Every month the State Department’s National Visa Center (NVC) posts an update in regards to the Immigrant Visa backlog. You can find this monthly report by going to the State Department website, then relocating to the “U.S. Visas” tab, and then select the “National Visa Center Immigrant Visa Backlog Report. A link for the most recent backlog report can be found here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-information-resources/visas-backlog.html
Applicants who are awaiting an immigrant visa interview might want to refer to the NVC Backlog report, so that they can better understand how many visa appointments are being conducted monthly by U.S. consulates and embassies around the world. Applicants should note that the NVC backlog report is only specific to immigrant visa applications, and therefore does reflect wait times for a non-immigrant visa or an NIW—National Interest Waiver.
Let’s take a closer look at the Backlog Report for May:
For May, there are still significant backlogs, and we are seeing that there are only 28,447 immigrant visa (IV) appointments that have been scheduled for this month. In April, consulates were able to schedule significantly more IV interviews— approximately 32,000. This means that in the month of May, there has actually been a slowdown when it comes scheduling, which must be consistent with Covid-19 trends in select locations.
At the current rate of IV appointment scheduling, it would take the State Department approximately 14 months to cut through the rest of the backlog, assuming there were no major disruptions that lessened the amount of appointments scheduled under the current 28,000 per month rate. If the State Department wants to cut the IV backlog to a 12 month timeframe, they would roughly need to schedule 35,000 appointments per month for the next year.
Applicants should note that the monthly report is also indicative of interviews that are being scheduled because the applicant has presented a case that is documentarily complete. Therefore, the number of cases for an immigrant visa is likely higher than 449,583 figure presented in the backlog report. In addition, the report is only contingent upon IV applicants who already have a visa number.
