Moving to Australia as a Nurse

The most common and most expensive mistake is treating registration and skills assessment as the same step. They are not, and they are assessed by different organisations against different criteria.

AHPRA, acting for the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, decides whether you may practise as a nurse in Australia. ANMAC decides whether your qualifications and experience meet the standard for a skilled migration visa — a skills assessment in the same sense as any other occupation. You will generally need both, and you should begin the registration pathway first because it governs whether working in Australia is possible at all.

Employers will ask about your registration status, not your skills assessment. A job offer is often contingent on registration being underway or complete.

Internationally qualified nurses are assessed against the NMBA's standards for the division they are applying to — most commonly Registered Nurse, with a separate pathway for Enrolled Nurses and for midwives.

Depending on where you trained, your route may involve an outcomes-based assessment with a written component and a practical clinical assessment, or a more direct pathway if your qualification and regulatory system are closely comparable to Australia's. Nurses from the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Canada, the United States and a number of other jurisdictions often follow a shorter route than those from countries whose systems differ more substantially.

Where an outcomes-based assessment applies, it runs in three stages: a self-check, a multiple-choice questionnaire, and an OSCE — an objective structured clinical examination — which is sat in Australia. Budget for the travel as well as the fee.

Because the specific pathway depends on your country of qualification and can change, confirm your route directly with AHPRA before paying for anything. The registration standards and the current pathway definitions are the authority on this — not a recruitment agency's summary, and not this page.

English is assessed twice — once by the NMBA for registration and once by the Department of Home Affairs for your visa — and the registration standard is usually the higher bar.

The NMBA's English language skills registration standard took effect on 18 March 2025, and the minimum scores changed again from 23 April 2026. For IELTS Academic the requirement is an overall 7.0, with 7.0 in listening, reading and speaking and 6.5 in writing — worth knowing, because the widely repeated advice that you need 7.0 in every band overstates the writing requirement. OET moved from letter grades to numeric scores in the same update.

Exemptions exist for applicants from a defined list of recognised English-speaking countries, and for some applicants whose education was conducted in English, though conditions still attach. Check your own position against the current NMBA standard rather than relying on a recruiter's summary — this is one of the fastest-moving requirements in the whole process.

For the visa itself, higher English scores also earn points on the points test, so a strong result can serve both purposes — see our English test requirements and run the numbers through the points calculator.

Nursing occupations have appeared consistently on Australia's skilled occupation lists, which opens several routes.

This is the part overseas nurses are least prepared for, and it matters more than any headline salary figure.

Public sector nursing pay is set by state and territory enterprise agreements, not by individual negotiation. Each agreement defines graded levels — Registered Nurse Level 1 with incremental years, then Level 2 and above for senior and specialist roles — and your pay is largely determined by which increment you are placed on. That placement is negotiable in the sense that recognised overseas experience can move you up the scale, so evidence of your years of practice is worth assembling carefully before you accept an offer.

On top of base pay, shift penalties for nights, weekends and public holidays make a substantial difference to actual earnings, and superannuation is paid by the employer on top of salary rather than deducted from it. Comparing an Australian offer against a UK or Irish salary on base pay alone will understate it.

Rates differ between states and are renegotiated periodically, so check the current enterprise agreement for the state you are moving to rather than relying on a salary aggregator. Nursing is also the occupation where Australian pay most clearly beats the UK once the currency is converted.

For most nurses, this order minimises wasted time and money: