News & Resources
Note: After the publication of this blog, the Department of State created a new IV Scheduling Status Tool that the public can use to understand visa backlogs, addressing a recommendation IRAP had made in a prior blog and filling a key gap that IRAP highlights in this blog. This blog is available for historical reference only.
How long will an immigrant visa applicant have to wait for an interview at a U.S. consular office after their visa application is complete? From the State Department’s internal data, we know that as of December 2024, some consular offices had no backlogs at all, while other offices expect to take over two years to schedule an interview. Frustratingly, the State Department provides no public data for immigrant visa applicants broken down by consular office, even though the State Department tracks this data internally and provides non-immigrant visa interview wait times on its website.
To answer this question, IRAP filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the State Department’s internal report with this data, the “NVC Interview Scheduling Backlog Report.” IRAP had learned about the internal report from a previous lawsuit, and advocates had accessed an IRAP resource featuring an earlier version of this report thousands of times. When the State Department did not comply with FOIA’s requirements, IRAP, represented by Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, sued and obtained the more recent reports that we now share publicly here.
One of the most useful pieces of information is the State Department’s table of “Top 20 Backlogs” at consular offices. The table lists consular offices by their country code and the number of business days it would take to interview all immigrant visa applicants in the backlog based on the current rate of interviews (The codes for the consular offices are available here.). Readers should note that these are backlogs for applicants who are ready for an interview, and many immigrant visa applicants wait for years in earlier steps and/or for visas to become available before they can move forward to the interview stage of consular processing. Below is the Top 20 Backlogs Table from the most recent report from December 2024:
Here are some takeaways from the data:
- Three consular offices–Abu Dhabi, Dhaka, and Accra–would take over two years to clear the backlog according to estimates (keeping in mind the estimates in the table are given in business days). Another eight would would likely take more than a year.
- Of the eleven consular offices with estimated backlogs of a year or more, all but two are located in Africa, continuing a disproportionate impact of delays on African visa applicants that IRAP noted in the January 2023 data.
- Applicants who have the option to process at different consular offices can consider expected backlogs as a factor. For example, Eritreans are able to process at either Nairobi (293 business days) or Addis Ababa (259 business days); and Ukrainians at Frankfurt (26 business days) or Warsaw (2 business days). We recommend CLINIC’s helpful guide “Where Can I Consular Process?” to learn more about which consular offices an immigrant visa applicant could potentially process at.
When reviewing the data, it is important to note that these are expected backlogs based on previous rates of interviewing. Changes made by the Trump Administration, including reported bans targeting people from specific nationalities, or external factors impacting consular office capacity will impact how long it actually takes. Additionally, consular offices sometimes prioritize interview scheduling for certain visa categories, which would not be reflected in the averages. Even with those caveats, given that the State Department still fails to share estimated immigrant visa interview wait times by consular office with the public, this data may be helpful to applicants and their advocates as they navigate consular processing.
You can access all of the NVC Interview Scheduling Backlog Reports from January 2023 to December 2024 here. We recommend downloading the reports and opening them in in Excel or Google Sheets because the complexity of the report’s formatting prevents it from being viewed easily in a browser. Below is an image of the “Dashboard-Summary” sheet showing with a bright green arrow and circle where the “Top 20 Backlogs” table is located:
Bonus: If you want to learn more about how the NVC schedules interviews, you can review the NVC Scheduling Manual, obtained in previous litigation.
This post is intended for a legal practitioner and legal advocacy audience; it is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. If you would like more general legal information about refugee resettlement in English, Spanish, and other languages, or to request help from IRAP, please use IRAP’s Legal Information website.
This publication is from March 2025 and does not reflect any legal changes since publication. Please see IRAP’s Legal Practitioner Resources page for newer resources and additional information for legal practitioners.
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