Migration Assessment and Registration Pathways

• Registration and a visa are separate applications. The Board says they are “entirely separate” and that success in one “does not automatically guarantee success in the other”.
• ASMIRT and ANZSNM can take your work experience into account; the Board looks only at your formal qualifications when it decides whether you are qualified. The Board says this is why some people are approved for skilled migration but don’t meet its registration requirements.
• The Board recommends that you don’t apply for work or set up a practice until you are registered.
• We don’t give migration advice, and we don’t name visa types or processing times: check with the Australian Government Department of Home Affairs. The Board doesn’t give migration advice either.

ASMIRT’s Overseas Qualifications Assessment Panel assesses each application individually. Its July 2026 application form lists three outcomes:

The skills assessment letter is valid for three years, and the Department of Home Affairs accepts a skills assessment outcome only if it was issued within the last three years.

An ASMIRT outcome, whatever it is, doesn’t decide registration: the Board makes its own decision on its own pathways, below.

ASMIRT says application fees are non-refundable.

Processing time: ASMIRT’s own documents give different processing times, so we don’t quote one: ask ASMIRT.

An appeal must be lodged within three months of the Assessment Panel’s decision, in writing and signed by you (the July 2026 form says email or faxed copies aren’t accepted). ASMIRT’s Board of Directors decides it, and its decision is final.

ASMIRT’s October 2026 guide moves applications online, so check how it takes appeals once its page relaunches.

Checked 7 November 2026 against the Board’s pages for internationally qualified practitioners.

Registration to practise comes from the Medical Radiation Practice Board of Australia, through Ahpra, in one or more of three divisions: diagnostic radiography, radiation therapy and nuclear medicine technology. The Board decides which pathway applies to you from the information in your application. Nothing on this site can tell you for certain which one it will be.

• The Board says this pathway is not available for nuclear medicine technologists.
• If you hold current registration with New Zealand’s Medical Radiation Technologists Board and a current practising certificate, you can apply for general registration under the Trans-Tasman Mutual Recognition Act 1997.
• If you qualified in New Zealand but don’t hold a current New Zealand practising certificate, you can’t use Trans-Tasman mutual recognition: you apply for general registration and give the details of your New Zealand qualification.
• If the comparable regulator or recognised qualification pathway applies, the Board says you are on a fast-track pathway: it doesn’t assess your qualification, but it still verifies every document in your registration application.

The Board’s list of recognised international qualifications

As printed on the Board’s page (reviewed 13 March 2026). Only an exact match counts: division, institution, qualification title and award year. Anything else goes to the qualification assessment.

MRPBA: is my qualification recognised · MRPBA: registration pathways

On the Qualification Assessment Pathway you send form PNAQ-91 and the $660 fee before you apply for registration. The Board looks at three things: registration (your qualification was recognised for registration where you gained it, or, where there is no statutory registration body, evidence that it let you practise there); quality assurance (accreditation by a body outside your education provider, or issue by a legally authorised institution meeting minimum requirements); and academic level (comparable to an Australian Bachelor degree, AQF level 7, or one level lower: an Associate degree or Advanced diploma at AQF level 6, or a Diploma at AQF level 5 if gained in a comparable regulator jurisdiction).

• Meeting all three at the higher standard gives “substantially equivalent”. Meeting one or more only at the lower, threshold standard gives “relevant to the profession”, which means the exam. Missing a threshold means not qualified.
• For “substantially equivalent”, the Board’s core topics for every division are anatomy, physiology and pathology; principles of patient care; communication with patients and their families or carers; medical radiation physics; safe radiation practice; computed tomography (CT) imaging; and the safe use of medicines, including contrast media. Diagnostic radiography adds projection radiography and fluoroscopy; nuclear medicine technology adds preparing radiopharmaceuticals and assessing their purity, radionuclide therapies, SPECT (including SPECT/CT) and PET examinations, and in vivo and in vitro laboratory procedures; radiation therapy adds equipment and techniques for patient reproducibility, localisation and pre-treatment imaging, treatment planning and treatment. For “relevant to the profession” the essential content is shorter: anatomy, physiology and pathology, principles of patient care, medical radiation physics and safe radiation practice, plus projection radiography and fluoroscopy (diagnostic radiography); radiopharmaceuticals, nuclear medicine examinations and therapies, and laboratory procedures (nuclear medicine technology); or treatment planning and treatment (radiation therapy).
• You provide “a clear colour scan of a certified copy” of each document, and Ahpra asks for proof of identity when you apply for an assessment of your qualifications, as it does when you apply for registration.
• The Board publishes no processing time. It will contact you if the assessment is expected to take more than 28 days or it needs more from you, and it says qualification assessments can’t be fast-tracked.
• If you think something was missed, you can ask for a re-assessment within 28 days of your outcome; the Board says it will tell you the result within two months of receiving the request.
• You can ask for your portfolio to be assessed for more than one division.
• The application fee for the qualification portfolio assessment is not refundable.

MRPBA: assessment of international qualifications

Being qualified is only part of it. When you apply for general registration, the Board checks you against its registration standards on criminal history, English language skills, professional indemnity insurance and recency of practice.

• English language skills: the standard in effect since 18 March 2025, with the minimum test scores that changed for tests taken on or after 23 April 2026 (see the English section).
• Criminal history: you declare your criminal history in all countries, including Australia. A revised standard took effect on 15 July 2026.
• Professional indemnity insurance: your arrangements must cover all aspects of your practice, and you declare that you won’t practise without them.
• Recency of practice: at least 450 hours of practice in the previous three years (about three months full-time), under the standard dated 1 December 2016. Falling short doesn’t necessarily stop a return to practice.

• Licensing to use radiation is up to each state and territory’s radiation authority: the Board says most states and territories require a radiation use licence, so check with the authority where you will practise before you start work.
• Supervised practice isn’t one of the steps on the Board’s pathway pages for internationally qualified applicants. Where the Board does require it, for example as a condition on registration, Ahpra’s Supervised practice framework applies.
• Once registered: 60 hours of CPD over the current triennium (1 December 2024 to 30 November 2027), at least 10 hours in any one year, and at least 35 hours of substantive activities.
• Proposed, not in force: Ahpra and 14 National Boards, including this one, consulted from 15 May to 17 July 2026 on revised standards: 150 hours of practice in the last year or 450 hours in the last three years, and 20 hours of CPD every year, including 5 hours of interactive CPD. No outcome had been published by 7 November 2026.

English, side by side with ASMIRT’s rules: English requirements. MRPBA: registration standards

You sit the exam if the Board assesses your qualification as “relevant to the profession”. The Board can also use it for practitioners returning after an extended break, or where there are concerns about safe practice. The exam guidelines say that, ordinarily, recent graduates of an approved program of study, and applicants under Trans-Tasman mutual recognition, are exempt. They define an approved program of study as one that the Medical Radiation Practice Accreditation Committee has accredited and that leads to a Board-approved qualification published on Ahpra’s website; a recent graduate is someone applying within two years of the award. A qualification the Board assesses on form PNAQ-91, its “Portfolio for the assessment of non-approved qualifications”, is not an approved program of study, so that exemption doesn’t cover it.

• The Board’s documents word the identification rule in different ways, so bring your printed exam confirmation email (with its booking or authorisation code) and two forms of government-issued photo identification, at least one of them issued within the last five years (the Board’s 2015 sitting page asks for photo identification issued no more than five years before the exam), and follow the instructions in your confirmation. A candidate refused entry over identification forfeits the sitting fee.
• You can reschedule without a fee up to 72 hours before your exam. Cancel 72 hours or more ahead and the fee is refunded; inside 72 hours it isn’t, unless special consideration is approved.
• You pay the sitting fee by credit card through the exam portal. Kryterion’s head office is in Arizona, USA, so your bank may add an international transaction fee.
• Requests for additional support go to the National Exam Coordinator at least 30 days before the exam. Applications for special consideration go in before the exam or within 14 working days after it.
• There are no past papers. Once you have registered and paid for a sitting, the portal’s practice exam shows the look and feel of the real one.
• No reference material, phones, internet-connected devices, pens and paper, or water in the exam room. Arrive 15 to 20 minutes early.

What it costs (Board schedule effective 1 October 2026)

The Board charges an application fee and a registration fee, and both are paid when you apply. The sums are ours, not the Board’s. Any English test, criminal history checks, insurance, a radiation use licence, visas and travel are extra. MRPBA: fees

2027 exam dates and registration periods

From the Board’s 2027 examination schedule. Registration for each sitting closes weeks before its exam window, you need an active exam account first, and the three-month rule between attempts can rule out the next sitting after a fail. Check the Board’s exam page before you plan around a date. MRPBA: National exam