---
title: "Education agent commission disclosure in Australia: what must be reported, who sees it, and what happens to rates"
description: "Do education agents have to disclose commissions in Australia? What providers must report under ESOS, what PRISMS shares, and how commission rates reprice."
date: "2026-07-03"
updated: "2026-07-10"
category: "Business strategy"
keywords: "Business strategy"
author: "Raphael Arias"
lang: "en"
wordCount: 3559
url: https://qualyhq.com/blog/education-agent-commission-disclosure-australia
---
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# Education agent commission disclosure in Australia: what must be reported, who sees it, and what happens to rates

> Do education agents have to disclose commissions in Australia? What providers must report under ESOS, what PRISMS shares, and how commission rates reprice.

Education agents in Australia don't file commission reports — but since December 2025, every provider they work with can be required to report them: total dollars per agent, non-monetary benefits, students recruited. Per-agent visa outcomes, completion rates, transfers and commission information will be visible to every CRICOS provider through PRISMS. The confidential rate card is ending.

There is a document every large agency guards more carefully than its client list: the schedule of what each provider actually pays. The base rates, the volume kickers, the marketing top-ups, the extra two points a director negotiated over dinner in a conference-hotel restaurant. The economics of a master agency rest substantially on the fact that no provider knows what any other provider pays, and no competitor knows what you earn.

Australia has now legislated that someone will know — and the someone is precisely the party you least want holding the spreadsheet: every provider you'll ever negotiate with. The Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 4 December 2025, and its ESOS amendments turned "what do you pay your agents?" from a rude question into a reportable data field. The question agencies keep asking — *do we have to disclose our commissions?* — has a precise answer, and the precision is the whole story, because the reform's modality (what's mandatory, what's on-request, what's merely possible) determines who feels it first.

## The short answer: you don't disclose — your providers disclose you

Nothing in the new law requires an education agency to file anything about its own commissions. **The disclosure obligation sits entirely with CRICOS-registered providers**, and it comes in three distinct strengths. Getting these right matters, because half the commentary circulating in agent WhatsApp groups collapses them into one imaginary rule.

**What providers must always do** (unchanged in kind, sharpened in scope): publish a list of the education agents they work with on their website (section 21A of the ESOS Act), report each agent's details in PRISMS when the agent facilitates an enrolment, and keep records of those agents. ASQA notes that non-compliance with the list obligations is a strict liability offence — committed even without intent.

**What providers must do if asked**: under new section 21B, the Secretary of the Department of Education can require any registered provider, by written notice, to report its education agent commissions. The notice specifies the reporting period, the deadline, and the format — including entry into PRISMS. The information can cover **the total amount in dollars given to each agent, the value and description of non-monetary benefits given to each agent, and the number of accepted students each agent recruited**. Compliance is not optional once asked; incomplete or misleading answers count as non-compliance, and the penalties run from infringement notices to regulatory action. The one mercy: only commissions given on or after commencement (5 December 2025) can be requested — the pre-2026 dinner-table history stays buried.

**What may be shared or published**: per-agent performance data — visa applications granted, refused, withdrawn or invalid; visa cancellations; enrolment numbers; completion rates — under publication powers that have actually existed since the 2017 ESOS amendments, plus a 2018 government commitment to publish agent performance data publicly that has never been delivered. What the 2025 reforms add is distribution: this data, along with transfer counts and commission information, is being opened to **all providers through PRISMS**, covering all agents used by all providers.

| Information | Who provides it | When it's required | Who can see it |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| List of agents a provider works with | Provider, on its website and in PRISMS | Always (s 21A ESOS Act) | Public |
| Agent details per enrolment | Provider, in PRISMS | Always (ESOS Regulations) | Regulators and providers |
| Total commission dollars per agent | Provider | On the Secretary's written request (s 21B) | Department; providers via PRISMS, deidentified where required |
| Non-monetary benefits: value and description | Provider | On the Secretary's written request (s 21B) | Department; providers via PRISMS, deidentified where required |
| Students recruited per agent | Provider | On the Secretary's written request (s 21B) | Department; providers via PRISMS, deidentified where required |
| Visa grants, refusals, cancellations; enrolments; completion rates per agent | Government systems | Release powers since the 2017 amendments | Providers; public publication committed in 2018, not yet delivered |
| Onshore transfer counts per agent | PRISMS | Being added under the 2025 amendments | All CRICOS providers |

*Verified July 2026 against the Department of Education's fact sheet and ASQA guidance; treat as a map, not a quote — and we're a payments company, not your lawyer, so where it matters, read the Act.*

If commissions are new territory for you, start with our full guide to [how education agent commissions work](/blog/how-education-agent-commissions-work.md) — rates, gross vs net, census dates — and come back. This article is about what happens to all of that when the numbers stop being private.

## What counts as a commission: any benefit with a student attached

The reform's quiet radicalism is in the definition. An **education agent commission** is now any consideration or benefit, **monetary or non-monetary**, given by or on behalf of a provider to an education agent — *or an associate of the agent* — in connection with recruiting, advising or otherwise dealing with overseas students. The Department's own examples run from the obvious (5% of tuition, a flat $1,000 per accepted student) to the previously invisible: a subsidised holiday to Australia taken as payment, courses delivered to the agent's staff at a heavy discount.

The boundary cases are drawn with unusual care. A familiarisation trip *before* any recruitment relationship isn't a commission; the same trip given as part of an arrangement to recruit students is. General marketing activity not connected to identifiable students may fall outside; volume-linked "marketing bonuses" almost certainly don't — we've mapped that boundary in detail in [when marketing budget becomes agent commission in Australia](/blog/marketing-budget-education-agent-commission-australia.md). And the anti-avoidance language is blunt: payments routed through third parties, paid to an agent's associates, or dressed up as service fees "significantly higher than market rates" are all captured, and providers who obscure commissions this way are explicitly threatened with regulatory action.

Pair this with the new activity-based definition of *education agent* — anyone not permanently employed by the provider who recruits, advises or deals with overseas students, including casuals, contractors and, functionally, influencers paid per enrolment — and the design intent is clear: **there is no longer a category of provider-to-agent value transfer that is definitionally invisible.** The reporting may be on-request rather than continuous, but the request, when it comes, reaches everything.

## The league table nobody voted for

Here is the part that changes negotiations rather than compliance calendars. The Department has confirmed that providers will be able to access, through PRISMS, information about **all agents used by all providers** — not just their own roster. That includes each agent's onshore transfer counts, commission information, and the performance set the government has been able to release since 2017: visa applications granted and refused per agent, visa cancellations, enrolments, completion rates.

Assemble those columns and you have built, whether or not anyone says the words aloud, an **agent league table**. Australia now has one; it just lives behind a PRISMS login instead of on a government website. The Department is explicit that this information will not be available to agents or the public, and will be deidentified where privacy or commercial confidence requires. Which produces the reform's strangest asymmetry: **the league table is not public — it is visible only to the people who pay you.** Providers gain a market-wide view of every agent's outcomes and pricing; the agents being ranked can't see their own file, let alone a competitor's. What schools and colleges will actually do with that view — and how the repricing runs from their side of the table — is a big enough question that we've written [a dedicated guide to PRISMS agent data sharing](/blog/prisms-agent-data-sharing-australia/).

**A commission rate is only a trade secret while nobody can see your conversion rate — and Australian providers are being handed both.** In a market where 88% of surveyed international students used an agent in 2024, that is not a compliance footnote; it is a repricing event for the sector's entire distribution layer. The first National Code change built on these definitions has already landed: the [ban on commissions for onshore student transfers](/blog/onshore-transfer-commission-ban-australia.md), which applies to transferring students accepted after 31 March 2026 and deletes a revenue line some agencies had built business models on. It will not be the last.

## The pharma playbook: disclosure doesn't shrink the money — it sorts it

International education has never run this experiment, but medicine has, at scale, and the results are the best forecast we have. The US **Physician Payments Sunshine Act** — passed in 2010, first data published in September 2014 — forced drug and device makers to report every transfer of value to physicians, down to the sandwich, into a public database called Open Payments. Industry lobbied hard against it, predicting the end of legitimate collaboration.

What actually happened is the playbook for what happens to agent commissions. The money did not disappear: physicians received roughly **$12.1 billion between 2013 and 2022**. But it re-sorted, in two directions at once. The small, ubiquitous, hard-to-justify payments shrank — research found a significant post-Sunshine reduction in meal payments, both in dollars and in the number of physicians reached. Meanwhile the big money concentrated on recipients whose value was documentable: the median physician payment was a trivial **$48**, while the top sliver of recipients collected millions each, and payments above $50,000 held steady or grew. Once every payment was visible, companies stopped scattering money across the profession and aimed it at the people whose numbers justified scrutiny.

Call the education version of this **the transparency spread**: once per-agent performance and payment data circulate, commission rates stop clustering around a polite market average and start tracking documented outcomes — a widening premium above the old rate for agents with strong visa-grant and completion numbers, and compression, then delisting, below it for everyone else. The uncomfortable corollary from pharma: the middle disappears fastest. An agent who is merely *fine* — average conversion, average completions, a book padded with onshore churn — was protected by opacity, because a relationship could carry a rate no data supported. The relationship now has a rebuttal window open in the next tab.

## If you run a master agency, your ledger is now your résumé

For large agencies and master agents, the reform lands twice — once as exposure, once as leverage.

**The exposure.** Every provider you hold an agreement with can now be compelled to report everything it gave you: the rate, the bonus, the fam trip, the discounted seats for your counselors' upskilling. If your books and the provider's books tell different stories, that discrepancy now has a regulator-shaped audience. And because the definition captures benefits paid to *associates* and the agent definition is activity-based, your sub-agent network is your risk surface too — the splits you run downstream, which we unpack in [master agent and sub-agent commission splits](/blog/master-agent-sub-agent-commission-splits.md), are exactly the kind of arrangement providers will document defensively from now on. The adjacent income lines are converging on the same logic: OSHC referral money is getting its own squeeze via the [12% cap on OSHC commissions](/blog/oshc-commission-cap-12-percent.md).

**The leverage.** Data cuts both ways, and this is the part weak commentary misses. If your visa-grant rate, completion outcomes and transfer behaviour are genuinely strong, the league table is the best negotiating document you have never been allowed to use — because now the university's own screen corroborates you. Here is our falsifiable claim: **within two to three years, commission negotiation in Australia flips from relationship-driven to data-driven — the meeting opens with your PRISMS numbers, not your history with the international office — and agents with strong published conversion and completion metrics will command above-market rates while the rest absorb compression.** And because Australia's integrity template is the one Canada and the UK study whenever agent quality makes headlines, expect at least one of them to copy the per-agent data-sharing model within the same window. The UK has already started collecting the raw material — since April 2026 every CAS names the recruiting agency, a shift we unpack in [what the UK sponsor guidance means for education agents](/blog/uk-sponsor-guidance-education-agents/). Universities are not spectators either: once per-agent commission data pools centrally, what *providers* pay per outcome becomes benchmarkable, and vice-chancellors will discover their agent spend is a league table too — [how schools pay agent commission](/blog/how-schools-pay-education-agent-commission.md) is about to become a board-level slide.

## Get your numbers straight before someone else reports them

The practical program for the next twelve months is unglamorous. Reconcile your commission records per provider — including every non-monetary benefit, valued honestly — so that when a provider's section 21B response describes you, it matches your own ledger. Document sub-agent splits like the reportable arrangements they now are. Build your own performance file per provider — conversion, visa outcomes, completions — because you cannot see PRISMS, and walking into a data-driven negotiation without your own data is how compression happens to you. The agencies that treated commission tracking as an accounting chore are about to discover it was pricing power all along.

That provability is the gap Qualy is built to close: tuition collected, commissions and sub-agent shares split automatically the moment payment clears, with school and agency looking at the same numbers on [one auditable trail](/features/automatic-accounting-for-ed-agents.md) — for a flat fee, not a percentage. When the league table arrives, you want your side of it already written.

## Sources

- [Department of Education — Fact sheet: Changes to requirements around education agents and commissions](https://www.education.gov.au/download/19892/2025-fact-sheet-changes-requirements-around-education-agents-and-commissions/43184/document/pdf): the definitions of education agent and education agent commission, the section 21B request mechanics, penalties, and PRISMS data-sharing scope, including that data will not be available to agents or the public.
- [Department of Education — Changes to the legislative framework for overseas students](https://www.education.gov.au/esos-framework/changes-legislative-framework-overseas-students): overview of the ESOS amendments.
- [Parliament of Australia — Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2025](https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r7384): passage and Royal Assent on 4 December 2025.
- [ICEF Monitor — Australia passes integrity legislation; sharpens definition of agents and agent commissions](https://monitor.icef.com/2025/12/australia-passes-integrity-legislation-sharpens-definition-of-agents-and-agent-commissions/): the sharpened definitions and the 88% agent-usage figure.
- [ICEF Monitor — Australia moving to wider sharing of education agent data](https://monitor.icef.com/2026/02/australia-moving-to-wider-sharing-of-education-agent-data/): all-provider PRISMS access to agent transfer, performance and commission data.
- [ASQA — Education agents (ESOS requirements)](https://www.asqa.gov.au/esos-providers/esos-requirements/education-agents): the 2017 publication powers over per-agent visa outcomes, enrolments and completion rates; the 2018 public-publication commitment; strict liability for agent-list obligations.
- [ICEF Monitor — Australia introduces new rules restricting agent commissions for onshore student transfers](https://monitor.icef.com/2026/01/australia-introduces-new-rules-restricting-agent-commissions-for-onshore-student-transfers/): the National Code change of 20 January 2026.
- [The Koala News — Government clarifies onshore transfer commission ban with fact sheet](https://thekoalanews.com/government-clarifies-onshore-transfer-commission-ban-with-fact-sheet/): the 31 March 2026 acceptance cut-off and the transfer/progression distinction.
- [The PIE News — Integrity Bill passes as government vows crackdown on "quick-buck" operators](https://thepienews.com/integrity-bill-passes-as-government-vows-crackdown-on-quick-buck-operators/): ministerial framing and sector reaction.
- [Health Affairs — The Physician Payments Sunshine Act](https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/briefs/physician-payments-sunshine-act): history and mechanics of US payment disclosure.
- [Assessing the impact of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act on pharmaceutical companies' payments to physicians (PMC)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11321574/): the significant post-disclosure reduction in meal-related payments.
- [Lown Institute — More than half of doctors receive industry payments](https://lowninstitute.org/more-than-half-of-doctors-receive-industry-payments-with-some-making-millions/): the $12.1 billion 2013–2022 total, the $48 median, and million-dollar top recipients.
- [Trends in Industry Payments to Physicians in the United States From 2014 to 2018 (PMC)](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7610185/): concentration of payment value among a minority of physicians, with high-value payments holding or growing.

## Frequently asked questions

### Do education agents have to disclose their commissions in Australia?

No — agents themselves file nothing. But since December 2025, every Australian provider an agent works with can be required to report every commission, monetary or non-monetary, per agent. Under section 21B of the ESOS Act, the Secretary of the Department of Education can compel any CRICOS provider to report total dollars given to each agent, the value and description of non-monetary benefits, and the number of students each agent recruited. The disclosure burden sits with providers; the transparency lands on agents.

### Who has to report education agent commissions to the government?

CRICOS-registered education providers — universities, VET colleges, ELICOS and schools — not the agencies. A provider must respond to a written request from the Secretary of the Department of Education specifying the reporting period, deadline and format. Providers must also always publish the list of agents they work with on their website and report agent details in PRISMS for each enrolment; ASQA treats non-compliance with the list obligations as a strict liability offence.

### What commission information can the Secretary request under section 21B?

Three categories: the total amount in dollars given to each education agent, the value and description of non-monetary benefits given to each agent, and the number of accepted students each agent recruited for the provider. The request must be in writing and can require the information to be entered into PRISMS. Only commissions given on or after commencement of the amendments (5 December 2025) can be requested; earlier arrangements are out of scope.

### Do non-monetary benefits like fam trips count as agent commissions?

Often, yes. The ESOS definition covers any consideration or benefit, monetary or non-monetary, given in connection with recruiting or dealing with overseas students — the Department's examples include subsidised holidays and heavily discounted courses taken as payment. A familiarisation trip before any recruitment arrangement exists is not a commission; the same trip given as part of a deal to recruit students is. Payments to an agent's associates or routed through third parties are captured too.

### Will education agent commission data be made public in Australia?

Not under current settings. The Department of Education states that the expanded agent data in PRISMS — including commission information — will be available to registered providers and regulators, deidentified where required, and explicitly not to education agents or the public. Separately, publication powers over per-agent visa outcomes and completion rates have existed since 2017, and the government committed in 2018 to publishing agent performance data publicly — a commitment that remains undelivered. The infrastructure for publication exists; the switch hasn't been flipped.

### What per-agent performance data can providers see?

Through PRISMS, providers will be able to see information about all agents used by all providers — not just their own roster. That includes the number of onshore transfers associated with an agent, course transfers, commission information, and the performance set releasable since the 2017 amendments: student visa applications granted, refused, withdrawn or invalid; visa cancellations; enrolment numbers; and completion rates for agent-referred students. Functionally, it is an agent league table visible to the buying side of the market.

### When did the new commission disclosure rules start?

The Education Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Other Measures) Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 4 December 2025, with the relevant provisions commencing the next day. The Secretary can only request information about commissions given on or after commencement. The first National Code change built on the new definitions — the ban on commissions for onshore student transfers — was published on 20 January 2026 and applies where the transferring student is accepted for enrolment after 31 March 2026.

### What happens if a provider doesn't comply with a commission information request?

Non-compliance includes missing the deadline, or providing false, misleading or incomplete information. The consequences range from infringement notices to broader regulatory action by the ESOS agencies — and for agencies, a provider scrambling to reconstruct what it paid you is a relationship risk in itself. Providers are expected to receive further guidance on exactly which commissions and agents each request covers, but the safe operating assumption is that every benefit with a student attached is reportable.

### How does the onshore transfer commission ban relate to disclosure?

Same legislation, different instrument. The 2025 ESOS amendments created the statutory definition of education agent commission; the National Code amendment of January 2026 then used it to prohibit providers from paying commissions when an onshore student transfers from another provider, with an exemption where the student was accepted on or before 31 March 2026. Disclosure makes commissions visible; the transfer ban deletes one category of them outright. We cover the ban in detail in a dedicated guide.

### Will other countries copy Australia's agent commission transparency rules?

Our bet: yes, within two to three years, starting with Canada or the UK. Both markets face recurring agent-quality controversies, both already collect visa outcome data that could be joined to agent identity, and Australia has now written the regulatory template — statutory commission definition, on-request reporting, provider-facing performance data. Regulators copy what is drafted and working. Pharmaceutical payment disclosure followed the same diffusion pattern after the US Sunshine Act, with France and other European countries adopting disclosure regimes of their own.

## Related articles

- [How education agent commissions work: rates, gross vs net, and getting paid on time](/blog/how-education-agent-commissions-work.md)
- [How schools pay education agent commission: run it like payroll, not a shoebox](/blog/how-schools-pay-education-agent-commission.md)
- [Agent 'marketing support' now reads as a commission — unless you can show otherwise](/blog/marketing-budget-education-agent-commission-australia.md)

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