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Weighing up a move from the UK to Australia? Why the numbers say it needs more workers

News · 2026-09-22 · 4 min read

If you follow Australian politics from the UK, you could easily come away thinking the country wants fewer newcomers. Calls to trim the intake crop up at every election. Look past the speeches, though, and the government's own long-range economic projections tell a rather different tale: cutting migration does not make Australia's problems smaller. It makes them bigger.

For anyone in Britain thinking about a working life in Australia, that gap between the noise and the numbers is worth understanding before you plan anything.

Fewer babies, more birthdays

Start with the population itself. For around fifty years, Australian women have had fewer children on average than the 2.1 births needed to keep numbers steady. The rate now sits near 1.5, and official forecasts expect it to slide to about 1.34 over the coming four decades.

Follow that line forward and something new happens in the mid-2060s: for the first time in modern Australian history, more people are expected to die each year than are born. The current Treasurer has ruled out bringing back baby-bonus style payments or telling families how many children to have, which leaves migration as the main tool for keeping the population, and the workforce, growing.

The ratio that drives the budget

Economists boil this down to one figure, the dependency ratio. It counts how many people aged 65 and over there are for every 100 Australians of working age. Today it is roughly 27. Under normal migration settings it is expected to reach 40 by the 2060s. With a smaller intake, it climbs to 43.

Why does that matter? Because pensions, hospitals and aged care are paid for largely by the taxes of people in work. When the number of retirees grows faster than the number of earners, the bill lands on a shrinking group. The government's long-term modelling spells out what a lower-migration path would do:

• the underlying budget deficit would widen from 1.8% of GDP to 2.4% by 2065-66
• government debt as a share of GDP would end up nearly 10 percentage points higher

Put simply, the cost of not having enough migrants outweighs the cost critics usually point to.

What this tells you about the direction of travel

None of this means any single visa will get easier, and short-term politics can still shift the rules. But the modelling does say a lot about where Australia is heading over the longer run.

Skilled migration is treated as core, not optional. Treasury's own baseline assumes net overseas migration of well over 200,000 people a year, simply to stop the budget picture getting worse.

Younger workers carry real weight. People who arrive of working age start paying tax straight away, at a time when an older home-grown population leans more heavily on services.

Migration is framed as an economic strategy. Government language increasingly links it with skills, innovation and international ties, rather than treating newcomers as a population top-up.

Turning the big picture into a plan

For a UK electrician, chef, nurse or engineer, the practical message is that Australia's long-term need for working-age people is built into its own forecasts. That is a reason to prepare properly rather than wait for the politics to settle. Check which visa fits your occupation on the Department of Home Affairs visa listing, and remember that for many Australian work visas a current UK passport counts towards the English language requirement, although employers and registration bodies can set their own rules.

If you want more context on the politics, our pieces on the question Australia's migration debate keeps missing and what the ageing population means for future intake are a good next read. When you are ready to look at actual roles, browse jobs in Australia for UK citizens and see which ones mention sponsorship.

#migration #australia #ageing population #skilled workers #move to australia from the uk