Why this exists

We were on the other side of this

Someone in our family went for their visa interview and came home without a passport. Just a printed slip, a line saying the case needed further administrative processing, and no date on it anywhere.

What followed is probably familiar if you are reading this. Refreshing a status page several times a day for a word that never changed. Writing to the consulate and getting the same paragraph back. Reading everything we could find and coming away with two contradictory answers, both from strangers, neither with anything behind it. Rebooking flights. Explaining to an employer, again, that we still did not know.

The visa was issued in the end. It came late, well past every estimate we had been given, and by then the damage was mostly done — to plans, to work, to the assumption that somebody somewhere could tell us what normal looked like.

The hardest part was never the waiting. It was not knowing whether the waiting was normal. Two weeks is bearable if two weeks is what happens. Two weeks is terrifying if you think everyone else got theirs in two days.

Why the internet made it worse

When you are stuck, you go looking for other people’s timelines. And you find them — but you almost only find the fast ones. People who clear in a day come back to say so. People still waiting eight months later mostly go quiet. So the picture you assemble from the loudest voices is systematically wrong, and it is wrong in the direction that hurts most: it tells you that you are the exception.

You are usually not the exception. You just cannot see the others, because the others stopped posting.

That is the specific problem this site was built to fix. Every number here counts the cases that are still open alongside the ones that finished. When we say a median, we say how many cases are still pending underneath it. A median that only describes the people who got out is not a median, it is a survivorship illusion.

What VisaMoves actually is

• A crowdsourced record of what really happens. Thousands of anonymised case timelines — interview date, what the slip asked for, when the status moved, when the passport came back — grouped by consulate so you can see your own situation rather than the average of everyone’s.
• Updated every single day. Policy in this area changes faster than guidance does. A page written six months ago can be confidently, dangerously out of date, so we re-check and publish daily.
• Honest about what it does not know. Where the data is thin, we say the sample is small. When we get something wrong, we correct it in place and say what we got wrong, rather than quietly editing it.

Things we will never do

• Charge you. The site is free and there is nothing to buy. If anyone ever asks you to pay to have a case moved, that is a scam — nobody outside the consulate can move an administrative processing case, and that includes us.
• Ask who you are. There are no accounts. We do not want your name, your passport number, your case number or your email. The forms actively reject anything that looks like one.
• Contact you, or sell your data. Nobody whose case appears in this dataset will ever be approached by us, and the data is not for sale.
• Pretend to be official. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Department of State, any embassy or consulate, or any law firm. This is not legal advice.

Who runs it

One person, working on this outside a day job, based in India. It began as a spreadsheet for one family’s case and turned into something worth sharing. If it saved you one bad night of refreshing a status page at 2am, it has done its job. Questions, corrections and removal requests: support@visamoves.com.