What counts as specified work, and where

Last checked: 15 August 2026

Specified work is two tests at once: a listed industry, and a listed area. Pass one and fail the other and the shifts are worth nothing toward your second year. For hospitality and tourism the area test is the strict one — the postcode has to sit in Northern Australia or on the Remote and Very Remote list.

The work also has to be paid at legal Australian rates. Unpaid trials and volunteer shifts don't count, with one exception: volunteer work in declared bushfire and natural disaster recovery areas.

Hospitality and tourism, as Home Affairs defines it

The department splits it three ways. Accommodation: hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, backpacker hostels, caravan parks and camping grounds, commercial housekeeping, boarding houses, guesthouses and reception centres. Food and beverage: cafes and restaurants, takeaway, catering, pubs, taverns and bars, hospitality clubs. Services provided directly to tourists: guides and operators, outdoor adventure and activity instructors, tourist transport, gallery and museum workers, travel agency and tourist information staff, event and entertainment venue workers.

Their own worked examples are a chef in a restaurant, a guest service agent in a hotel, a dive instructor and a tour bus driver. Home Affairs is also applying temporary flexibility to the industry test: work that supports the ongoing operations of a specified industry in an eligible postcode — administrative and cleaning support, for instance — may be accepted.

The postcode decides, not the town

Two lists make hospitality work count, and both are published as tables of postcodes on the specified-work pages for the 417 and the 462. Northern Australia is one. Remote and Very Remote Australia is the other. Four postcodes — 4406, 4416, 4498 and 7215 — are named separately on top of those.

Every Northern Territory postcode is on both lists. Queensland's Northern Australia band starts at 4680 and runs up the coast through Rockhampton, Mackay, the Whitsundays, Townsville and Cairns to the Torres Strait, plus a run of inland postcodes. Western Australia's covers the Pilbara and Kimberley — Karratha, Port Hedland, Broome, Kununurra.

The Remote and Very Remote list then adds places that are not northern at all: Port Lincoln in South Australia, Esperance and Rottnest Island in Western Australia, a short list of far-western New South Wales postcodes, a few in Victoria, and a Tasmanian list that is nowhere near the whole state.

Gladstone is the postcode people argue about. It sits below the Tropic of Capricorn, so it doesn't look northern — but 4680 is printed in the Northern Australia table and in the Remote and Very Remote table. Geography is not the test. The table is.

The other direction catches more people. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, the Gold Coast, Noosa and Byron Bay are on no hospitality list at all, and no number of hours in them will ever count. We map the towns that do count, state by state.

Specified work on the 417 and the 462 is not identical

For hospitality and tourism they are: same two lists, same four extra postcodes. The farm maps differ. The 417 counts plant and animal cultivation across a much wider regional Australia list. The 462 restricts it to Northern Australia and a narrower set of regional areas, and only counts fishing, pearling, tree farming and felling in Northern Australia. Read the page for your own subclass, not the one that came up first.

How a day is counted

One day of specified work is the normal number of hours per day or shift that is standard practice in your industry and role. Agree those hours with the employer before you start.

You cannot count one calendar day as more than one day. Home Affairs spells it out: if the industry standard day is 5 hours, working 10 — in one shift or several, for one employer or two — is still one day of specified work.

What you need is the number of workdays a full-time worker would do across 88 calendar days. Weekends and rostered rest days sit inside that window rather than extending it. Part-time counts, it just takes proportionally longer. You can split the days across any number of employers and periods. You cannot compress them: 88 calendar days is the floor.

Paid public holidays and paid sick days count as days of specified work. Unpaid ones don't, and neither do unpaid days lost to weather. Home Affairs makes no exception for weather, illness or anything else, which is the whole argument for doing the 88 days early rather than in your last three months.

One more thing worth knowing before you take a long contract: the 6 month limit on working for one employer is a separate rule from the 88 days, and it has its own exemptions — the detail is on the Home Affairs page for condition 8547.

Specified work, answered

The rest of the second-year requirements are in the second working holiday visa guide, and the other rules live in the guides. Once you know which postcodes count, get88 has the venues inside them.