Visa Processing Timeline Calculator

This calculator projects a rough total processing timeline from a base duration per visa category -- 18 months for family-based, 8 for employment-based, 12 for diversity (DV lottery), and 24 for humanitarian categories -- then adjusts that base by Service Center Speed (a 0.8x multiplier for a fast center, 1.0x average, 1.3x slow) and, for employment-based petitions only, an optional Premium Processing election that caps the estimate at roughly one month -- USCIS's real expedited premium processing service is 15 business days for most Form I-129 petitions (H-1B, L-1, O-1) and most I-140 classifications, though it runs 45 business days for I-140 EB-1C multinational manager/executive and EB-2 National Interest Waiver petitions, a sub-category this calculator's single "Employment-Based" category does not distinguish. Months Since Filing does not change the Estimated Total Processing figure at all -- total processing time is a property of the category, service center, and premium processing election alone -- but it does drive Estimated Remaining (total minus months already elapsed, floored at zero once you've passed the estimate) and Completion Progress (months elapsed as a percentage of the total, capped at 100%). RFE Probability (the estimated likelihood of receiving a Request for Evidence) is a fixed, illustrative figure by category alone -- 35% for employment-based, 20% for family-based, and 15% for diversity and humanitarian cases -- not a figure drawn from published USCIS statistics, and it does not change with service center, filing date, or premium processing.

Critically, this calculator models USCIS adjudication time only -- it does NOT model visa-bulletin availability, the per-country annual visa caps and priority-date backlogs that dominate real-world wait times for many family-based and employment-based categories (some categories run 20+ years for high-demand countries). If your category is subject to visa-bulletin retrogression, check the monthly Visa Bulletin from the State Department in addition to this estimate, which by itself can be off by more than an order of magnitude for backlogged categories. Every figure here is a rough planning estimate based on typical historical ranges, not official USCIS processing data -- actual case-by-case processing times vary by service center workload and case complexity far more than this simplified model can capture, and checking your case's actual status against the USCIS processing times tool for your specific service center and form type is the only way to get a current, authoritative estimate.