Is Your Child Heading to Study in Melbourne?

An earlier version of this article told you a 270,000 international student cap was coming into force in 2025, and that you should buy before it hit. I'm correcting it, because the cap in that form never became law — and the version that does exist works differently enough to change what you should actually do.

Here is the accurate position, and then the part that matters for your child's accommodation.

What actually happened to the student cap

In 2024 the Australian government introduced the ESOS Amendment Bill, which would have legislated a hard limit of 270,000 new international student commencements from 1 January 2025. It failed to pass the Senate in November 2024 after the Coalition declined to support it. There is no legislated cap on international student numbers in Australia.

What the government did instead was reach for a tool that needs no parliamentary approval: a ministerial direction. Ministerial Direction 111, issued in December 2024, tells departmental officials to give priority processing to each education provider's student visa applications until that provider reaches roughly 80% of an indicative allocation — the same per-provider numbers that were drafted for the failed bill. Beyond that threshold, applications aren't refused; they're processed more slowly.

That distinction is the whole thing. A cap stops students at a number. A prioritisation direction slows the queue. The practical effect is real — students applying late in the year to a provider that has already filled its allocation wait longer — but it is not a wall, and anyone telling you your child may be locked out of Melbourne is overstating it.

The current numbers

The government now publishes a National Planning Level each year. For 2025 it was 270,000. For 2026 it is 295,000 — an increase of 25,000 places, not a reduction.

There is also a change worth knowing if your child is already in the Australian system: from 2026, students moving from an Australian secondary school, a pathway provider or TAFE into a publicly funded university are exempt from the planning level altogether. If your child does Year 11 and 12 in Melbourne and then goes to the University of Melbourne or Monash, the planning level does not apply to that step.

So should you still be worried?

Not about your child getting a place. Melbourne's universities are not turning away qualified Singaporean students, and the direction of travel on the planning level is upward.

Be worried about something more boring and more likely: where they will live.

The accommodation problem is the real one

Melbourne's rental vacancy rate was 1.1% in October 2025 — the tightest in fifteen years. At that level there is effectively no slack in the market. Properties near the university precincts are let within days, often above asking, and frequently to whoever can sign fastest and pay the most bond.

For a family arriving from Singapore, that produces a predictable and expensive sequence: you fly in two weeks before semester, you cannot secure anything without an Australian rental history or a local guarantor, you take serviced apartments or a hotel at A$200–350 a night while you keep looking, and you end up accepting something worse and further out than you wanted. I have watched this happen to families who did everything else right.

That is the risk to plan around. Not the cap.

What buying actually solves — and what it doesn't

Buying an apartment near campus solves the accommodation problem completely and permanently. Your child has a fixed address from day one, you are not re-entering the rental market every twelve months, and when they graduate you can let it to the next cohort or sell.

What it does not do is guarantee a return. Let me be direct about the costs, because they are the part most agents skip:

• FIRB approval is required for every residential purchase by a foreign person, regardless of price, and must be obtained before you buy. Fees are tiered by property value and reviewed annually — budget from the current ATO schedule.
• Foreign buyers can only purchase new dwellings until 30 June 2029. No resale apartments. You are buying from a developer, off-the-plan or newly completed.
• Victoria charges an 8% foreign purchaser additional duty on top of standard land transfer duty, and an annual absentee owner land tax surcharge for as long as you hold it.
• Financing is harder as a non-resident — larger deposits, fewer lenders, worse rates.

Against that, Victoria's off-the-plan duty concession has been extended to 21 April 2027, it applies to foreign buyers, and it can be worth tens of thousands. It covers strata apartments and townhouses only — not house-and-land.

The honest comparison is total cost of ownership over the years your child is studying, against three or four years of rent at Melbourne's current levels with nothing at the end. For a three-year degree the numbers are often close. For a five-or-six-year course, or a second child following, buying usually wins clearly.

When to start

Earlier than feels necessary. Foreigner-eligible completed stock in the inner suburbs is thin — roughly one in ten completed apartments in 2025 qualified for foreign buyers, because the rest had already been sold to locals off-the-plan years before. If you want to buy something your child can move into, you are shopping in a small pool.

Two to three years ahead lets you buy off-the-plan, pick your stack and floor, and use the duty concession. Twelve months ahead limits you to whatever completed stock is left. Two months ahead means renting, badly.

If you want the honest read

Tell me which university, which year they start, and your budget. I will tell you whether buying makes sense for your situation or whether you are better off renting and keeping the capital in Singapore — I say the latter more often than you would expect, particularly for a single three-year degree.

Send me the details and I will run the comparison properly.