If you are over 18, have been a certified diver for at least six months, and are willing to build up to 100 logged dives, you can become a PADI® Open Water Scuba Instructor. The route runs Advanced Open Water, then Rescue Diver, then Divemaster, then the Instructor Development Course, and finally the Instructor Examination.
That is the short answer. The longer answer is that almost every guide on this subject starts at the IDC, which is the second-to-last step. If you are reading this as an Advanced or Rescue diver wondering whether a career in diving is realistic, the IDC is months away and it is not the thing standing between you and it.
I am the Platinum Course Director at Dive Centre Bondi, one of only two PADI Platinum 5 Star IDC Centres in Australia in 2026. This is the whole pathway, with the real numbers.
The pathway at a glance
Here is every rung on the ladder, with the logged dives you will have accumulated by the time you get there.
| Stage | Minimum age | Prerequisite | Logged dives |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Water Diver | 15 (10 for Junior) | None | 0 to start |
| Advanced Open Water | 15 (12 for Junior) | Open Water Diver | 4 |
| Rescue Diver | 15 (12 for Junior) | Adventure Diver with Underwater Navigation | 9 |
| Divemaster | 18 | Advanced Open Water and Rescue Diver | 40 to begin, 60 to complete |
| Assistant Instructor | 18 | Divemaster | 60 |
| Instructor Development Course | 18 | Divemaster, certified 6 months | 60 |
| Instructor Examination | 18 | IDC completed within 12 months | 100 |
If you are not certified yet, start with the Open Water Diver course. There is a longer guide to the Open Water course in Sydney if you want the detail first.
Assistant Instructor is a rating in its own right, but you do not have to take it separately: the IDC covers the Assistant Instructor course and the Open Water Scuba Instructor program together.
From Divemaster onwards you also need two pieces of paperwork kept current: a medical clearance signed by a physician within the previous 12 months, and Emergency First Response® Primary and Secondary Care training completed within the last 24 months. The Diver Medical form is the one to look at early, because a condition that needs a doctor's sign-off is much easier to sort out now than the week before a course.
A note on the 100-dive figure
You will often hear that you need 100 dives for the IDC. Strictly, the standard is 60 logged dives to start the IDC and 100 to sit the Instructor Examination. Because the IE follows immediately after the course, in practice you should plan for 100. Anyone telling you to turn up with 60 and worry about it later is setting you up for a stressful fortnight.
Read that dive-count column again, because it is the part that catches people out. The courses themselves are not the bottleneck. You can book a Divemaster course for next month. What you cannot book is 100 dives.
Key takeaway: the rate limiter on becoming a dive instructor is time in the water, not course availability.
Where you actually start: Rescue Diver and Divemaster
Most people arrive at this question somewhere between Advanced Open Water and Rescue Diver. That is the honest starting line, and it is worth understanding what the next two steps do to you.
Rescue Diver is the turning point
Every course before Rescue is about you: your buoyancy, your air consumption, your navigation. Rescue is the first one that is about everybody else. You learn to spot a diver who is quietly getting into trouble, manage a panicked diver at the surface, and run a search for someone missing.
Most divers describe Rescue as the course that changed how they dive. It is also the last recreational rating before the professional pathway begins, and it is a genuine filter. If you enjoy Rescue, the professional route will probably suit you. If you found it stressful rather than satisfying, that is useful information too.
Our Rescue Diver course is $595.
Divemaster is where you become a professional
Divemaster is the first professional rating, and the numbers are specific: you need 40 logged dives to begin the course and 60 to complete it. You also need to be 18, hold Advanced Open Water and Rescue Diver, and have a current dive medical.
In practice our Divemaster candidates finish with more than the minimum. Because they can join our training dives as often as they like, most complete the course somewhere between 60 and 80 logged dives. That matters, because those extra dives are exactly what the Instructor Examination is going to ask for later.
As a certified Divemaster you can supervise certified divers, assist an instructor with student divers in confined and open water, guide Open Water students on the tour portion of dives 2, 3 and 4, run the ReActivate programme for lapsed divers, and independently teach and certify Advanced Snorkelers.
Our PADI Divemaster course is $1,645 on its own.
The Divemaster package
If you are an Open Water Diver now and Divemaster is the goal, the package sequences the courses properly and comes in cheaper than booking them one at a time:
- PADI Advanced Open Water
- PADI Rescue Diver
- PADI Divemaster
- Dive Centre Bondi internship
- PADI Enriched Air Nitrox, included free
$2,645 for the lot, plus a $200 gift voucher.
Already hold Advanced Open Water? The package is $2,140 with a $100 gift voucher.
It is fine to stop here
A lot of people take the Divemaster rating, work a season or two, love it, and never go further. That is not a failed attempt at becoming an instructor. It is a complete outcome, and it is the point at which you find out whether you want to teach or whether you just want to be in the water. Those are different jobs.
The IDC: what happens across ten days
The Instructor Development Course combines the Assistant Instructor course and the Open Water Scuba Instructor programme. Ours runs over ten days, in small groups, with personal coaching and video feedback throughout.
What you need before you start
- PADI Divemaster, or a leadership-level rating with another recognised training organisation
- 18 years old
- 60 logged dives, with documented experience in night diving, deep diving and underwater navigation
- Certified as a diver for at least six months
- Medical clearance signed by a physician within the last 12 months
- EFR Primary and Secondary Care within the last 24 months
If you are not a PADI Divemaster, you will also complete the PADI Divemaster course dive rescue assessment.
The ten days
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction, PADI Standards, theory class, preparing a confined water presentation |
| 2 | Preparing a knowledge development presentation, the full PADI skill circuit in the pool, your first pool presentation as an instructor, Rescue 7 |
| 3 | Theory exam and Standards exam, DSD briefing, preparing an open water teaching presentation |
| 4 | First knowledge development presentation, first open water skill presentation in the ocean, advanced water workshop with lift bags and compass navigation, rescue skills workshop |
| 5 | Scheduling your own open water presentation, two confined water presentations, swim exercises, more Rescue 7 |
| 6 | Rest day, or catch up on theory and skills |
| 7 | Standards and theory exam 2, risk management and licensing workshop, learning and training workshop |
| 8 | Knowledge development presentation 2, two open water presentations, continuing education workshop, sales techniques workshop |
| 9 | Mini IE: knowledge development presentation 3, two open water skill presentations, Rescue 7 |
| 10 | EFR Instructor course, and the IDC closes |
Two things about that schedule are worth pointing out. Day 6 is a rest day, deliberately. Ten consecutive days of presenting while being assessed is genuinely tiring, and people perform better in the second week for having stopped. And day 9 is a full mock examination, so that nothing on the real IE is a surprise.
How we teach it
Two choices shape the way we run our PADI IDC, and both are about how you will actually be teaching in five years, not just how you will pass in two weeks.
Neutral buoyancy from day one. Every skill you demonstrate, you demonstrate mid-water rather than kneeling on the bottom. It is the modern professional standard, it is harder at first, and it is what separates instructors whose students learn good habits from instructors whose students learn to kneel.
Video review of your own teaching. You watch yourself present underwater, alongside your instructor. Almost nobody enjoys the first session. It also compresses months of gradual improvement into a fortnight, because you stop guessing at what you look like to a student and simply see it.
Courses run with a maximum of five candidates, and the Course Director runs every one personally. You can meet the team here.
The Instructor Examination
The IE is not run by us. It is conducted by a PADI Instructor Examiner, independent of the training centre that taught you, and that independence is the entire point. It means the rating you hold at the end says something verifiable about you rather than something flattering about your dive shop.
To sit the IE you need:
- 100 logged dives
- Completion of the IDC or OWSI programme within the past 12 months
- EFR Instructor, or a CPR and first aid instructor rating with another recognised emergency care organisation, before certification
The two days
| Day | What happens |
|---|---|
| 11 | Theory and Standards exams, knowledge development presentation |
| 12 | Open water presentations in the ocean, Rescue 7, confined water assessment |
Every candidate we have trained has passed the PADI Instructor Examination. That record exists because of day 9, not because of luck: candidates arrive at the IE having already been through the same assessments under the same conditions.
What it actually costs, and how long it takes
Almost no dive centre publishes what any of this costs. Here is ours, in full, including the parts that do not come to us.
The professional pathway
| Item | Cost | Paid to |
|---|---|---|
| Divemaster package (Advanced, Rescue, Divemaster, internship, free Nitrox) | $2,645 | Dive Centre Bondi |
| Instructor Development Course | $3,395 | Dive Centre Bondi |
| PADI Instructor Examination fee | $1,575 | Directly to PADI |
| PADI EFR Instructor registration | $277 | Directly to PADI |
| Total, Advanced Open Water through to Instructor | $7,892 |
The IDC portion on its own is $3,395 plus $1,852 in PADI fees, so $5,247 all in. We would rather you saw that number here than discovered it later.
What the $3,395 covers
- Ten full days of training: classroom, confined water and open water
- All theory materials, backpack and slates
- The EFR Instructor course and materials
- Three specialty instructor certifications: Enriched Air Nitrox, Equipment Specialist and Emergency Oxygen Provider
- All training equipment
- A free Shark Exploration Dive
- A free Santi drysuit try dive
- Free instructor trainee dives, before and during the course, and for life afterwards
- 15% off retail and 20% off packages
Budget separately for your own equipment if you do not already own it, and for annual PADI professional membership and insurance once you are certified. Our PADI PRO+ reward program offsets some of that.
Dive with us for free while you build your hours
This is the part that matters most, and it goes back to the dive-count column at the top of this page.
Once your deposit is paid, you can join our training dives straight away at no extra cost, with all equipment provided. If you are sitting at 45 logged dives and need 100, that is the difference between a goal that feels distant and one you are actively closing on every weekend. You also arrive on day 1 already comfortable with the team, the sites and the equipment, which is worth more than it sounds when you are about to be assessed.
Those dives stay free after you certify, for life. The dive calendar shows what is running.
So how long does it take?
If you are already Rescue certified with a reasonable number of dives behind you and you are motivated, three months is realistic.
From Open Water, plan on six to ten months. The variable is your dive count rather than our calendar, which is exactly why the free training dives exist.
Upcoming IDC dates
| Start date | Seats remaining |
|---|---|
| 30 September 2026 | 4 of 5 |
| 18 November 2026 | 4 of 5 |
| 27 January 2027 | 5 of 5 |
| 26 May 2027 | 5 of 5 |
| 29 September 2027 | 5 of 5 |
| 24 November 2027 | 5 of 5 |
We cap every IDC at five candidates. Check current availability and book.
Is it the right move for you?
Diving for a living is a real job, and it is worth being clear about what the job is.
The days start early and finish late. You will teach the same skills, in the same bay, many times over. You will spend a meaningful fraction of your working life rinsing equipment, filling cylinders and checking paperwork.
What stops that becoming monotonous is that the ocean does not repeat itself. You can dive the same Sydney site two hundred times and still surface having seen something you have never seen before, and that keeps happening for as long as you keep going in.
The rewards are real too. Watching somebody who was frightened of putting their face in the water complete four open water dives is genuinely satisfying, and it does not stop being satisfying on the fiftieth occasion. But job satisfaction and income are different things, and diving pays what it pays.
People who tend to do well are patient, stay calm when someone else is not, and are more interested in the student than in the diving. The best instructors are usually not the most technically gifted divers in the room.
People who tend to struggle love diving and are less interested in people. That is not a character flaw. It just means the job is a poor fit, and it is much cheaper to work that out at Divemaster level than after the IE.
If you are unsure, the Divemaster rating is the honest place to find out. You will work alongside instructors, assist with real students, and get an unglamorous look at the profession before committing to it.
If it does suit you, this is a career with an unusual property: you can do it almost anywhere there is water, and the qualification travels with you.
FAQ: becoming a dive instructor
How many dives do you need to become a dive instructor?
Sixty logged dives to start the Instructor Development Course, and 100 to sit the Instructor Examination. Because the IE follows straight after the course, plan for 100. The Divemaster course before it needs 40 dives to begin and 60 to complete.
How long does it take to become a scuba diving instructor?
From Rescue Diver, three months is realistic if you are motivated. From Open Water, plan on six to ten months. The limiting factor is accumulating logged dives, not course availability.
How much does it cost to become a dive instructor in Australia?
At Dive Centre Bondi the IDC is $3,395, plus $1,575 for the PADI Instructor Examination and $277 for EFR Instructor registration, both paid directly to PADI. That is $5,247 all in. Our Divemaster package, which covers Advanced, Rescue and Divemaster, is $2,645.
Do you need to be a strong swimmer to become a dive instructor?
You need to be genuinely comfortable in the water rather than fast. The Divemaster course includes a timed 400 metre swim without aids, a timed 800 metre swim with mask, snorkel and fins, and a treading-water requirement. Speak to us about the current scoring if you are unsure whether you are ready.
Can you become an instructor without being a Divemaster first?
You need PADI Divemaster or an equivalent leadership rating with another recognised training organisation. If you hold a non-PADI leadership rating you will complete the PADI Divemaster course dive rescue assessment as part of the IDC.
Is being a dive instructor a real career?
Yes, with caveats. The work is seasonal in many places and it is not highly paid. It is also portable, sociable and genuinely rewarding. If you want to talk it through honestly, come and see us or join a training dive and ask the instructors what it is actually like.
Sources
- PADI professional education and the Open Water Scuba Instructor course for professional ratings and prerequisites
- PADI downloads for the current Diver Medical form
- Emergency First Response for EFR Instructor requirements
