Enabling programs at Australian universities offer an alternative entry pathway for potential university students who do not qualify or do not attend following secondary school. Widely seen as improving access to non-traditional bachelor’s degree students, enabling pathways have higher shares of equity students than traditional entry pathways. Using linked administrative data from the Australian census and higher education enrolments and completions, we apply a sequential logistic regression approach to understand how family background and individual-level characteristics affect educational transitions of domestic students who participate in fee-free enabling programs at Australian universities. To measure pre-university family socioeconomic origins from Census data, the sample consists of students aged 14–17 at the time of the 2011 Census who resided with at least one parent and went on to enrol in a university enabling program. Then, using linked higher education enrolment and completion information, we track students across the potential transitions into bachelor’s degree enrolment and, subsequently, bachelor’s degree completion. We find that among this subsample of relatively young enabling students, some factors, such as socioeconomic disadvantage, are associated with lower enrolment and completion conditional on completion, while others, such as gender and disability, matter more for bachelor’s degree completion than for the transition from enabling programs into bachelor’s programs. Further, we find that several institutional characteristics, such as the size of the enabling student population, institutional selectivity, and whether the student has changed institutions, are predictive of degree completion for students who start in enabling programs. The results suggest that while enabling programs can widen participation in university, a more nuanced understanding of multiple educational transitions can inform how institutions can ultimately improve rates of degree completion for those who begin their higher educational careers in enabling programs.