Australia Significant Investor Visa (closed); National Innovation visa (subclass 858)

No. There is no open residence-by-investment visa in Australia for new applicants in 2026. The Significant Investor Visa, the standard Investor stream, the Business Innovation stream, and the Entrepreneur stream were all part of one program, the Business Innovation and Investment Program, and that program stopped accepting new applications on 31 July 2024. Nothing in the Australian migration system replaced it as an investment route. The successor visa is a talent visa, not a buy-in.

This is worth stating bluntly because search demand has not caught up with policy. People still type 'Australia golden visa cost,' 'AUD 5 million investor visa,' and 'Australia significant investor visa requirements' every month, and a layer of stale advisory pages and offshore agents still answers as if the program were live. It is not. If you are quoted a fee, a fund allocation, or a processing timeline for an Australian investor visa in 2026, you are being misinformed, and in the worst cases set up to hand money to someone for a service they cannot deliver.

There is one narrow sense in which subclass 188 still appears in the system: applications lodged before 31 July 2024 are still being processed, and existing 188 holders can still move to the permanent subclass 888. That is the wind-down of a closed program, not an open door. A new applicant cannot lodge a subclass 188 today, full stop. If you did not already have an application or a granted 188 visa before the cut-off, the investor route does not exist for you.

Our position is simple and consistent across every closed program we cover. We do not keep a dead route on life support to harvest search traffic, and we do not let a closure quietly imply that a workaround exists. If the honest answer is no, the page says no, and then it does the useful work of telling you where the live options actually are.

The route that closed is the Business Innovation and Investment Program, delivered through the Business Innovation and Investment (Provisional) visa, subclass 188, and its permanent companion, subclass 888. The program stopped accepting new applications on 31 July 2024. The four streams that closed to new applicants are Business Innovation, Investor, Significant Investor, and Entrepreneur. The closure was effected by amending regulation under the Migration Regulations 1994.

Inside that program, the headline 'golden visa' was the Significant Investor Visa, the subclass 188C stream. It required AUD 5,000,000, roughly USD 3,300,000 at a mid-2026 rate, placed into complying Australian investments and held for the qualifying period. The standard Investor stream, subclass 188B, sat below it and historically required a designated investment of around AUD 2,500,000. The Business Innovation stream, 188A, was for business owners and used turnover and net-asset thresholds with a points test. The Entrepreneur stream, 188E, was for founders with backing for an innovative venture. All four are now shut to new lodgements.

The closure did not arrive overnight. The wind-down was signalled in the migration program planning levels well before the formal cut-off. Permanent investor-visa grant places were cut from 1,900 in the 2023 to 2024 program year to 1,000 in 2024 to 2025, a deliberate squeeze on throughput that telegraphed the direction of travel. The 31 July 2024 date is the hard line at which new applications stopped being accepted across the BIIP streams.

One precision point that catches people out: the date that matters for a new applicant is 31 July 2024, the close to new applications. A separate change in December 2024 introduced the successor talent visa and closed the former Global Talent visa, a related but distinct event. We keep the two apart in the timeline below so you can see exactly which change did what.

Because the search demand is still alive, it is worth recording precisely what the SIV was in the form it took just before it closed, not as stale brochures may misremember it. The Significant Investor Visa, subclass 188C, required AUD 5,000,000 in 'complying investments.' Under the framework in force from 1 July 2021, the composition was prescriptive: at least AUD 0.5 million in venture capital and growth private equity funds investing in start-ups and small private companies, at least AUD 1.5 million in managed funds investing in emerging companies meaning smaller ASX-listed firms, and a balancing investment of at least AUD 3.0 million in managed funds covering ASX-listed companies, Australian corporate bonds or notes, annuities, and commercial real estate.

Two details inside that structure shaped who the SIV attracted. First, direct residential real estate was prohibited as a qualifying investment. The SIV was never a property visa in the way Greece or the old Spanish program were. Second, an earlier and more lenient composition applied to applications lodged before 1 July 2021, weighted more toward a general balancing investment and less toward venture and emerging-company funds. If you are reconciling old advice against newer advice, the date of the framework explains most of the apparent contradictions.

The appeal of the SIV was never the headline price, which was among the highest in the world. It was the lightness of the obligations attached to that price. There was no points test on the 188C stream, no upper age limit, and a famously low physical-presence requirement of only 40 days per year, or 180 days across the four-year provisional period. For globally mobile wealth that wanted a first-world anchor without relocating, that combination was the entire pitch. It is also exactly the combination that several live alternatives now replicate at lower cost, which is why the closure is more redirect than dead end.

The pathway ran from the provisional subclass 188 to the permanent subclass 888 after holding the complying investment for the qualifying period and meeting the residence conditions. Australian citizenship then followed the ordinary naturalization clock: four years of residence including at least twelve months as a permanent resident. Australia has never offered citizenship by investment, and the SIV did not change that. It bought time-limited residence with conditions, not a passport.

The investor streams closed because the government concluded they were a poor use of scarce permanent-residence places. A succession of reviews and the broader migration strategy found that business and investor migrants delivered weaker economic outcomes, lower lifetime tax contributions, and softer labour-market integration than skilled and talent migrants admitted through other streams. When a country caps its permanent program, every place handed to a passive investor is a place not handed to a surgeon, an engineer, or a researcher. The reform redirected those places.

Risk was the second driver. Passive investor programs that move large sums across borders carry money-laundering and source-of-funds exposure, and that concern featured prominently in the public case for ending the BIIP. This is the same pressure reshaping investment migration globally, from the European Commission's hostility to citizenship-by-investment to the due-diligence reforms in the Caribbean. Australia did not act in isolation; it acted in step with a worldwide tightening around the passive-capital model.

The political durability of the closure matters most for anyone hoping to wait it out. The opposition floated reviving an investor route before the May 2025 federal election. Labor won that election in a landslide and has shown no intention of restoring it. With the governing party committed to a skills-and-talent migration model and no parliamentary pressure to reverse course, the realistic planning assumption for 2026 and beyond is that the investor visa stays closed. We do not advise structuring around a hypothetical return.

It helps to read this closure in context. Australia is one of several wealthy destinations that have killed or gutted passive investor routes in the same window. Spain ended its golden visa, the United Kingdom scrapped its Tier 1 Investor visa, and Australia closed the BIIP. The era of buying residence in top-tier Anglosphere and Western European economies by parking capital is largely over. The programs that remain open, and that we route you to below, are mostly in jurisdictions that still see investment migration as a net positive.

If you already had an application in the system before 31 July 2024, your position is materially better than a new applicant's, and this page is not the end of your file. Subclass 188 applications lodged before the cut-off are still being processed under the rules in force when they were lodged. The caveat is throughput: with planning levels cut and the program winding down, processing times for the in-flight cohort are long and a large backlog remains. The applications are being decided; they are just slow.

If you already hold a subclass 188 visa, you keep it, and you can still progress to permanent residence. Subclass 888 permanent applications are still accepted from eligible 188 holders, including people whose 188 was granted after 31 July 2024. The permanent door at the end of the provisional path remains open to those already on it. The closure cut off new entries to the path; it did not strand the people already on it.

The extension streams also remain open for existing holders. The Business Innovation Extension and the Significant Investor Extension are still available to current 188 holders who need more time to meet the requirements for the permanent 888. If your investment timeline or presence schedule slipped, the extension mechanism exists precisely so the closure does not force you off the pathway through no fault of your own. Family members can still be added to an existing 188 application as secondary applicants.

On refunds, the rule is specific and easy to get wrong. Applicants who withdrew a Business Innovation, Investor, Significant Investor, or Entrepreneur application on or after 31 July 2024 may be entitled to a refund of the visa application charge. Refunds are not available for the Business Innovation Extension or Significant Investor Extension streams. The complying-investment funds themselves are your own assets, returned according to the terms of the funds you invested in, not money paid to the government. If you are in this cohort, read the official closure-and-refunds guidance and take migration advice before withdrawing anything, because withdrawing is the trigger for a refund entitlement and is also irreversible.

The honest summary is that Australia retains strong migration routes, but none of them is a residence-by-investment visa. If your specific requirement is to deploy capital for residence, Australia is no longer on your menu and you should move to the alternatives section. If your requirement is broader, to live in Australia by some legitimate means, here is what is actually open, and where each route really sits.

The headline successor is the National Innovation visa, subclass 858, which commenced on 6 December 2024 and replaced both the former Global Talent visa and the BIIP as the government's premium permanent route. It is a permanent visa granted by invitation only. You qualify by having an internationally recognized record of exceptional and outstanding achievement in an eligible field, with priority given to critical technologies, health industries, and renewables and low-emissions sectors. The process runs through an Expression of Interest, then a ministerial invitation, then the application, and you generally need an Australian individual or organization of national reputation to nominate you. There is no investment requirement, no job-offer requirement, and no points test, and high earnings are treated as one possible indicator of calibre rather than a price of entry. The visa application charge starts at around AUD 4,985 for the main applicant. To be clear, this is not an investor visa wearing a new name. Capital does not help you qualify, and the bar is set so that only a small number of people clear it each year; in the program's early months, thousands of Expressions of Interest yielded only a few hundred invitations.

For the great majority of people who would once have looked at the SIV, the realistic Australian routes are the skilled and employer-sponsored visas. The points-tested skilled streams, subclasses 189, 190, and 491, select on occupation, age, English, and qualifications. The employer-sponsored streams, including the Skills in Demand visa and the permanent employer-sponsored options, run through a sponsoring employer. None of these is investment-linked, and none can be expedited or unlocked with money. They reward skills, sponsorship, and genuine relocation.

States and territories run their own nomination settings, and some still market 'business and investor' language on their pages. Treat this carefully. With the Commonwealth BIIP closed, state pathways for business and investment people now generally funnel into skilled and business migration tied to genuine activity, job creation, and ongoing presence, not into a passive capital transaction. There is no state-level workaround that recreates a buy-in visa. If a state route looks like an investor visa, verify it directly against current state and Home Affairs guidance before relying on it, because these settings change frequently and the marketing language lags the rules.

The right alternative depends on what you actually wanted from the Australian investor visa, and people wanted different things. Below we sort the live 2026 programs by the goal that drew people to the SIV in the first place. The comparison table that follows lays out the leading options side by side with verified entry points; here we explain which goal points to which program and why.

If you wanted the SIV's signature low presence burden, those 40 days a year, the closest matches are Greece and Portugal. Greece's golden visa carries no minimum-stay requirement at all, even more flexible than the SIV ever was. Portugal's route asks for roughly seven days a year on average and, importantly, is now fund-based rather than property-based, since real estate was removed as a qualifying investment. Both put you inside the European Union and the Schengen area, which the SIV never offered. Note one major 2026 change in Portugal: under the new nationality law, the citizenship clock now runs to ten years, or seven for nationals of EU and Portuguese-speaking CPLP countries, rather than the old five. Residency rights are unchanged; the passport simply takes longer.

If you wanted to deploy capital with the least risk of losing it on a refusal, Italy's investor visa is the structural standout. Italy operates an 'approval first, invest second' model: you obtain the nulla osta clearance before any funds move, so your capital is not at risk if the application is refused. Entry points start at EUR 250,000 for an innovative start-up, rising through EUR 500,000 for an Italian company, EUR 1,000,000 for a philanthropic donation, and EUR 2,000,000 in government bonds. It is a G7 country with permanent residence after five years and citizenship after ten.

If what you really wanted was a second passport rather than residence, the Caribbean citizenship-by-investment programs are the direct route. Donation routes start from roughly USD 200,000 under the regional floor, but presence rules differ by country and travel access changes over time. Grenada is an E-2 treaty country; investment-acquired citizens generally face a separate three-year Grenada-domicile rule before applying, and approval is never automatic.

If your priority was tax efficiency and a business-friendly base, UAE Golden Residency uses an AED 2,000,000 investor threshold, roughly USD 545,000, but duration and real-estate evidence differ between federal ICP and Dubai Land Department channels. It is residence, not citizenship, and the permit alone is not a tax-residence result. If your real goal was the United States, EB-5 is a separate immigrant-investor route with its own current investment, job-creation and visa-availability rules.

Start by separating residence from citizenship, because most people who searched for the Australian investor visa were buying the wrong product without realising it. The SIV was residence, with citizenship only later and only through real presence. If residence is genuinely what you need, a passport-grade program is overkill and the European golden visas or the UAE route are the efficient choices. If you actually need a second nationality, no residence program substitutes for it, and the Caribbean programs or EB-5's eventual citizenship path are where you should look. Buying years of residence when you wanted a passport, or a passport when you wanted a tax-efficient base, is the most expensive mistake in this market.

Then weigh the three variables the SIV taught its applicants to care about: presence, cost, and what you end up holding. Greece minimises presence to zero. The Caribbean minimises time-to-result to months and hands you a passport. Italy minimises capital-at-risk through its approve-then-invest sequence. The UAE minimises tax. EB-5 maximises the prize, US permanent residence, at the cost of an active job-creating investment and longer timelines. There is no single best program, only the best fit for the variable you weight most heavily. The Australian SIV happened to bundle low presence and a strong passport at a very high price; the live market lets you unbundle those and pay only for what you need.

Watch the moving parts, because the entire sector is repricing. Portugal's citizenship timeline doubled in 2026. Greece raised its real-estate tiers and narrowed its cheapest entry to specific conversion and heritage cases. Malta's permanent-residence figures were revised by legal notice in 2025. For EB-5, 30 September 2026 is the filing cutoff for statutory protection against a later Regional Center Program lapse, not the program's closing date; the program is authorized through 30 September 2027, and investment thresholds are scheduled to index on 1 January 2027. A program's headline number this quarter is not a promise for next quarter, which is exactly the volatility the Australian closure itself demonstrates. Verify the current rule before you commit, and prefer programs whose changes you can see coming.

Finally, mind what the alternatives do not give you that Australia would have. None of these European or Caribbean programs is the Australian passport, and several explicitly do not grant visa-free access to the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia. If Australia specifically was the destination, the honest conclusion is that you now reach it on merit or sponsorship, not capital, and you should treat the alternatives as a different objective rather than a like-for-like swap. We size these against your real mobility, tax, and family goals rather than selling whichever has the fattest referral fee, which is why our analysis names the trade-offs out loud.