USCIS I-130 CR1, IR1 Spouse Visa Processing Times: June 2024

To apply for your Spouse Visa, you first submit your Application to USCIS. USCIS processes the application and when they are done, USCIS forwards your case to the State Department for further processing and final interview at a US embassy or consulate in your partners home country.

The initial and currently slowest stage your case needs to pass through is processing and review by USCIS. USCIS stands for United States Citizenship and Immigration Service.

To submit your application you mail it to either USCIS’s Elgin, Illinois or Phoenix, Arizona lockboxs.

Which mailbox you should send your case to depends on what State you reside in.

At the respective lockboxes, USCIS mailroom clerks, sort all applications and decides where each should go. They are assigned to one of 5 possible processing centers scattered around the USA.

The theory behind this is that the sorting clerks can “balance the load” between centers.

Sorry, you can’t choose your preferred destination. It is completely up to the clerks.

Here are the COMBINED expected timing for these five processing centers.

There are two time estimates. The first is how long it takes for that center to complete processing on 80 percent of the cases it is assigned, and the second is the earliest date USCIS allows you to contact them to chase the progress of your case, if still pending, a few months after their expectation of when the majority of similar cases submitted the same time had finished their processing.

All Centers Combined,

80% of Spouse Visa cases are taking 14.5 months
Earliest time allowed to chase is 19 months after submission