Let’s talk about NVC or the National Visa Center wait times. Let’s back up for a bit on how we get to the NVC.

As far as immigration for couples purposes, we start with a petition to USCIS. Many times, that is an I-130 spouse visa or an I-129 fiancé visa. Once that petition is approved by USCIS, then it can be forwarded to the NVC for processing.

There are two types of processing because we have two different case types. The first is the fiancé visa processing

The NVC wait times are all posted on travel.state.gov. You can search up NVC wait times and it will come up with a whole web page that will tell you what their case creation and case processing times are.

Essentially, USCIS tells you the date that they are currently processing applications. Currently, it is August 17th of this year. They are currently creating cases for those that they’ve received from USCIS from August 17th of this year.

If you have an approval of a USCIS petition that needs to go to NVC that is before that date, then you have the right to submit an inquiry with them. You can do that from that same exact page that you were on to figure out the wait times. It’s called a public inquiry form and you do it all online.

See: Public Inquiry Form

You just need to have all of your information; petitioner beneficiary, receipt notice, date of birth, and the like.

Wait Time Process

For the fiancé visa, all you’re waiting on is for them to create the case and then you will satisfy their application process. It is forwarded to the consulate for the interview and then you go on as the beneficiary for the client to schedule the interview yourself.

As far as the spousal visa is concerned, the case is created with NVC but there’s a second date that’s important. The second date is the case review under the spousal visa. You will also submit documents to the CEAC.

After you submit and pay the visa fees on their website, you also go through that application process and you have to submit some documents. There is a process by which CEAC will review those documents to make sure they meet all of the standards. That probably would be a topic in and of itself to understanding what documents they need and how to figure out if they’re going to be available or okay with them.  Right now, the case review date is June 29th of this year.

Once you hit submit on that CEAC website, it goes into a queue for them to review. If you submitted before the June 29th date that they say that they are now currently processing, then you can also submit a wait time for that as well or a public inquiry for that to see if they can move that forward.

If it was before that date, you might want to go in and check and make sure you don’t have any messages from CEAC. Sometimes, they do not accept a certain document or they want something additional or maybe you missed a signature. They will comment on each document specifically and let you know what is needed.

Once the NVC has been able to review all of the documents for a spousal visa and they have approved them, you will become documentarily qualified. That is really what you’re waiting on in order to get that moved to the consulate and have an interview scheduled. A lot of times, they will notify you of that via email that you’re documentarily qualified.

Now you’re just waiting for that scheduling of an interview again. Once you get to the scheduling of the interview portion and you are at the consulate, you are at the consulate’s mercy on processing and how quickly they get to the interview.

Some of them are very lengthy and some of them are moving a lot quicker especially for certain types of visas.