Everything You Need To Know About A Working Holiday Visa
13 Minute Read | Written by The Way To Wherever
What is a Working Holiday Visa and why would you want one?
Living and working in a foreign country is a unique experience. Regardless of language spoken, geographic location or socioeconomic status, the opportunity provides some insane room for self-development and education about yourself, as well as what’s out there in the big, wide, ‘real’ world.
That’s where the Working Holiday Visa comes in.
By definition, a Working Holiday Visa (which we’ll refer to as a WHV for convenience), is a residence permit allowing travellers to undertake employment in the issuing country to supplement their travel funds.
(Note: a large portion of these are targeted at specific age groups between roughly 18-30. If you fall out of that bracket, you’re not totally out of options but temporary immigration becomes a more involved and often more expensive process.)
Every country across the globe has its own immigration systems that decide who can enter, how long they can stay and what they can do while they’re there. If you’re a seasoned traveller, you’ll be familiar with the fun job of researching entry requirements of individual countries, especially post-2020.
At writing, about 60 countries offer some form of WHV, with the main purpose of supplementing the income of travellers, by allowing them a short period of legal work in the issuing nation.
We were granted Tier 5 ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ WHV’s in the United Kingdom (at that time, valid for two years), from January 7 2020 to January 7 2022 (good timing right?). And in this blog we’ll cover our experience of applying for, moving to, living in and leaving the UK!
It’s important to mention that not all visas are equal. Not all citizens of all nationalities can get WHV’s/any legal working visa in the countries offering them, and it is super important that when you’re looking at the relevant information issued by the immigration authority of your desired foreign home, that you look for the requirements that suit your particular nationality.
Most of our reason of why we got a UK WHV comes from what we’ve discussed above so we won’t go into too much detail, as our own reasons could differ loads from yours or someone you know who wants to move abroad. However this is a commitment that should be carefully considered. It can be a difficult emotional experience for some people, regardless of how culturally similar your nation and where you’re headed might be.
Here’s a quick step-by-step of what we did, as Australian nationals in 2019, applying for Tier 5 ‘Youth Mobility Scheme’ WHV’s.
The process for us
1. Visa Application process on https://www.gov.uk/youth-mobility
Requirements:
- Apply no earlier than 6 months from when you plan to arrive in the UK
- Member of a particular range of nationalities, of which Australian was.
- Aged 18-30 at time of application.
- Over ~£2,500 in savings, for at least one month (the equivalent in your currency is fine), this had to be proven with bank statements in each of our names covering the time frame.
- Pay the application fee, ~£250.
- Pay the NHS Healthcare surcharge, ~£470 PER YEAR, up front.
- Provide a single date to collect Biometric Residence Permit (‘BRP’, basically the WHV ID card), after arriving in the UK.
2. Book an appointment at a UK High Commission/Embassy for an ‘interview’, fingerprints and a photograph for our BRP. We were able to book our interviews 15 minutes apart in our home city, Brisbane.
3. Attend the interview, hand in our passport for the duration of the decision making process.
4. Return to the interview location to collect passport (about 6 weeks later) and outcome of application.
5. Pack up, organise our travel and prepare to move overseas for two full years.
The Important Stuff
As the pandemic and international relations continue to drastically change the way global travel works, we won’t expand too much on the details of the process we went through as by now most of it has probably been thrown out the window. But we will highlight a couple things that took us off-guard as we applied for and received our visas.
Costs
We didn’t need an immigration lawyer or any professional advice for the application of our visa, although you can seek some if it makes the process more comfortable for you. However, there were a few not-so-hidden, hidden costs involved in the process. For our UK visas we only saw the visa application fee, and missed the NHS healthcare surcharge which definitely wasn’t as easy to find as it is now. That fee ended up being roughly four times the cost of the actual visa.
Although the required minimum in savings was ~£2,500, we would recommend having significantly more than that. After expensive airfares and your huge going away party, you’re going to want a decent pool of cash to cover things like temporary accomodation upon arrival (which can be reasonably cheap or super expensive depending on your needs), funds for a deposit and up-front rent to secure a longer-term home (more on that later!), as well as ‘just in case’ for medical emergencies. Remember that in some cases your insurance will pay you back for medical expenses, and you might need to shell out up front depending on your policy provider and place of medical attention.
On the topic of insurance, we almost always travel with it. It’s another expense, but a necessary one. There are many insurance companies from all over. Insurance is a topic for another blog, but we’ve used a couple Australian based insurers as well as some ‘digital nomad’ target insurers such as World Nomads and Safety Wing. Do your research and make sure there’s some sort of backup to get you home and get you healthy if you’re ever in a sticky situation.
Passport
At our interview, they physically took our passports and told us they’d be returned upon the decision of our visas being granted. While this wasn’t an issue for us, it took us by surprise and it’s something to be mindful of if you have international trips planned between your application and when you plan to head to your WHV destination. We’re under the impression our passports were sent either to the primary embassy in Canberra, or the UK Home Office in London for review, in both cases we would’ve had no chance to get them back if we planned to head out of Australia in the interim.
Don’t forget to take your passport to the interview!
Date of arrival
We had to put down a single date on which we’d head to a pre-selected post office in the UK, to collect our BRP. Once we received the decision that our visas were approved, the window of arrival into the UK and the location our BRPs would be collected from were pretty much set in stone. Our passports now had a full page vignette (sticker) that granted us the right to enter the UK within a 30 day window roughly leading up to the date we chose to collect our BRP from the pre-selected post office.
It’s possible that we could’ve organised for this to be changed, but as it was physically printed on a sticker in our passports we definitely wouldn’t have wanted to try. So bear that in mind when you’re selecting dates of arrival.
Note: Like almost everything in the visa application process, this is entirely dependent on the country issuing the visa. The UK seems to be notoriously difficult in this regard as some of our friends (UK nationals) were given a 12 month window to enter Australia on their Australian WHV, and our visa for entry to Indonesia in 2022 had a 3 month window.
Arriving in your new home
Whether you’re planning to work for a while to top up funds during a huge backpacking adventure, or look for an avenue to permanently emigrate abroad, you’re likely to go through a few of the same processes that we did.
Booking flights is the first step, and we’ll keep it brief.
We use Skyscanner to check for the cheapest/quickest routes with all airlines, then purchase directly from their website to avoid any commission that travel agencies/booking platforms can tack on to the purchase price. This also makes it easier to sort out if we have to make changes or chase up refunds.
We moved overseas with a couple of 40L backpacks with a handful of clothes the first time, but you could plan to take much more depending on your situation. We recommend looking into this far in advance if you plan on taking several pieces of large luggage/furniture, appliances or other homely goods, as this can add thousands to your relocation costs and require careful pre-planning.
Next you’ll most likely need some sort of temporary accomodation for when you arrive.
It should go without saying, but you’ll need somewhere to sleep when you first get past that great big ‘Welcome to ____’ sign. If you’ve got friends or relatives in your destination country, amazing, move to the next step. If not, you’re in the same position we were and here’s our thoughts.
There are really three main options to consider, again depending on your plans and situation.
Hostels, they aren’t all dens full of broke hippies who can’t afford a house. In this day and age we’ve found them more often than not packed with digital nomads trying to live a low-cost lifestyle. Hostels provide an environment that attracts people with the traveller mindset, the same target audience as WHV’s. Not only are most of the staff in them super knowledgable about the area, but most people staying there are usually keen to explore both the touristy and less touristy parts of cities and areas, something that can give you a great introduction to your new home.
AirBNB/Hotels, almost always more expensive and usually slightly less immersive than the previous option, this can provide a bit of comfort and a buffer against the culture shock that can sometimes sneak up on you when arriving in a foreign place and trying to make it feel like home. If you’re a socialite and can make friends with no problems, this could be a good option if you have the funds to support up to/more than a month of living there.
Securing a residence before arrival, this is the most difficult route to take but can save you money and time if it’s the right fit, or cost you significantly more if its not. This can give you a place to head directly upon arrival, without an awkward and sometimes stressful in-between period of arriving and then trying to find somewhere to live. Most of the time this is going to take form in a share house or sublet with roommates or flatmates, as most private rentals through landlords or real estate agencies can require significant evidence of proof of income, existing funds, tax numbers, employment contracts, guarantors, all in the local language. We know people who have done it, but it can be an absolute monster of a process without full-time research beforehand.
At this stage you’ve arrived and checked in to your temporary home, time to get on the hunt.
We’ll focus on our experience in the UK for this next part, but we’ll do our best to be as general as we can with things to keep in mind when it comes to finding a more permanent home and employment.
We arrived in London, as almost every single Australian moving to the UK does. We had pretty much no idea how to find a rental and booked two weeks at a St Christopher’s hostel, not expensive but not ultra cheap.
Finding somewhere to live
Just like there were for your temporary home, there’s some options. We did some research on the best ways to find a home as an expat which we’ll provide here.
Facebook; Facebook groups will become one of your most invaluable resources when moving abroad as chances are someone from a ‘*insert nationality* in *insert new home*’ group has been in the same set of predicaments you’ll find yourself in. Not only do they often provide comprehensive guides on exactly how to find a home, how to setup your tax ID and loads more, but there are usually huge pools of experience to tap into from those whose footsteps you’re walking in. One of the key benefits is you’ll probably find the best local ‘Flats/apartments/homes for rent’ groups to search for someplace to live. An honourable mention is also FB Marketplace. People privately sublet and rent out accomodation via FB Marketplace. It can be a bit more un-regulated as we found out, but can result in some cash saved.
Local flatsharing/housemate-finder apps; If you’re moving abroad solo, especially to the comparatively high cost-of-living UK, chances are you won’t be able to afford your own digs. Flatsharing will probably be your golden ticket. There are apps out there, the most popular in the UK being ‘SpareRoom’, that connect people looking to sublet/rent larger abodes for (slightly more) reasonable budgets.
Going through estate agents; This didn’t work for us in the UK at all. They always needed way more evidence than we could provide for things such as recent pay checks in the UK, proof of employment with contracts longer than x months, local guarantors within the UK etc. They lease entire flats/homes most of the time, so these usually fall well above the budget a temporary WHV traveller has, and straight up wouldn’t reply most of the time when we told them we weren’t looking to commit for 12 months. If none of those things are true for you, definitely give them a go as they will usually provide the highest level of security when it comes to a contractual rental agreement.
After deciding that London was not the city for us we headed to Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, to see if the UK’s coldest country would suit us better.
The climate didn’t, but the beautiful city and much lower cost of living certainly did. We spent another two weeks in January 2020 in a city centre hostel looking for a place to live before finding one in a Facebook ‘Houses/Flats to rent in Edinburgh’ group.
The monthly price was measly in comparison to what we found in London, with all the strings attached that you’d expect from a ‘too-good-to-be-true’ find on Facebook. But it suited us as we only planned to be in there for a couple months.
For everyone that followed us on Instagram @thewaytowherever during that period knows, we ended up running back to Australia on an extortionately priced flight in March 2020, and didn’t return to the UK until July 2021.
When we got back, we found a much better rental with no strings attached (this time on Gumtree), and even a legit, legal tenancy agreement. Just highlighting this in case you were starting to think it’s all a big risky con-job trying to find an affordable home in a foreign country outside of estate agencies.
Finding employment
The search for a job will vary person-to-person more than any other step in the process of moving abroad. Some people move overseas with a job already lined up, sometimes with a different branch of their employer at home, others have niche qualifications and specialities that they relocate to capitalise on.
We had neither.
Our grand plan was to live out the Aussie dream of working in a pub in the UK, for all the rubbish pay and long hours that come with that experience. Something that really required absolutely no prior experience or skills. We met a lot of Australian’s in the same position, one that provided loads of opportunity to meet fellow expats looking to soak up the world.
It greatly depends on the type of employment you’re searching for, but one thing we will say is be prepared to do something totally out of your ballpark. We met HR personnel, early learning educators, government bureaucrats and retail assistants working in totally different occupations to what they do at home, which is totally a part of the experience of uprooting your life and heading somewhere totally foreign.
Depending on where you end up, finding a job can be super similar or incredibly different to what you’re used to at home. For us in the UK, it was pretty similar.
We had a brief look online for advertised positions in pretty basic customer-facing jobs across retail and hospitality, before deciding to simply walk the streets with our resumes, soak up the freezing February cold in Edinburgh, and ask if businesses were hiring.
This worked out for us, landing a couple of jobs through this method which we managed to squeeze a few weeks in with before heading home in March.
When we got back to the UK, the nation was still reeling from lockdowns and restrictions so we played it safe and sought out work with Jackson’s employer from our first stint.
There really isn’t a super easy and detailed path to take when searching for a job in a foreign country, and like finding a home, your best resource will be those handy FB groups with expats from your country.
The little things
So many things took us by surprise when we first began properly living in the UK. From the concept of paying ‘Council Tax’, widely known to Australian’s as ‘Rates’ as a tenant, to how you pay for the bus, we quickly learnt that even though we were speaking the same language the processes we’d grown up with were quite different.
All of this information is available to you if you do your research thoroughly, but a lot of it we didn’t encounter until it was there in front of us.
The below list is just a taste of the things that caught us off-guard when we moved from Australia to the UK.
You can pay with your credit/debit card for pretty much everything including bus fares and…
Paid public toilets! One of the biggest irks for us coming from the land of the free bathroom, some public spaces will charge you up to £1.50(!!!) to use a toilet.
Be prepared for courier services to shove (other peoples) parcels through your tiny letterboxes or leave deliveries with your neighbours without a word of warning.
Eating/drinking out is more expensive in the UK than anywhere we’d ever been, competing closely with Iceland. There’s obviously some reason the disparity between staff wages and prices in venues is extreme, but we really didn’t expect the very infrequent meal or night out to rival our monthly rent when looking at our overall expenses.
Expect to have a huge hassle dealing with utility providers in the UK. Notoriously a frustrating task anywhere in the world, but for some reason it just seems to be so unnecessarily difficult in the UK. None of the services we used (all large, well known companies) were able to communicate through email at all, meaning hours of waiting on the phone to sort out the never ending issues.
Council Tax. The umbrella of taxes that cover cold water supply, sewage usage and public infrastructure maintenance, is paid by the tenant and not the landlord. This amount, separated by bands depending on location, is paid in addition to your agreed rental amount with your landlord. E.g. we paid £760 per month to our landlord, and an extra £110 to the government via bank transfer, per month as council tax.
If hospitality is your plan when looking for a job, you will need absolutely zero experience or any certification (e.g. RSA). A basic ability to work under some sort of pressure and learn simple skills is all you’ll need for basic hospo in the UK.
Getting a local SIM card for data + calls is really easy. Whilst we were there we used Giffgaff’s prepaid monthly services. Erin had unlimited data/calls/sms in the UK for £35/month and Jackson had 100gb data/unlimited calls+sms for £20/month, good value for what we needed! They both included 20gb monthly data for roaming in the EU + Iceland.
Expectations vs Reality
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to leave the UK barely two months in to our visa duration. It took us about 16 months to get back, and as a result, we really only spent about six months in the UK on our visa.
Being fully honest, it’s mainly for that reason that our experience was not what we expected at all. Combined with the fact that the UK government responded terribly to T5 WHV holders affected by the pandemic by not offering any sort of refund and refusing to let us pay for the visa again and reapply, we really didn’t experience much of a ‘life’ in the UK. Note: Many other WHV issuing countries gave repeated extensions to holders from other nationalities, as far as we know the UK was one of the only places to offer no concession whatsoever.
We had a vision of working for a few solid months, then taking a couple weeks/weekend holidays around Europe with it being much cheaper and more accessible than traveling from Australia. When in reality, we worked 45+ hour weeks in the UK’s coldest and darkest months both times we were there.
As you can see in our other posts, we still snuck in an insane trip-of-a-lifetime 18-day adventure to Iceland, and a Christmas week in Paris, but it was far from what we expected of our time ‘living’ in the United Kingdom.
But that’s our story, if you’re reading this and planning to head away on a WHV now, the world’s probably in a better place.
If you’re thinking of it, do it and if you have questions, ask us!
What comes after?
Getting a WHV in a foreign country can be one of the most rewarding things you might do during your youth/life. While we aren’t in a hurry to return to the UK, even with the limited amount of time we spent there, the experiences we had with everything you’ve read above were totally invaluable when it comes to moving to and living in other parts of the world.
It’s important to mention that the visas we had were single-use, and the only way we could return to the UK with any sort of right-to-live/work, is if we met other requirements for sponsorship through employment, or some of the complex study visas. So unless we were to get (relatively) high-paying and specialised jobs in industries that the UK needed workers in, we probably won’t ever be able to spend more time living there.
If permanently emigrating to another country is your goal, a WHV can be a good place to start, letting you get in, work, live and experience a country. But it does not always lead to permanent residency. We would recommend thoroughly researching pathways for further visas that allow longer terms of stay if this is the goal, or engaging an immigration lawyer.
That's it!
If you’ve made it down here, thank you so much for reading!
This is our guide to living out your dream of getting a Working Holiday Visa in a foreign country, if you’ve got any questions or have your own visa experience to share, let us know below!