No Time to Visit

Despite mild progress, US visa wait times remain three times longer than historic targets and the processing times offered by peer countries.

An enduring problem

A decade ago, visitor visa appointment wait times exceeding three weeks drew urgent attention — yet today waits are measured in months, or even years. Visitors should expect to wait seven months for an interview appointment with consular staff in Sydney, six months in Amsterdam, and five months in Paris. There are no visitor visa interview appointments available in Bogotá for over a year, and the next available appointment in Calgary is over two years away.

Excessive wait times presented a consistent problem throughout the Biden Administration. Between April 2025 and July 2022, when IFP began tracking these trends at visalimbo.org, the average wait times for a US visitor visa across consular posts never fell below two months.¹ By contrast, Australia processes 90% of tourist visa applications within 23 days, while the UK reports 21-day processing times.^{2 3}

Figure 1. Average US visitor visa interview appointment wait times (days)

Figure 2. Longest waits for visitor visa interview appointments (days)

Our broken visa system poses enormous costs to sectors across the US economy. International travel and tourism contributed $1 trillion to the U.S. GDP in 2023 — revenue which relies on the State Department’s ability to effectively issue visas to international travelers.⁴ Yet, unpredictable and lengthy visa wait times prevent many prospective visitors from obtaining visas within a practical timeframe, even with timely application. This prevents foreign researchers from passing on groundbreaking insights to American scientists, and hampers innovation by barring entrepreneurs from accessing America’s uniquely liquid capital markets. Beyond the damage to the US scientific leadership, tourism, and business, processing delays also inflict heartbreaking personal tolls by depriving millions of Americans of the ability to spend childbirths, graduations, weddings, or funerals with loved ones stuck overseas. Inability to process visas on a reasonable time frame sends US citizens and visitors alike the message that our government is both unwelcoming and incompetent, and degrades our economic competitiveness.

How did we get here?

Despite mounting wait times, a handful of consulates still measure wait times in days rather than years, proving that an efficient visa process is possible. There is also a well-documented playbook for speeding up visa processing times that the current administration can follow: previous executive efforts successfully reduced wait times from two months to just three weeks.

In the early 2010s when visa wait times crested two months, Executive Order 13597 directed agencies to “increase nonimmigrant visa processing capacity”, “ensure that 80 percent of nonimmigrant visa applicants are interviewed within 3 weeks”, and “expand the Visa Waiver Program.” Within six months every agency was on track to meet these targets.⁵ Another successful wait time mitigation strategy came in the form of the first Trump Administration’s interview waiver program, which, in response to COVID, allowed a subset of vetted, low-risk applicants to renew their visas without an in-person interview. This helped prevent a surge in appointment wait times, and continued to relieve pressure on the visa system until ending in March 2023. 

When Congress instructed the Department of State to explore “process improvements that would enhance consular services domestically and overseas” in 2022, the agency did take some concrete steps to address processing inefficiencies. Initiatives like the Domestic Visa Renewal pilot program aimed to better allocate limited consular resources by shifting the workload associated with routine nonimmigrant visa renewals back to the US, making them cheaper and potentially faster. Besides the permanent reimplementation of stateside renewals, the Department should also continue other cost-cutting, commonsense efficiency improvements to improve visa wait times, such as the strategic use of interview waivers and virtual interviews.

The solution

Failing to keep pace with basic government functions like facilitating the entry and exit of visitors is unacceptable for a taxpayer-funded agency, and allowing the State Department to obscure changes to visa wait times creates a dangerous lack of transparency. To restore a functioning visa system and boost the American economy, the administration should:

1. Preserve access to public data on global visa wait times, fulfilling the administration’s promise to hold the government accountable for how it spends taxpayer dollars.
2. Resume domestic renewals, freeing consular resources abroad to be used more efficiently.
3. Establish clear goals for expected visa wait times, and work to achieve these.