One Nation has again had to clear up its migration target, so exactly what is the NOM?

Three letters are defining the latest migration debate in Australia and catching out political parties.

Net overseas migration, or NOM, has become a de facto measure on how tough each party is on migration but the term is widely misunderstood.

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson this week was again forced to clear up the party's NOM target, after their newest MP David Farley suggested the party's figures were "not too different" to Labor's .

Labor, the Coalition and One Nation are all saying they will cut back on net overseas migration, although how exactly each party plans to achieve this remains scant on detail and policy.

So what exactly is the NOM, what kind of factors cause it to fluctuate, and where do the political parties stand?

The NOM figure is the number of people who have arrived in Australia and stayed for a year or more, minus the number of people who have left to live overseas.

But that year doesn't have to be continuous — the NOM is calculated using a "12/16-month rule", meaning it counts people who have stayed in Australia for 12 months out of a 16-month period.

For example, someone could come to Australia and stay for nine months, go overseas for a month, and then return to Australia for another three months. They would then be counted in the NOM figure and added to our estimated resident population.

It's important to note that the NOM number doesn't just include foreigners coming to Australia on visas — it also includes Australian citizens and permanent residents returning home after a long stint overseas, or New Zealand citizens moving here.

Take, for example, the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme, which aims to fill agricultural gaps in regional and rural Australia by recruiting workers from Pacific islands for short-term jobs of up to nine months, or longer-term jobs of up to four years.

Such workers would not be counted in the NOM if they're recruited for a nine-month role, but they would be if they were employed for a longer-term job.

The latest data, released in June, puts the NOM at 300,960. That figure represents the year to December 2025.

Some visa classes that have been floated for cuts are skilled visas, working holidays visas, family reunion visas, international student visas and graduate visas.

In 2024-25, the biggest cohort of visas contributing to NOM were international students (156,700), with the vast majority of those being in the higher education sector.