Spousal Visa -> PR (when to apply?)

7 comments

1. If you’ve been married for 3 years and a resident for 1 year (and have a visa longer then 1 year) you should apply.

2. No reason not to apply as soon as you are eligible. If you are doing it from spouse visa the documents you need are pretty much the same as visa renewal so you can just get doubles of everything and file both at once and you save yourself the risk of missing a renewal down the line.

3. Takes a while to come through. I’ve been waiting a few months

4. You need to be:

   1) married for 3 years (anywhere in the world, so Japan or overseas)

   2) have at least 1 year of consecutive residency

   3) be holding a 3 or 5 year visa. This can be any type of visa. But it must be 3/5 years

   So if you’re only holding a 1 year visa then you can’t apply.

5. Further to others’ excellent responses, if you’re planning on retiring here, you should get PR squared away as soon as you can. Especially if you have children.

6. If you’ve been here at least 1 year, married at least 3 years, and have a visa length of over 1 year you’re good to apply. Also make sure you’ve been laying your taxes/pension/etc on time for at least two years

7. There is nothing in the rules that says you should wait for your current visa to get closer to expiring before applying, and in fact doing so could lead to logistical issues where you’d be renewing your current viso while applying for a new one.

   If you generally want to get permanent residence, then standard wisdom is to apply for it as soon as you qualify and can reasonably do so. There are always risks that things in the future could change in a bad way, and you don’t want to be looking back banging your head on the wall because you didn’t get PR when you could have but now it’s too late. I think the two simplest situations that could lead to extreme badness are divorce or death of your spouse.