Form 888: Who Can Make One and What It Should Actually Say

Who can make a Form 888 statement?

Any person aged at least 18 who knows the visa applicant, knows the applicant's partner or fiancé(e), and knows the history of their relationship may make a Form 888 statement. Those are the only conditions the form imposes. The current version, design date 08/26, states that the form must be completed by a person who knows the visa applicant and their partner or fiancé(e) and the history of their relationship, and who is at least 18 years of age.

Nothing in that test turns on nationality. A person does not have to be an Australian citizen. A person does not have to be an Australian permanent resident. A friend on a student visa, a colleague on a working holiday visa, a parent living overseas and a neighbour who has known the couple for eight months are all capable of making a valid statement, provided each of them genuinely knows both members of the couple and knows how the relationship has developed.

Citizenship and residence do become relevant, but not as a test of eligibility. The form requires the person making the statement to provide documentary evidence of their current name, their age and, where applicable, their Australian citizenship or Australian permanent residency. That means a citizen evidences citizenship and a permanent resident evidences permanent residence. A person who is neither simply evidences name and age, for example with a passport or a birth certificate. Question 5 of the form asks directly whether evidence of identity has been attached, and the answer should be yes.

There is one practical limit the form does not state. A statement is only as useful as the knowledge sitting behind it. A person who has met the couple twice can honestly say very little, and a decision maker reading that statement learns very little from it. The people worth approaching are the people who have actually watched the relationship happen: the housemate who lived through the move, the sibling who spent Christmas with both of them, the manager who met the partner at the work function three years running.

One group is often overlooked. Form 888 applies to prospective marriage applications as well as partner applications, so a person may make a statement about a couple who are engaged and not yet living together. The form refers throughout to the applicant's partner or fiancé(e). A statement supporting an engaged couple should therefore describe the engagement itself, how it came about, who was told and when, and what the couple have arranged for the wedding.

Who signs the statements also sends a signal. Where every supporting statement comes from one side of the couple, a decision maker may reasonably wonder why nobody from the other side has spoken. A subclass 820 partner visa application is usually stronger when the statements come from both sides, and from people at different points in the couple's life rather than a single group of mutual friends.

Is Form 888 still a statutory declaration?

No. The current Form 888 is a supporting statement, not a statutory declaration. It is titled Supporting statement in relation to a Partner or Prospective Marriage visa application, it carries the design date 08/26, and it contains no witnessing block anywhere in it. The last page asks for the signature of the person making the statement and the date, and nothing more.

This matters because a great deal of published guidance still describes Form 888 as a statutory declaration that must be signed in front of an authorised witness, and still reproduces the list of occupations under the Statutory Declarations Regulations 2018. Couples follow that advice, arrange an appointment with a justice of the peace, a pharmacist or a police officer, and then find there is nowhere on the form for that person to sign. Older copies of the form still sit on third party websites carrying the former title and the old witnessing page, which makes the confusion worse. The only safe course is to download the form from the Department of Home Affairs on the day it is being completed.

Departmental procedural guidance has not fully caught up with the form. Policy on assessing married and de facto relationships still refers to the form by its former title, and still encourages supporting evidence to be given in the form of statutory declarations on the basis that a statutory declaration carries more weight as a legal document. The practical reading is straightforward. The current Form 888 is the document to lodge. A person who also wishes to make a separate Commonwealth statutory declaration is free to do so, and in a contested matter that can be worth considering, but nothing in the current form requires it.

What has not changed is the legal weight of the document. The absence of a witness does not make a Form 888 statement informal, and it does not reduce the consequences of putting something untrue in it. Those consequences are set out further down this page.

What should a Form 888 statement actually say?

A Form 888 statement should answer the two questions the form asks, in the person's own words, using specific facts, places and dates rather than general praise. Question 3 asks the person to state how they know the applicant and the applicant's partner or fiancé(e), and to indicate how often they have been in contact with them. Question 4 asks whether the person believes the relationship to be genuine and continuing, and requires the reasons for that belief. A further section invites any other matters the person wishes to add in support of the application.

Most weak statements fail because they answer a different question. They describe what a lovely couple the two people are. The form does not ask that. It asks how the person knows them, how often there is contact, and what the person has personally seen that supports the belief that the relationship is real and ongoing.

Question 3: how you know them and how often you see them

This answer should establish the person's vantage point. Where and when did the person meet the applicant, and where and when did the person meet the partner. What is the connection: family, share house, workplace, church, sporting club, study. How the contact happens now, how often, and in what form. A person who sees the couple every Sunday should say so. A person who moved interstate in 2024 and now speaks to them by video call every few weeks should say that instead.

Dates carry more weight than adjectives. "I have known Sarah since we started work together at the same hospital in March 2019, and I met David at her birthday dinner in October 2021" tells a decision maker something. "I have known them both for a long time" does not.

Question 4: why you believe the relationship is genuine and continuing

This is the answer that decides whether the statement is useful. It should set out what the person has personally observed, described as events. Holidays the person joined or heard planned. The move into the shared flat, and who helped carry the boxes. Meeting each other's parents. How the couple speak about money, who paid for what, who handles the bills. Who cared for whom during illness or after a job loss. Plans the person has heard the couple make about the next few years.

Two rules keep this answer safe and strong. The person writes only what they know first hand, and says plainly where something was told to them rather than seen. The person writes in their own voice, in their own English, and does not copy wording from anyone else's statement.

The additional matters section

The free text section is where context that does not fit the earlier questions belongs. Cultural or family circumstances that explain something a decision maker might otherwise read the wrong way often sit here. Periods living apart for work, study or visa reasons. A wedding delayed by family illness. Why one set of parents was not told immediately. This section is also useful where a couple have limited financial or household documents, which is common early in a relationship and for same-sex and LGBTIQ+ couples whose families or home countries make open evidence difficult.

Why the Department asks for these statements at all

Form 888 statements go to one of the four matters a decision maker is required to consider when deciding whether a relationship is genuine. For a married couple, regulation 1.15A of the Migration Regulations 1994 is made under subsection 5F(3) of the Migration Act 1958, and subregulation 1.15A(3) prescribes four matters: the financial aspects of the relationship, the nature of the household, the social aspects of the relationship and the nature of the persons' commitment to each other. For a de facto couple the equivalent provision is regulation 1.09A, made under subsection 5CB(3) of the Act, with the same four matters in subregulation 1.09A(3).

Form 888 speaks to paragraph 1.15A(3)(c) for married couples and paragraph 1.09A(3)(c) for de facto couples: the social aspects of the relationship. Within that paragraph, one of the listed matters is the opinion of the persons' friends and acquaintances about the nature of the relationship. Departmental policy names Form 888 as the form provided for exactly that purpose.

Two consequences follow, and both are commonly missed. The first is that a decision maker must weigh all four matters together and is not counting how many are satisfied against how many are not. Form 888 statements cannot rescue an application with no financial, household or commitment evidence. The second is that these statements are not a formality to be filled in at the end. They are evidence directed at a specific paragraph of the Regulations, and they should be written as if a decision maker will test them, because a decision maker may.

How many Form 888 statements are needed?

The current Form 888 sets no minimum number. It states that a person completing the form may be asked to submit up to 3 separate statements during the processing of the visa application, and it warns that the person may be contacted for further comment or for an interview about what they have said. It does not say that a particular number must be lodged, and it does not say the statements must come from Australian citizens or permanent residents.

The widely repeated advice that a partner visa application requires exactly two Form 888 statements from Australian citizens or permanent residents aged over 18 comes from the older version of the form and from checklists built around it. Applicants still lodge two, in the belief that two is the rule, and stop there.

The better approach is to think about coverage rather than count. The question is whether the statements, read together, let a decision maker see the relationship from more than one angle and across more than one period. Three or four considered statements from people who know different parts of the couple's life do more than six identical statements from the same friendship group. Where a subclass 309 offshore partner visa application relies heavily on time spent together overseas, statements from people who saw that time matter far more than statements from people who did not.

How a Form 888 statement is signed and lodged

The person making the statement signs and dates the form, attaches their identity evidence, and gives it to the couple. The form is then attached to the visa application in ImmiAccount by the visa applicant or their appointed representative. The person making the statement does not lodge anything with the Department themselves, and they do not need an ImmiAccount.

The form should be completed in English, either typed into the fields in Adobe Acrobat Reader or printed and written in block letters. The Department asks the person to provide contact details, including an email address, and states that it prefers to communicate electronically. That contact detail is not decoration. It is how the Department reaches a supporting witness if it decides to verify the statement, so a person unwilling to be contacted should not be making a statement in the first place.

Two housekeeping points cause avoidable problems. The names on the form must match the names on the passports exactly, including the order of family name and given names. Where a person has changed their name, the identity evidence should show the link. The Department also advises keeping a copy of the statement and all attachments, and that advice is worth following, because statements are sometimes requested again years later at the permanent stage or on review.

The mistakes that make a Form 888 statement worthless

The most damaging mistake is the statement that was not written by the person who signed it. Where several statements arrive in the same voice, with the same phrases, the same structure and the same unusual turns of expression, a decision maker draws the obvious conclusion, and the statements stop being evidence of anything. Worse, doubt spreads from the statements to the rest of the application. A template circulated among friends, or a paragraph everybody copies, is a false economy.

The second mistake is praise without facts. A statement that says the couple are deeply in love, wonderful together and clearly committed contains no information a decision maker can weigh. The form asks for reasons. Reasons are events, dates, places and observations.

The third mistake is inconsistency with the rest of the application. A supporting statement that places the couple living together from early 2023 sits badly beside a lease beginning in late 2023 and an applicant's own statement describing a move in mid 2024. Small discrepancies of this kind are ordinary in real life, because memory is imperfect. They are still the discrepancies that generate a request for further information, and in some cases a notice under section 57 of the Migration Act 1958 inviting comment on the inconsistency. They are also a common feature of files that end up at the partner visa refusal stage.

Three smaller errors round out the list. Identity evidence is left off, and question 5 is answered no. The form is an old version downloaded from a third party website, complete with a witnessing page nobody can sign. Or the statement is written in a language other than English and lodged without a translation, when the form requires English.

What happens if a Form 888 statement is false or misleading

Making a false or misleading statement in a Form 888 is a criminal offence. The form warns of this directly. It records that the person understands that, under section 234(1)(b) of the Migration Act 1958, it is an offence to make a false statement in connection with a visa application, and that the person believes the statements in the form are true in every particular.

Section 234(1)(b) makes it an offence to make, or cause to be made, to an officer or a person exercising powers or performing functions under the Act a statement that, to the person's knowledge, is false or misleading in a material particular. The penalty under section 234(1) is imprisonment for 10 years or 1,000 penalty units, or both. The dollar value of a penalty unit is set by legislation and is indexed, so the current figure should be checked at the time.

The risk is not only criminal, and it does not fall only on the person who signed. Information given in support of an application can engage Public Interest Criterion 4020, which deals with false or misleading information and bogus documents, and which can carry an exclusion period affecting later applications. That is why a supporting witness should never be asked to confirm something they did not see, and why the honest answer of "I was told this rather than saw it" belongs in the statement itself. Marking the limits of a person's knowledge does not weaken a statement. It is what makes the rest of it believable.

How My Migration Lawyers works with Form 888 statements

At My Migration Lawyers, supporting statements are treated as evidence, and prepared with the same care as any other evidence on the file. The firm does not write a client's supporting witnesses' statements and does not tell anyone what to say. What the firm does is make sure the right people are asked, that each of them understands what the form is actually asking, and that what they have said is their own account, checked by them and signed by them.

In practice that means several things. Weiwei Zhang, Principal Lawyer, reviews the relationship as a whole first, identifies which of the four matters under subregulation 1.15A(3) or 1.09A(3) the documentary evidence already covers well, and works out where independent statements would add something a bank statement or a lease cannot. The firm then identifies which people in the couple's life are genuinely placed to speak to those points, and explains to each of them what questions 3 and 4 require, in plain terms, so that the statement they write is responsive rather than decorative.

The firm also checks the things that quietly cause trouble: that the current version of the form has been used, that names match the passports, that identity evidence is attached and question 5 is answered correctly, that the dates in each statement sit consistently with the applicant's own statement, the sponsor's statement and the documents on the file, and that no two statements read as though one person wrote both. Where a statement turns out to contain something the person does not actually know, it is corrected by that person before it goes anywhere near the Department.

This is the same work whether the application is an onshore subclass 820 visa, an offshore application, or a subclass 300 prospective marriage visa, where the couple are not yet married and the social evidence carries particular weight. It is also the work that matters most on a file that has already attracted a request for further information, because by that stage every inconsistency is being read closely.

If a partner visa application is being prepared, or a request for more relationship evidence has arrived, request a consultation online and an Australian migration lawyer will review the position and reply by email.