Timeframe to get passport returned

Hi all

I received some good news yesterday from the registry office that the Home Office had given the go-ahead for mine and my US-based fiancee's marriage ceremony to take place next weekend.

All we need to do now is get her passport back to her in NYC so she can fly over (scheduled to do so on Thursday 22nd to get married on 24th).

However we've yet to have a decision made confirmation email, so does anyone have any idea when we can expect to have the passport back by?

Also, is there any way of alerting the Home Office/Visa4UK of our tight timeframe and have this popped in the post asap now the decision has been made?

Cheers
Jonathon

You need to wait for the visa to be approved.  There is absolutely no way to accelerate this.

Right now it's taking 2/3 weeks to get the "application received" email from Sheffield for priority applications, which is when the clock starts.  This is about 4 weeks for non-priority.

From that email, it'll be about 6 weeks to process a priority application and 12 weeks for a non-priority application.

As sent your application on October 2nd, I would suspect you will hear by mid/late-December if priority (maybe after Christmas if there has been a big rush of applications before the holidays) or February/March if non-priority.

The good news is that you are good to go whenever the visa is processed.   

I’m sorry, I’m confused - where did your information come from?

The registry office has nothing to do with your visa application, and if you requested the permission to marry while she was in the U.K. as a visitor, the permission will have been granted based on her being a visitor in the U.K.

It will have nothing to do with her fiancé visa at all and they probably don’t even know she has applied for a fiancé visa.

There’s no way to speed up the visa process I’m afraid... until you get the decision made email from Sheffield (or New York... not sure who sends it now), you have to assume the visa application has not been processed yet.

Have you received the email confirmation from Sheffield to say they have received her visa application yet? I believe you applied in October?

It’s generally taking about 3 weeks (priority) or 4 weeks (non-priority) from mailing everything to New York to receiving the acknowledgement email from Sheffield. Then once you have that email, you’re probably looking at about 1-2 months for the visa to be processed if you paid priority and 2-3 months non-priority.

So far, we have other people who applied in early-mid October who received their confirmation emails at the end of October, and have yet to receive a visa decision yet. At this point, we don’t know how long exactly it will take for their visas to be processed.


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The information came from the registry office. When I flagged up that we might have to postpone as we hadn' t heard anything, they replied that they had been informed by the Home Office that our marriage may proceed.

They added they assumed this meant the visa had been approved and I would receive confirmation in due course.

She has been applying from the US, not as a visitor, and we received the application received email at the start of this month.

The information came from the registry office.

Ah, okay. Unfortunately, that means absolutely nothing when it comes to your visa, because the registry office has no way of knowing whether your visa has been processed or not.

If you gave notice to marry before applying for the fiance visa, then the permission to marry will likely be based on her not having applied for a visa yet, but they are allowing the registry office to marry you without any further investigation once the visa has been granted and she has arrived in the UK... whenever that may be.

I would say it is extremely unlikely that you will get the visa in time to marry on the 24th, given that not even priority applications sent in at the same time as yours have been processed yet... and non-priority visas generally take double the time of priority.

They added they assumed this meant the visa had been approved and I would receive confirmation in due course.

Yeah, I don't think they understand how it works unfortunately. Given Sheffield only acknowledged they had it at the beginning of this month, I doubt your visa application has even been looked at yet.

She has been applying from the US, not as a visitor, and we received the application received email at the start of this month.

Okay, so your business day count for processing should start from the date you got that email (we think - that's how it always worked before the changes).

So, if that's the case then you're on approximately business day 8, maybe day 10, at the moment. Going by recent months, priority applications have been taking 20-30 business days (though could be longer now), and non-priority have taken 50-60 business days.

I'd say best case scenario is that you might get the visa sometime in December (if the business day count actually starts from when New York received it and not when Sheffield emailed), and worst case you might not get it until sometime in February (if it takes 60 business days and the count starts from when Sheffield emailed this month).