Evidence When You Don't Live Together

Living together is not a condition of the subclass 820. The Migration Act 1958 asks a narrower question, and couples who live apart for work, study, caring or visa reasons can and do meet it. The file has to show the separation is not permanent, and explain why it exists.

What does the law actually require?

For de facto partners, section 5CB(2) of the Migration Act 1958 requires a mutual commitment to a shared life to the exclusion of all others, a genuine and continuing relationship, that the two are not related by family, and — in the words of paragraph 5CB(2)(c) — that they:

Section 5F(2)(d), which applies to married couples, uses exactly the same words, so the condition is not one that only de facto couples face. What differs is the twelve-month rule in regulation 2.03A, which applies to de facto partners and not to married spouses.

Regulation 1.15A (married spouses) and regulation 1.09A (de facto partners) of the Migration Regulations 1994 add no living-together rule of their own. They set out the four matters the Minister must consider and direct the decision maker to consider all of the circumstances of the relationship, including those matters. Shared accommodation appears inside that list twice, as "the living arrangements of the persons" and "the length of time during which the persons have lived together" — items to be weighed, not thresholds to be cleared.

A couple living apart are therefore not failing a requirement; they are supplying different evidence against the same four matters. Relationship evidence sets those four matters out in full.

Does the 12-month de facto rule mean 12 months under one roof?

No. Regulation 2.03A(3) requires the Minister to be satisfied that the applicant "has been in the de facto relationship for at least the period of 12 months ending immediately before the date of the application". The period runs on the relationship, not on an address.

Two exceptions sit in the same regulation: it does not apply where the applicant can establish compelling and compassionate circumstances, and subregulation (5) removes it where the de facto relationship is a registered relationship within the meaning of section 2E of the Acts Interpretation Act 1901. For couples who spent much of their first year in different places, registration can be the cleaner route — see registering your relationship and exemptions from the 12-month rule.

The situations that put couples in different places

Fly-in fly-out and shift work is the most document-friendly, because the employer generates the proof: rosters, swing calendars, payslips showing site allowances, camp accommodation records and flight itineraries. They establish the pattern, and that the home address has not changed — the partner working away is usually still on the lease and still receiving mail there.

Study or work in another city — a posting, a graduate program, a hospital rotation, a course. The second address is real and the evidence should acknowledge it: the enrolment or employment contract with its dates, the tenancy for the temporary accommodation, and something showing the arrangement has an end point.

Caring for family, where one partner returns to a parent or child who needs care, sometimes overseas and open-endedly. Medical letters, carer payment records and travel history establish the reason, and the statements matter most here because there may be no fixed end date.

Immigration status forcing time apart — an expiring visa, a period spent waiting offshore, a trip prevented by a visa condition. Grant and expiry notices, the visa record in VEVO, bookings and cancellations, and correspondence with the Department date the separation precisely, which makes it among the easiest to explain.

Couples who have never shared a home are together for years without a joint address: adult children living with parents where that is expected, couples whose work has always been in different cities, couples separated by a refusal or a border closure. The legislation does not require a shared home at any point, but without the usual household documents the other three matters have to be covered unusually well. Long-distance relationships deals with this pattern.

What evidence covers the gap?

Replace the household documents with evidence that crosses the distance, and date all of it.

• Contact records. Call logs, message threads and video call histories, sampled across the whole period rather than dumped in full. Exported call metadata showing daily contact over two years says more than a thousand screenshots of one month.
• Visits in both directions. Flight and train bookings, boarding passes, hotel confirmations, passport stamps. These are the backbone: they show the separation was interrupted, regularly, by both people.
• Financial arrangements across the distance. Regular transfers with a visible pattern, a joint account still in use, one person paying the other's rent or loan, shared insurance, a jointly owned property. The regulations ask about the pooling of financial resources and the basis of any sharing of day-to-day household expenses; neither requires a shared kitchen.
• The shared address that persists. A room kept, a key, a name still on the lease or a utility account. Mail addressed to the absent partner at the home address across a run of dates is quietly persuasive.
• Third-party statements from people who have seen you together at both ends. Form 888 statutory declarations explains who can give these.
• Future plans with a paper trail. A lease application for a place together, a home loan pre-approval, a booked flight for the move.

Nature of the household evidence covers what is still available to you, and how much evidence to provide covers the volume question.

How to explain it in the statements

Deal with it directly, early, and with dates. Both the applicant and the sponsor should cover it in their own relationship statement.

A credible explanation has four parts. The dates — when the separation began, when it ends or is expected to end. The reason, matched to a document in the file. What continued across the period: the contact, the money, the visits, the shared commitments. And the intention: that the arrangement is temporary and the couple intend to live together.

Beyond that, credibility is consistency and specificity. Both statements should give the same dates, and those dates should match the boarding passes and the employment contract. Vague phrasing — "we were apart for a while for work reasons" — invites the question it fails to answer.

Where these applications come unstuck

The common failures are a file built entirely on the household matter, which has nothing left once the couple move apart; an unexplained gap in the middle of the relationship; and statements describing a shared home the documents do not support.

An application prepared with an Australian migration lawyer is more likely to succeed where a couple live apart, because the legal question is narrow — permanence of separation, not co-residence — and the evidence has to be assembled against that question rather than against a general impression of togetherness.

What to do next

Work out which of the four matters your living arrangement weakens, then build it back up from the list above. Check whether de facto partner requirements or married spouse requirements apply to you, then write the two statements so the separation is explained in both.

Keep reading

Financial Evidence for the 820

The five financial items in regulation 1.15A, the documents that evidence each, how to present them, and what to do when you keep your money separate.

Read the guide →

Nature of the Household Evidence

The three household items in regulation 1.15A, how to evidence a shared address over time, and what to do when only one name is on the lease.

Read the guide →

Social Evidence: Proving Your Relationship Is Known

The three social items in regulation 1.15A, who should write a statement, and how to evidence being known as a couple to employers, clubs and agencies.

Read the guide →