What this is
A community-run record of what happens after a 221(g) at a US consulate — how long administrative processing actually runs, what gets asked for, and how cases end. It exists because there is no public data on this and people in the middle of it are guessing.
What this is not
It is not legal advice and cannot predict your case. It is also not a random sample — a six-month wait is memorable and a two-week one is not, so slow cases are over-represented. Treat everything here as a rough signal about a community, not a base rate.
Why there is no "average processing time"
Every forum quotes one. It is almost always wrong, and wrong in a specific, predictable direction.
Suppose 100 people interviewed a year ago. Fifty were approved within two months. The other fifty are still waiting today.
Average the cases that finished and you get about two months — and that number is worthless, because it silently discards the fifty people whose wait is the whole problem. Worse, it gets better the more people are stuck, because anyone still waiting simply is not counted.
The honest answer to "how long?" is not one number. It is "half of this group is still waiting at six months" — which is what the curve on the results page shows. Cases with no decision stay in the denominator until the day they resolve.
P50, P80, P90, P95
The results page gives percentiles — "80% of cases resolved within N days" — but reads them off the survival curve rather than from the list of finished cases. That matters twice over.
Statistically, a percentile taken over finished cases only ignores everyone still waiting, and understates every figure. The damage is worst at exactly the numbers people care about: if a third of cases are still open, a "P90" computed from the rest is not a P90 at all.
For privacy, a raw P95 over forty cases is one specific person's exact wait. Read off the curve it inherits the 30-day resolution and the small-cell cutoff, so it never lands on an individual's number.
Where the data has not gone far enough to reach a percentile, the page says "not reached" rather than estimating one. With many cases still open the high percentiles genuinely are unknown, and a guess dressed up as a statistic would be worse than an honest blank.
Why some numbers are hidden
Suppose 31 people have responded and the consulate breakdown reads Mumbai 12, Delhi 10, Chennai 7, and one more group of 2. That last group is dangerous: read with the rest of the page it narrows to a single person — one consulate, one charge type, one outcome, one quarter. In a community where people know each other, that is a name.
So if fewer than 5 people gave an answer, the number is never printed. And
because the total is public, hiding one group alone would not be enough —
31 − 12 − 10 − 7 = 2 recovers it by subtraction. Whenever hiding one group
would leave it solvable, a second is hidden too. There is never only one unknown.
The same rule applies to time. Durations are only ever published as bands ("121–180 days"), never as exact day counts, because the median of five waits is the third person's exact wait. The longest and shortest waits are never published at all, at any sample size — those are always one specific person. The survival curve is computed on a 30-day grid rather than at real event times, and stops once fewer than five cases remain, because the tail of any such curve is a handful of identifiable people.
What is collected
Eight multiple-choice answers, and optionally a timeline. There is no free-text box anywhere on this site, deliberately — a comment field is the one place people identify themselves.
Never collected:
- No name, email, or account of any kind
- No employer, attorney, receipt number or case number
- No calendar dates. You enter dates; your browser converts them to a number of days and sends only that, plus the month you interviewed. A timeline with real dates is a near-unique fingerprint — and many of these cases were posted publicly in forums with those exact dates, so storing them would let anyone match the two.
- No IP address. Abuse limiting uses a hash salted with a value that rotates every 24 hours, and those rows are deleted on expiry.
- No analytics, no third-party scripts, no cookies.
Your case stays yours
On submission you get a private link containing a random token — the only way back to your case. Only a one-way hash of it is stored, so it cannot be recovered or looked up, by us or anyone else. Use it to add milestones as things move, or to delete your case.
Deleting removes your case from the live dataset and from every published number. In the interest of being straight with you: the database is backed up privately, so a copy of an already-deleted row can persist in an old backup for a while. Nothing from it is ever published again.
Nothing can remind you to come back. With no email and no account there is no way to reach you — that is the cost of real anonymity, and it is deliberate. The site can only remember the link in your own browser, which disappears if you clear site data or switch devices. Save the link yourself.
Where it runs
On Cloudflare Pages and a Cloudflare D1 database. Cloudflare, as the network carrying the request, sees your IP in transit the way any website's host does — this application simply never writes it down.