If your practice bills in stages, you probably learned the rule as a block of work: hold the client's money until the block is complete and an invoice has issued, then take the fee.
That rule was clause 7.2 of the former Code. Search the current Code for "block of work" and you will not find it.
Stage-based billing is still perfectly workable. But what makes a fee earned, and what makes taking it lawful, is now assembled from three provisions rather than stated in one — and the practices most exposed are the ones that never noticed the change, because their process still describes a clause that no longer exists.
What replaced it
Section 46 fixes the shape of the fee. Where fees are charged for work under a service agreement, the agreement must specify them as either an hourly rate or a fixed total amount, including any GST or other tax. Where it specifies an hourly rate, it must also include a reasonable estimate of the time. The rate or fixed fee must be fair and reasonable, and section 46(1) prohibits charging for work other than as the agreement provides.
Two shapes, and no third. This is where practices with stage schedules need to be careful: a schedule of stage amounts is compliant if it constitutes the fixed total for the work covered by the agreement, broken down. It is not compliant if it is an open-ended series of stage prices that never resolves to a total.
Section 49 governs the invoice. You must not charge a client a fee for work, or an amount for a disbursement, unless the client is given an itemised invoice containing details of the work or services to which the fee or disbursement relates. Once they pay, you must give a receipt identifying the work the payment relates to and the invoice it relates to.
The order is fixed. The invoice comes before the charge, not after it, and the receipt is a separate document from the invoice.
Section 313 of the Act governs entitlement. The Code's own note to section 49 states it: an agent is not entitled to be paid a fee or other reward for giving immigration assistance unless the agent gives the assisted person a statement of services setting out particulars of each service performed and the charge made in respect of each service.
That is the provision doing the work the block-of-work clause used to do. It is not in the Code. It is in the Act, and it speaks to entitlement rather than process.
Statement of services and invoice are not the same document
They can be one piece of paper. They are two requirements, and conflating them is how practices end up compliant with one and not the other.
The invoice is a Code requirement about charging: itemised, containing details of the work the fee relates to, given before the charge. The statement of services is an Act requirement about entitlement: particulars of each service performed and the charge for each.
What "itemised" has to survive
An invoice reading "Professional fees — 482 nomination and visa application — $4,400" is arguably itemised at the level of the engagement. It does not set out particulars of each service performed with a charge against each. If your standard invoice looks like that line, it is worth deciding deliberately whether it is also serving as your statement of services, and if so, making it do that job.
Why this decides when you may take the money
Section 50(1)(d) lists the only five purposes for which money may leave the account holding client money. The first is paying you or your business — and it carries an express exception: not where section 313 says the agent is not entitled to be paid.
Follow the chain. No statement of services means no entitlement under section 313. No entitlement means the payment is not within section 50(1)(d)(i). A payment outside the five permitted purposes is a breach of section 50.
So the discipline the block-of-work clause used to impose survives, by a different route. You cannot take the fee because the stage is done. You take it because the services have been performed, a statement of services has been given, an itemised invoice has issued, and the transfer is therefore an authorised movement. Our guide to monthly reconciliation covers testing that every fee transfer meets it.
Money before the agreement, and the consultation exception
Section 51 prohibits receiving amounts from a client — fees or disbursements — where they relate to giving immigration assistance and no service agreement covering that assistance is in force. It also requires reasonable steps to ensure nobody else in your business receives such amounts.
The exception is the initial consultation. Section 43 allows advice at a first consultation without an agreement, but attaches conditions: the fee must be reasonable, you must notify the client of your MARN, section 49's invoice and receipt requirements apply as if the assistance were given under an agreement, and any amounts received are treated as client money — with sufficient funds kept available for refunds and refunds paid promptly and within 14 days.
OMARA's guidance is worth reading alongside this, because it narrows the exception considerably. Only the first consultation about a particular immigration matter counts, and if a consultation runs across more than one day, the later days are not part of it. The guidance also confirms that following up for administrative purposes — collecting details to finalise the agreement — is not immigration assistance, but that providing advice after research at a subsequent meeting is not permissible without an agreement in place.
Deposits, and what they are for
Practices commonly take a deposit at engagement. Nothing prohibits that where an agreement is in force, but two things follow.
It is client money, so it goes into the account and stays there until one of the five permitted purposes applies. And it cannot become your fee just because it was described as non-refundable — entitlement runs through section 313, not through a label in the agreement.
Section 52 requires the agreement to include a fair and reasonable refund policy. OMARA's guidance says that, as a general rule, a refund policy should allow for a refund of any money paid by a client but not ultimately required for services or disbursements. A deposit that is forfeited regardless of work done is difficult to reconcile with that.
Making it work in practice
- Express the fee as an hourly rate or a fixed total. If you bill in stages, make the stages a breakdown of a fixed total for the agreed work.
- Define what completes each stage in terms of services performed, so the statement of services can describe them.
- Issue the itemised invoice before charging, with detail at the level of services rather than the engagement.
- Make the statement of services explicit — either a distinct document, or an invoice that genuinely particularises each service and its charge.
- Transfer only after the statement and the invoice, and record the transfer against them.
- Issue the receipt identifying the work and the invoice.
- Keep copies on the file. Section 56(2)(f) requires copies of all invoices and receipts given to the client; our guide to file note requirements covers the wider record.
The entitlement test
For your last five fee transfers:
- Is there a statement of services particularising each service and its charge?
- Was the itemised invoice given before the charge?
- Was a receipt issued after payment, identifying the invoice?
- Does the agreement express the fee as an hourly rate or a fixed total?
- Was any amount received before the agreement was in force?
- Would an unspent balance be refundable under your own refund policy?
Where a system helps
The failure mode is sequence. Documents exist, but in an order the Code does not permit — or the transfer happens on the day the work finishes and the paperwork catches up afterwards.
Software fixes this by making the sequence structural: a fee transfer that cannot be recorded without the invoice it relies on, invoices that itemise from the services actually performed, and receipts generated from payments rather than typed.
LodgeHQ ties invoices, receipts and client-money movements together so entitlement is evidenced by the record instead of assumed. Our guides to trust accounting and what migration agents charge cover the surrounding practice.
Verify before you rely on it
Section 313 of the Migration Act has consequences for an agent who is paid without giving a statement of services, and this article does not set them out. Read the section itself, along with the prescribed Code and the Regulations on the Federal Register, before relying on any billing practice.
This is general information for migration practices, not legal or accounting advice. Have your fee terms and invoice format reviewed against the current provisions rather than carried forward from a pre-2022 precedent.