How to check H1B visa processing times on the USCIS homepage?
You have filed your H1B petition in April, received your H1B case number, and now you are waiting for your visa to be approved. I am sure you wonder about when you will get your visa and how long the processing time will take. Don’t worry, you are not the only one wanting to know this answer. Others who have applied for the same visa also wonder how much processing time it will take to get their H1B visa. In order to make things easier for you, we have prepared a guide on how to check processing times online on the USCIS homepage. But before we get into that, we want to explain to you what your case number is.
How to identify your processing center?
The case number you get after filing a report, looks a little bit something like this: SRC-16–022–57890. So what do these numbers and letters mean? We dissect each part of the number so you know what it means.
LOCATION:
In our example, the letters are SRC, which is the abbreviation for Texas Service Center. This indicates that you filed your H1B petition in the Texas Service Center. There are 4 different service centers where your H1B petition can be filed and their acronyms and location names include:
· LIN — Nebraska Service Center; LIN refers to Lincoln, Nebraska
· EAC — Vermont Service Center; EAC refers to Eastern Adjudication Center, which was the original name given to the center.
· SRC — Texas Service Center; SRC refers to Southern Regional Center, which was the original name given to the center
· WAC — California Service Center; WAC refers to Western Adjudication Center, which was the original name given to the center.
Now that you know what your location name is, you can start to check the processing time online.
1. Homepage: go to USCIS homepage, https://www.uscis.gov/
2. Tools: Click on “Tools” and then on “See Office Case Processing Times”
3. Select Service Center: The next step is to select your processing center and then to click on Service Center Processing Dates.
4. Processing time: Once you have clicked on service center processing dates, it will open up the processing times for the specific center, as you can see here:
The problem is that these processing times are not always accurate, as this information is not updated daily.
5. Average Processing Times: Here under this link — https://egov.uscis.gov/cris/ptAllFormsAverage.do you can check the average processing times for all USCIS offices. This might be more helpful than the other chart.
Here you can see the fiscal year and the processing time needed.
We wish you the best of luck for your H1B visa journey and we hope you get your H1B visa answer soon. If you have any further questions about the processing time or this online tool, please do not hesitate to contact us. Also please share your experiences below! We are all here to help each other out and learn from each other.
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