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How to Read DHA's Monthly Student Visa Data — A Practical Guide for Agents, Providers and Students

Every month, the Department of Home Affairs publishes the BP0015 dataset — student visa grants, lodgements and grant rates by country, sector and quarter. Here's what to look at, what to ignore, and how to turn the numbers into a forecast you can actually use.

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Every month, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) drops a new BP0015 dataset on data.gov.au. It contains three pivot tables: visa lodgements, visa grants, and grant rates, broken down by country, sector, quarter and provider state. The data is locked at the previous month-end and published roughly four weeks later.

Most people who look at it walk away confused. The pivots are dense, the labels are bureaucratic, and the file naming is a little eccentric. Here's how to actually use it.

What's in the dataset

Three Excel files, each released together:

  • bp0015l-student-visa-grant-rates-locked-at-[date].xlsx — the grant rate (grants ÷ total decisions) by country and sector.
  • bp0015l-student-visas-granted-report-locked-at-[date].xlsx — total grants by country, sector, lodgement channel and more.
  • bp0015l-student-visas-lodged-report-locked-at-[date].xlsx — total lodgements (applications submitted), same dimensions.

The dimensions on every file:

  • Citizenship country (the applicant's passport)
  • Sector — Higher Education, VET, ELICOS, Schools, Postgraduate Research, Non-Award
  • Provider state — where the institution is registered
  • Lodgement channel — onshore vs offshore
  • Year and quarter — back to 2018

What to actually look at

For most users, three numbers do most of the work:

1. Grant rate trend by country (last 4–8 quarters)

If India's grant rate is 65% this quarter, that figure on its own tells you almost nothing. Compare it to the last four quarters. If it's been climbing, the policy posture toward Indian applicants is loosening. If it's flat, nothing has changed. If it's falling, something has — and you should find out what.

Rule of thumb: changes of less than 3 percentage points are usually noise. Changes of 5+ are usually signal.

2. Sector breakdown within a country

A country's overall grant rate hides important sector differences. India's higher education grant rate and India's ELICOS grant rate often move in opposite directions, because the underlying applicant pool and DHA's posture toward each sector are different.

If you're a provider: look at your sector for your top source countries. That's the number that affects your enrolments.

If you're an agent: look at the sector your client is applying to. Country-level averages will mislead you.

3. Onshore vs offshore split

Onshore lodgement (already in Australia, applying for next visa) and offshore lodgement (applying from home country) get different treatment. For most countries, onshore is harder right now — the Department has tightened scrutiny of within-Australia applications since 2024. If you're advising someone whether to lodge from home or while visiting, this is the figure to check.

What to ignore

  • Annual averages. The data moves quarter-to-quarter. An annual average smooths over real shifts and is less useful than the most recent quarter.
  • Tiny countries. Anything with fewer than ~30 decisions per quarter is too small to draw conclusions from. The grant rate looks volatile because the denominator is small, not because policy changed.
  • The current incomplete quarter. Always look at fully-closed quarters. The current one is partial and misleading.

How we use it at SVH

Every month, we run our pipeline against the new BP0015 release:

  1. Download the three files within 48 hours of publication.
  2. Process them through our QA gate (row counts reconciled against source, no impossible grant rates, no duplicate composite keys).
  3. Upsert to our Supabase grant_rates table.
  4. Refresh the live country dashboard at studyvisahub.com.au/visa-data.
  5. Publish a short Insights post highlighting the biggest movers.

If a country's grant rate moves more than 5 percentage points quarter-on-quarter, we publish an alert. If DHA reclassifies a country's evidence level, we publish a deeper-dive post on what changed.

How to use it yourself

If you're tracking a single country, our Visa Data page is enough. If you need the raw figures — for an internal report, a board presentation, or a research note — download directly from data.gov.au using the link below.

The dataset is free, public, and frequently underused. The agents and providers who read it monthly are the ones who notice policy shifts a quarter before everyone else.

Source: data.gov.au — Student Visa Program (BP0015). Refreshed monthly. SVH publishes a digest of every release within 72 hours of the data going live.