No. The ATO's online TFN application for foreign passport holders requires you to be in Australia, so a working holiday maker cannot lodge it from home. What you can do beforehand is have every detail ready so it goes in on day one, which decides whether you ever see a 45% pay.
Why does it have to wait until you arrive?
The application is built around your arrival being recorded against your visa, and it needs an Australian postal address to send the number to.
You can hold the granted visa for months beforehand and it makes no difference. The application is not gated on the grant, it is gated on you being here.
Does applying on day one actually matter?
Yes, more than the processing time does. From your first day of work you have 28 days to give an employer your TFN before they must withhold 45% instead of the 15% working holiday maker rate, and the ATO takes up to 28 days to issue it. The only real variable is how many days pass between landing and applying.
Apply on day one and start work in week two, and the letter is very likely to arrive inside the employment window. Travel for a month first and then start work the day after you apply, and you have engineered a gap that costs 30 cents in every dollar until it closes.
What should be ready before you fly?
Everything except the submission. The application is free, and the form is not the hard part.
- Your passport details, saved as a photo of the identity page. Details entered from memory are how applications end up in manual review.
- Your visa grant notice, accessible offline.
- A decision about your Australian postal address.
- An email address you will actually check, since the confirmation carries the reference number you will need if anything goes wrong.
What address should you use?
Somewhere that will still hold your mail in four weeks, which is a different question from where you are sleeping on night one. Your TFN arrives as a letter and only as a letter.
A hostel is fine if it has a mail system and you are booked in for a few weeks. A hostel you are leaving on Friday is not. A friend or relative anywhere in Australia with a stable address is usually the better answer even if you never go there.
Is your TFN affected if your visa changes?
No. A Tax File Number is issued once and kept for life. It does not expire with a visa, change with a second working holiday visa, or need renewing years later on a different visa.
What must stay current is the address the ATO holds against it, because that is where correspondence and any paper refund goes. Anyone who has been in Australia before on a student or working holiday visa should assume they already have a TFN and treat this as a retrieval.
Your arrival dates decide the cost.
Everyone faces the same rule about applying from inside Australia, so the variable is what the gap between landing and applying costs you.
- Whether you have been in Australia before on any visa with work rights. If so you already have a TFN and applying again creates a duplicate that delays everything.
- How soon you intend to work. Someone starting a Thredbo or Falls Creek ski season in June with a job lined up has a much tighter margin than someone travelling first.
- Whether you have a stable Australian address, or anyone in the country who can be one for you.
- Whether your first employer is registered with the ATO as a working holiday maker employer, because an unregistered one withholds at foreign resident rates even once your TFN is on file.
Once you are working, tax withheld before the number was on file comes back through your working holiday tax return, and you can estimate your tax refund at any point in the year.