Info on processing times?

[London24 0]

Hello, I have just joined VJ and have filed a K-1 Fiance Visa for my fiance in England. We've received our notice of receipt on September 13, 2010. Since then, we have heard nothing. We have noticed that the typical time frame is 5 months. Is this start to finish or just this initial part? How long does this part normally take? Also, once it is approved at the Vermont Service Center and sent to the embassy in London, how long will it take to schedule the medical exam and interview and receive a green card? Any information would be greatly appreciated and would make it much easier to plan a wedding. Thank you!

[marlea 84]

It's hard to answer your questions with certainty. There are average times, but there is no guarantee that any individual case will be average. Right now, both the service centers (Vermont and California) have been working slowly in regards to approvals. With an initial receipt in September, you have roughly three more months to wait before you get your approval. It could come tomorrow, but it may not arrive until February. The service center's goal is to have your approval by the 5 month cut off. If you don't have it by then you can call and put in a service request.

Once you get your approval, London is running at about 2-3 months until the visa is finally issued. London will get your case and it will be about three weeks before your file will get into the system. A week or two after you get your approval from Vermont, you can call the NVC, and to get your London case number, and once you have that, you can make an appointment for the medical, even if the embassy doesn't have your case logged. After London gets your case logged and you send your P3 back, you will likely have to wait a few more weeks to be notified of your interview, which will likely be another month later.

Even though my fiance and I got our approval from Vermont very quickly, everything else at the embassy was pretty typical for us. The Embassy got our file in late July, my fiance's medical was in late August, we were notified about our interview in early September, and his interview was in early October.

Hope this helps! You can always go to the UK specific forum to ask London related questions as well. http://www.visajourney.com/forums/forum/99-united-kingdom/

[danimatt 0]

It's hard to answer your questions with certainty. There are average times, but there is no guarantee that any individual case will be average. Right now, both the service centers (Vermont and California) have been working slowly in regards to approvals. With an initial receipt in September, you have roughly three more months to wait before you get your approval. It could come tomorrow, but it may not arrive until February. The service center's goal is to have your approval by the 5 month cut off. If you don't have it by then you can call and put in a service request.

Once you get your approval, London is running at about 2-3 months until the visa is finally issued. London will get your case and it will be about three weeks before your file will get into the system. A week or two after you get your approval from Vermont, you can call the NVC, and to get your London case number, and once you have that, you can make an appointment for the medical, even if the embassy doesn't have your case logged. After London gets your case logged and you send your P3 back, you will likely have to wait a few more weeks to be notified of your interview, which will likely be another month later.

Even though my fiance and I got our approval from Vermont very quickly, everything else at the embassy was pretty typical for us. The Embassy got our file in late July, my fiance's medical was in late August, we were notified about our interview in early September, and his interview was in early October.

Hope this helps! You can always go to the UK specific forum to ask London related questions as well. http://www.visajourney.com/forums/forum/99-united-kingdom/

What about if you are already in the US with B1 visa? Is the procediments the same? And if so, how long until they give back to you if you were approved or not?

[Nik+Heather 121]

Hi, welcome to VJ!

I agree with everything Marlea has said, and will add some of my own experiences and the resources I used to make my plans and decisions. I'm not sure if you've found it, but I think just for some clarity, you should review the K1 flowchart. The major milestones in the process are the petition phase, visa phase, entrance & marriage, Adjustment of Status (AOS or Green Card filing), Removal of Conditions and Citizenship (optional). Here's the link (From the blue bar, "Guides" -> "K1 Flowchart"): http://www.visajourney.com/content/k1flow The first part, the petition phase is taking at least 5 months for people.

So, if you are curious about timelines, then you have definitely come to the right site, because we collect data from all of our users in order to estimate time frames. Plus, you can watch other people's cases that are about the same as yours. So, some links:

Timeline data - historical: (From the blue bar at the top: "Immigration Timelines" -> "K1 Visas > Historical Trends") http://www.visajourney.com/content/k1historical

Igor's List - current: (From the blue bar at the top: "Immigration Timelines" -> "Processing Status: Igor's List") http://www.visajourney.com/timeline/monthly_filers.php?cfl=

Your Filing group: http://www.visajourney.com/forums/topic/274047-september-2010-k1-filers/

As you explore around those links, you can get to the raw data tables and do your own sort of investigations in excel. The problem with the average numbers in there is that it's not a very steep slope in terms of the timing when I plotted it out. The standard deviation is quite large. Keep an eye on your filing group thread. When others start getting their petition approvals, yours is probably on it's way as well!

Anyway, we didn't (or probably more correctly, *I* didn't) let any of that stop me from planning a wedding. When we filed it was an average of 8 months start to finish, and I picked a date roughly 10 months out and started planning a wedding for that weekend at about the same time in our process as you are in yours now. You'll see a lot of advice on here warning you not to plan anything without having the visa in hand, but we are all adults, so it's up to you to assess your risk and more importantly your priorities, and make decisions based on your own financial ability to absorb any lost deposits or to write into any vendor contracts the ability to move the date as the visa processing changes.

So, before I get any farther, let me tell you what our priorities were when we were making wedding and flight decisions:

1. We wanted only one wedding/marriage ceremony. The legal part and the floofy dress part had to occur at the same time. We wanted all of our family there.

2. We wanted to make sure that Nik's risk was minimized in terms of health care etc. This requires legal marriage soon after entry - it's difficult to find decent health insurance options, but Nik would be retroactively covered from the date of our marriage.

3. We wanted to get Nik working in the US/Nik wanted to work as long as possible in the UK.

4. We wanted to be together ASAP.

5. We wanted to minimize our costs/financial risk.

Unfortunately, as you can imagine, #1 and #2 actually somewhat conflict with #4! Maybe your priorities are in a different order than ours were. If so, perhaps a different plan of attack is appropriate. So what happened was that we had the visa 4 months before our wedding, and 3.5 months before Nik actually entered the country! As I said, I started planning before the petition (first phase) was even approved! I set a mental milestone (for the contracts and the invites) of 60 days. If we didn't have the visa or we didn't think we'd get it in time, that's when I was going to make the decision to go forward or push it out. Luckily, we had the visa well before that. It's useful to have that 6 months validity on the visa, because then the beneficiary can wrap up their affairs with a firm date in mind rather than trying to handle it all at the last minute, or with an unknown date.

Besides, there are a lot of things that you can do to plan the wedding without having to worry about the date. You can pick your dress, and select flowers and colors, work with your attendants, and at least tour locations and interview caterers. You can pick out the paper for your invitations and select the wording with everything except the date, think of a guest list and start gathering their addresses. There are tons of things that can be done before you have to sign on the dotted line!

Good luck!