splits the risk. The deposit covers the adviser's initial work and confirms you are serious, and the balance falls due when the deliverable is handed over. It protects you from paying a large sum before any work is done, and it protects the adviser from doing the work for nothing. NextMigrate's roadmap uses the same structure: $99 to start, with the balance of the $499 settled afterwards.

Do adviser fees or government fees change often?

Government fee schedules are revised on a published cycle, typically annually, and health surcharges and levies are revised separately. Adviser fees move with market conditions and are not published anywhere centrally. Any figure you read in an article, including this one, is a planning range with a date attached. Reconfirm every government charge on the issuing authority's own fee page in the destination currency before you budget or apply.

The bottom line

Price differences in this market are mostly tier differences. A few hundred dollars buys a route decision and a sequence. A few thousand buys someone to prepare and lodge the file and to carry the correspondence. Legal work after a refusal is a separate and more expensive category with real deadlines. Insist on a fixed fee for a named scope, insist that government charges appear as their own line payable to the authority, verify the registration number on the public register yourself, and be sceptical of any fee tied to your salary or contingent on approval. Then buy only the tier your file actually needs.