Right to Work Checks Across the Employee Lifecycle
Australian employers must verify that every employee and contractor has the legal right to work, and keep verifying it throughout employment. A single check at onboarding is not enough to satisfy the obligation. Visa conditions change, and visas expire. Employers who only complete a check once at hire leave themselves exposed.
Here’s what the law requires at each stage of the employee lifecycle, and where most employers get it wrong.
What is a right to work check?
A right to work check is the process an employer follows to confirm that a person is legally permitted to work in Australia. The obligation sits under the Migration Act 1958. Under that Act, employers who allow an unlawful non-citizen to work — or continue working — face civil penalties of up to $93,900 per worker for an individual, and $469,500 for a body corporate (as of 2024 rates). Ignorance of an employee’s work status is not a defence.
The process differs depending on whether the person is an Australian citizen or a foreign citizen.
Australian Citizens: Employers must collect a declaration of citizenship and sight evidence of citizenship. Acceptable documents are an Australian passport, or an Australian birth certificate with photo ID, or an Australian citizenship certificate with photo ID. Employers should record that they sighted and approved the documents. They should not retain a copy of the document itself, for privacy reasons.
Foreign Citizens: Employers must collect a copy of the person’s foreign passport, travel document, or ImmiCard. They must also collect and record consent to conduct a workplace entitlement check, then run a VEVO check to validate work rights through the Department of Home Affairs.
Key Stages in the Employee Lifecycle
Pre-employment: Before the contract is signed
Most employers run right to work checks after the offer is accepted. That ordering carries real risk — if the check fails, the employer has already made an offer to someone who cannot legally fill the role.
Employers who run checks before extending an offer avoid this. The additional steps at pre-employment stage are:
- Collect a declaration of citizenship
- For foreign citizens, confirm the visa is valid and review any conditions attached to it. In particular, whether the type of work and hours are permitted under the visa, and whether the visa’s duration covers the intended start date
- Record when the declaration was collected and what documents were sighted
- Store records within the requirements of the Australian Privacy Principles, and set a process for their deletion
- During employment: ongoing checks for visa holders
The obligation does not end at onboarding. Visa holders need to be rechecked during their employment because visa conditions can change and visas expire.
The frequency of VEVO checks required depends on the visa subclass and the risk profile associated with it. In most cases, employers should run a VEVO check at a minimum of every three months. For visa holders on subclasses with shorter validity periods or work restrictions, that cadence should increase.
When a visa is approaching expiry, employers should check in with the employee about their plans and determine whether the role can continue under a renewal or a different visa subclass. If the employee’s circumstances have changed, HR and migration advisors need to be involved early, not after the visa has expired.
Role changes and promotions
Some visa subclasses restrict the type of work a holder can perform, the number of hours they can work, or both. When an employer changes a visa holder’s role or promotes them, that change may place them outside their visa conditions.
Before confirming any role change for a visa holder, employers should check whether the new role and its conditions remain within what the person’s visa permits. Where there is doubt, employers should seek advice from a Registered Migration Agent before the change takes effect. Some changes require notification to the Department of Home Affairs; others require a new visa nomination entirely.
Getting this wrong creates the same liability as employing someone without work rights in the first place.
Termination of employment
When an employee leaves, employers need to confirm that records of right to work checks conducted during the employment are complete, retained appropriately, and then deleted within the timeframes required under the Australian Privacy Principles.
The record should show: when checks were conducted, what was sighted, and the results. This documentation is what employers rely on if the Department of Home Affairs ever audits their workforce.
Where most employers fall short
In practice, compliance breaks down in three places:
At scale. When employers are hiring hundreds of people across multiple locations, manual processes miss checks, lose records, or assign the wrong check type for the role. A hospitality employer hiring seasonal workers across five states faces a different compliance load than a corporate team hiring ten people a year — the process needs to match the volume.
When roles change. Promotions and internal moves rarely trigger a compliance review. For visa holders, they should.
When nobody is in charge of watching the calendar. VEVO rechecks for visa holders require someone to track expiry dates and act before they pass, not after. Employers without automated monitoring rely on HR teams who are already managing competing priorities to remember.
How CheckWorkRights handles this
CheckIntelligence™ assigns the right check type to each worker automatically based on their role and location — removing the manual decision-making that causes gaps. Direct API connection to the Department of Home Affairs means VEVO results come back in seconds, not hours.
Automated monitoring tracks visa expiry dates and triggers rechecks at the right intervals, so HR teams are alerted before a visa lapses rather than after. All records are stored and managed within Australian Privacy Principles requirements.
If you’re not sure whether your current process is meeting the legal requirements, download our Right to Work Compliance Checklist.
Further reading
- Migration Act 1958 — Department of Home Affairs
- VEVO — Visa Entitlement Verification Online
- Australian Privacy Principles — Office of the Australian Information Commissioner
