Which Australian authority assesses which occupation — and why the answer lives in a legislative instrument, not on a website

There is no single website that authoritatively tells you which body assesses your occupation. There is a legislative instrument that does, and every website — including the assessing authorities’ own — is a summary of it that can be, and sometimes is, out of date.

Two numbers frame the whole question. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations states that “A total of 39 assessing authorities are approved to deliver skills assessments to support applications for skilled migration”, on a page it says was last modified 25 June 2026. And the pairing of occupations to those authorities is set out in the Migration (LIN 19/051: Specification of Occupations and Relevant Assessing Authorities) Instrument 2019, whose current compilation on the Federal Register of Legislation is F2026C00265, compilation 05, dated 28 March 2026.

That instrument is the answer. Everything else is commentary.

What each layer of the system actually is

Layer	Who publishes it	What it settles	What it does not settle
The legislative instrument (LIN 19/051, current compilation F2026C00265, 28 Mar 2026)	Federal Register of Legislation, administered by the Department of Home Affairs	Which body is the relevant assessing authority for a given occupation, for a given visa programme	Whether the occupation is on a current occupation list; what the authority’s criteria are
The approved-authority list (39 bodies)	Department of Employment and Workplace Relations	Which bodies are approved to deliver skills assessments at all, and the Guiding Principles and Standards they operate under	Which occupations each one covers
The occupation lists	Department of Home Affairs	Whether an occupation is currently available for a given programme	Who assesses it, or on what criteria
The authority’s own occupation pages	e.g. VETASSESS, ACS, CPA Australia	Its criteria, fees, evidence and pathways	Its own legal scope — the instrument does that

The practical consequence: if an authority’s website and the instrument disagree about scope, the instrument wins, and VETASSESS says as much about its own pages — “The occupation codes we use are those specified in the legislative instruments giving us the authority to assess occupations for migration purposes, and not necessarily those in the latest ANZSCO updates.”

The four traps

Trap 1 — there are two live versions of ANZSCO, and which one applies depends on the programme, not on you. VETASSESS states it plainly:

“For most occupations, assessments are based on ANZSCO 2013, as referenced in the applicable legislation. For the Core Skills stream of the Skills in Demand (subclass 482) visa and the Direct Entry stream of the Employer Nomination Scheme (subclass 186) visa, assessments align with ANZSCO 2022. This later version of ANZSCO benchmarks the Core Skills Occupation List (CSOL), which the Government released in December 2024.”

Occupation pages now show two codes for the same job. Management Consultant, for instance, is 224711 under ANZSCO 2013 and 224713 under ANZSCO 2022 — same occupation, different number, and the criteria pages differ between the two views. A code copied from a forum post, an old checklist or a migration agent’s 2023 spreadsheet may be the right code for the wrong classification year.

Trap 2 — the occupation is a legal category, not a job title. The instrument and the authorities work from ANZSCO unit groups. VETASSESS’s Management Consultant page lists sixteen occupations that are explicitly not assessed under that code — including Management Accountant, Human Resource Adviser, Recruitment Consultant, Marketing Specialist, Policy Analyst and ICT Business Analyst — on the ground that “These occupations are classified elsewhere in ANZSCO or are not at the required skill level.” Your business card does not decide which authority you go to. The classification does.

Trap 3 — headline counts on authority websites are not the legal count. On the day we read them, VETASSESS’s landing page said “we assess more than 341 professional and other non-trade occupations” and its eligibility page said “The Australian Government has authorised us to provide skills assessments for 341 professional and other non-trade occupations” — statements that cannot both be exact. Its published sitemap listed 363 pages under professional occupations, one named test-profession and three carrying a duplicate -0 suffix. Its trade landing page said “each of the 25 trade occupations we assess” and then listed 28 on the same page. None of these is the legal figure. Only the instrument is.

Trap 4 — authority assignments change, sometimes mid-cycle. The Department’s assessing-authorities page carries a live example: “The Institution of Surveyors NSW (ISNSW) has been formally legislated as the assessing authority for the Surveyor occupation (ANZSCO 232212) and is listed on the Federal Register of Legislation. For migration purposes, ISNSW is now accepting applications for skills assessments.” An applicant working from a cached page would send a Surveyor application to the previous body. VETASSESS covers the mirror-image case in its own FAQ: “We will not be able to renew your assessment if we no longer assess that occupation.”

How to read the instrument, in five steps

1. Open the instrument by its identifier, not by search: F2019L00278 on the Federal Register of Legislation, and take the latest compilation rather than the “as made” version. On 3 September 2026 the latest compilation was F2026C00265, compilation 05, dated 28 March 2026.
2. Check which schedule applies. The instrument is structured around the occupation lists, and an occupation can appear in more than one with the same or different assessing authorities.
3. Read the ANZSCO code, not the title, and confirm which ANZSCO version the programme you are dealing with uses.
4. Note the date of effect on the compilation. A compilation is a snapshot; amendments between compilations are registered separately.
5. Then, and only then, go to the named authority’s site for criteria, fees and evidence — those are the authority’s to set, and they are not in the instrument.

If reading legislation is not where you want to be, the Department of Home Affairs’ skilled occupation list search is the intended consumer-facing route, and DEWR points you there: “To find the assessing authority for your occupation, search the skilled occupation list on the Department of Home Affairs website.” One caution from our own reading: the Home Affairs assessing authorities page delivers its content by script — the served HTML contains no list — and the page states it was last updated 23/09/2024. Treat it as a navigation aid, not as the source of truth.

The coarse map, and why we will not print a fine one

Across the 39 approved authorities the pattern is stable enough to be worth stating, and too coarse to substitute for a lookup:

• Professional and managerial occupations without their own profession-specific body cluster at VETASSESS, which describes its own scope as “professional and other non-trade occupations”.
• ICT and data occupations go to ACS, which groups its scope into “Data Science occupations”, “IT occupations” and “Cyber Security occupations”.
• Accounting and audit occupations go to the accounting bodies — CPA Australia, CA ANZ and IPA — not to VETASSESS, with the single adjacent exception of Internal Auditor, which VETASSESS assesses as a Group A occupation. See a skills assessment and membership are two different assessments.
• Trades are assessed under Trades Recognition Australia programmes, delivered by TRA-approved registered training organisations including VETASSESS. The pathway and fee structures are entirely separate from the professional stream — see VETASSESS general, trade and priority streams.
• Regulated health, teaching, engineering, law, architecture and social work occupations go to the profession’s own body, and for most of those the skills assessment is a different animal from the registration decision. That distinction is the single most expensive thing to get wrong: see assessment, licence and admission are three different gates and regulators block the register, not the rules.

We are not reproducing the occupation-to-authority table. Not because it is secret — it is Commonwealth legislation and freely readable — but because a copy of it on this page would be a snapshot that silently ages, and the one thing an applicant cannot afford is a stale pairing. The instrument is one click away and it is dated. Use the dated one.

So what should you actually do

Settle the ANZSCO code first, from the occupation description rather than your job title. Confirm which ANZSCO version your intended programme uses. Look the code up in the current compilation of the instrument. Then read the named authority’s criteria — and if the authority is VETASSESS, read the group letter before anything else, because it sets the qualification floor: what each VETASSESS group demands.

What this page does not do

This page reports which body performs which assessment. It does not tell you which visa to apply for, whether you should apply, whether you would be nominated, or what any outcome would be. Those are questions for the Department of Home Affairs or a registered migration agent; this site is not one and does not provide migration advice. It also does not summarise the criteria of 39 bodies — each publishes its own, and where two of them assess adjacent occupations they routinely reach different conclusions on the same document, for reasons set out in one award, four rulebooks.