The number of people living in Australia on bridging visas has hit 445,678, the highest figure recorded in Department of Home Affairs data going back to June 2018.

The figures, released on Wednesday, show 2,932,059 temporary visa holders were in the country at 30 September, excluding Bridging visa E holders. That is up 27,485 on the 2,904,574 recorded a year earlier. It is not the highest total on record: that was 2,983,330 at the end of December 2025. But the population of people here on temporary terms remains close to three million, more than one in ten of the 27.9 million people the Australian Bureau of Statistics counted in March.

The bridging figure is the one that should worry Canberra most. It rose by 40,528 in a year. Bridging visas are meant to be a stopgap, holding people in place while an application or appeal is decided. Instead, the category has become a waiting room for close to half a million people.

Three other categories also reached their highest point in the eight-year series. Temporary Graduate visa holders numbered 277,832, up from 239,324 a year earlier. Temporary skilled workers reached 268,293, up from 233,601 a year earlier. Special Category visa holders, overwhelmingly New Zealanders, reached 743,241.

Student visa holders went the other way, falling by 83,329 over the year to 551,341. The data does not show where those students went, and nothing in it proves they moved onto bridging visas. What it does show is a system in which one door narrows and the overall number barely moves.

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The waits behind the bridging pile are long. At the Administrative Review Tribunal, which replaced the AAT in October 2024, half of migration reviews finalised between March and August this year took up to one year and five months, and 95 per cent were finished within two years and nine months. For refugee protection cases, half took up to two years and one month, and the slowest 5 per cent took longer than four years and 11 months. Applicants typically stay on bridging visas while they wait, living and often working in Australia the whole time.

The Albanese government's main lever has been student numbers. It set a National Planning Level of 295,000 international students for 2026 and has announced the same level for 2027. Ministerial Direction 115, which took effect in November 2025, is the tool it uses to steer visa processing towards that cap. A spokesperson for Assistant Minister Julian Hill said the sector was "tracking towards 250,000 commencements for this calendar year".

Those caps do nothing for the bridging queue, and the Opposition has made it a target. On 6 October the Coalition announced a plan to cap net overseas migration at 100,000 for two years, cut bridging and temporary protection visa holders from 414,700 to 20,000, and shrink the Temporary Graduate visa from 271,200 to 10,000 by 2031 to 2032.

Shadow Home Affairs and Immigration Minister Jonno Duniam said universities had "reverted to, sadly, selling a pathway to some form of permanency or perhaps even citizenship rather than education; that's not what this scheme was set up for." Abolishing the Temporary Graduate visa, he said, "means we can focus on skills we need in this country, not just whatever is churned out of our universities."

Not everyone thinks the bridging backlog can be cleared so quickly. Former Home Affairs deputy secretary Abul Rizvi has argued that Coalition and One Nation targets for cutting the "massive bridging visa backlog" are unrealistic.

The Coalition and One Nation has not yet responded publicly to the September figures.