It is possible that you could be granted both 820&801 soon at the same time if you have waited more than 24 months. Have seen a couple of similar cases on this forum before.

Hope this will cheer you up :-)

Got an email requesting further information today - AFP check for my husband. Frustrating that I didn't think of it before - because when he applied he hadn't spent more than 12 months in Australia. As the time ticked on I was more concerned they would request another police check from his home country, as his is technically expired now. Totally forgot about the Australian one!

Anyway I got all excited thinking maybe this is it!! Except then I logged onto immi account and the status has only moved to 'initial assessment' so it's probably not been thoroughly reviewed. A good sign is my sponsorship has now moved to approved status.

I found it interesting the letter asked me to respond to the CO directly - figured they'd just ask me to put it on my immiaccount - isn't that kind of the point?!. There's no 'information provided' button activated either. Also based on the letter the visa is being processed in QLD (we're from ACT). Who knows how they decide these things certainly doesn't seem to be consistent at all.

Thanks guys. Although there is no guarantee that will happen, it's a possible scenario and if it happens,it's a bit of sweet surprise.

Hello, my wife and I have been reading this forum for many months as we wanted to apply for a partner visa onshore. Long story short we did that recently, online, and within a day or two the Bridging A visa was issued. We are very relived at this early stage, but also thankful for many other reasons, plus the forum was so helpful! Good luck everyone. We we try to post our updates as we go.

I don't mean to bring you down, but the BVA is automatically issued immediately following an 820/801 application. The only thing it really means in terms of your application is that payment was successfully processed.

Yes, true, but we read some stories of even that taking 5 to 10 days to get a confirmation of a bridging visa and given we only have about 10 days left on our existing substant visa we were pressed for time!

Yes, true, but we read some stories of even that taking five to ten days to get a confirmation of a bridging visa and given we only have about ten days left on our existing substant visa we were pressed for time! We held off submitting it as we were waiting for some docs to come through but really we could have done it sooner.. wish we had of known that prior to going through the whole application.. but all is well :)

BPAY over a long holiday weekend or issues with a bank releasing the money can cause delays. We paid by credit card and had the grant within a few minutes.

Sure, but the acknowledgement is not the grant, so there is a slight difference. CC is the faster way of course but some have not been granted within a day or two, for which ever reason. We were not sure what the grant depended on, was it just the applicant submitting the request and payment, or did the sponsor also have to submit their application and did all the docs have to be attached?

We were worried it might take a few days to see the grant (even though it was acknowledged within the hour), or was it going to take more than a week because we still didn't have one or two of what we thought were required forms. But it turned out it was granted without all docs attached and without the sponsor submitting their information, within a business day or two... so there is some slight grey areas there that we did not know before we started to apply. Hope that clears it up for someone else!

Main things we found: we could have opened immi accounts and started putting in personal details weeks ago (I read that somewhere but never did it, do it!). Also, people say to save your personal statement and then paste them in, we did that but because the website times-out quite often lossing 2000 - 6000 characters that you just randomly added really sucks! :))

Oh yeah, it's 2000 characters, not words, we had 2000 words or more :\\ so had to cut back a lot.

Also, the bridging visa doc has A LOT of information on it and what should be done next, so I am surprised to see people asking questions about what they can and should do with it.. but anyhow.

I had both acknowledgement and grant within a few minutes. Even the immigration website says to give ample time in case of delays. Best way to prevent issues is to be prepared ahead of time.

Most questions people ask are clearly answered in a grant letter or on the immigration website. They either read and forgot, missed it, or didn't bother reading at all.