E-3 Visa Requirements: The 7-Point Checklist

E-3 visa requirements come down to seven things, and you can check most of them against a job offer before you accept it. Three sit with you, four sit with your employer, and the ones that sink most cases are specialty occupation, the LCA, and prevailing wage.

The point of running the checklist now, rather than after you sign, is that an offer letter is far easier to fix before it's final.

The 7-point E-3 visa requirements checklist

E-3 visa requirements you must meet

Australian citizenship

In order to qualify for the E-3 visa, you need to be an Australian citizen, not a permanent resident.

Dual citizens are fine as long as one citizenship is Australian and you present the Australian passport at the consulate, so a dual Australian-British citizen qualifies by showing the Australian passport. A New Zealand citizen with Australian PR doesn't, even after decades in the country, and there's no carve-out for Commonwealth nationals or long-term residents.

Before anything else, open your passport, confirm the nationality field reads AUS, and check it's valid at least six months past your intended stay.

A qualifying degree

You need a bachelor's degree or higher in the field the job sits in, and the field has to match the role.

If you're short a formal degree, roughly three years of specialty work experience can stand in for each missing year of study, though that's harder to document and best confirmed before you rely on it.

A US degree needs no evaluation. A three-year Australian degree usually needs an approved credential evaluation (WES is the common one) to show it's equivalent to a US four-year degree, so order it the day you sign. Turnaround runs a few weeks, and the report goes to your interview with your transcripts.

Intent to depart

The E-3 is a temporary visa, so you have to show you intend to leave when your status ends.

It allows limited dual intent, which means applying for a green card won't automatically disqualify you, but each renewal is assessed fresh and an officer can refuse one if permanent intent looks dominant. In practice, people on a clear employer-sponsored green card path still renew without issue.

E-3 visa employer requirements

A written job offer

You need a signed offer on company letterhead listing the role, duties, salary, start date, and location. There's no self-sponsorship path on the E-3.

The consular officer reads the offer closely, because it's how they confirm the role matches the specialty-occupation rules and the certified LCA, so vague or generic duties cause problems.

A clean offer looks like "Software Engineer, salary at or above the prevailing wage, start date on visa approval, Austin TX," with duties that clearly map to the role.

A specialty occupation

This is where most E-3 visa cases fall short. The job itself has to require a specific degree to do it, judged on the actual duties rather than the title.

Roles that usually pass include software engineers, accountants, financial analysts, civil and mechanical engineers, registered nurses, architects, and data scientists.

Roles that usually fail are the generic ones, like sales coordinator, project coordinator, office manager, or anything advertised as "bachelor's required, any major," where the degree isn't tied to the work.

USCIS judges this with a four-part test, and the role only has to meet one of the four:

• The kind of job that normally needs a bachelor's degree to get into.
• Your specific employer normally requires a degree for the role.
• A degree is the standard across the industry for this kind of work.
• The duties are specialized enough that they can't reasonably be done without a degree.

The fix, where it's possible, is the offer letter. A posting rewritten from "bachelor's required, any major" to "bachelor's in computer science required, will design distributed system architecture" passes cleanly, because the degree and the duties line up. If your offer is loose, ask your employer to tighten it before you sign.

Learn more about E-3 speciality occupations, including what jobs qualify and how they are checked.

A certified LCA

The LCA (Labor Condition Application) is your employer's filing with the Department of Labor, and it has to read "Certified" before you can submit your DS-160.

It's the slowest-moving part of the timeline. Standard filings are certified within about seven business days, but your employer should lodge it two to three weeks ahead of your target interview date to be safe, and first-time sponsors often need an extra week or two just to set up their FLAG portal account. There's no H-1B-style portability either, so a new employer means a new LCA.

You can skip much of this by targeting employers with verified DOL LCA history on Migrate Mate's job board.

Prevailing wage

Your salary has to meet or beat the DOL prevailing wage for your role and metro area (MSA). There's no single national minimum, the same role carries a higher required wage in San Francisco than in Austin, and the worksite on your offer is what governs.

An offer below the local prevailing wage causes the LCA to be refused, which blocks the whole application until the salary is raised or the worksite moves.

To check yours, use the DOL wage data tool: enter the job title, find the matching SOC code, and select the metro area on your offer letter. Do this before you negotiate, not after.

Get your E-3 visa filed with Migrate Mate

Once your seven requirements are clear, the rest is paperwork and timing, and that's the part Migrate Mate handles. A dedicated E-3 expert takes the filing end to end: coordinating the LCA with your employer, preparing your DS-160, reviewing your documents, and booking your consular appointment.

Migrate Mate charges a flat fee of $499, with a 100% approval rate to date.

Frequently asked questions