An analytical look at family reunification waiting times

Hi all

One of the most commonly asked questions here relates to the waiting times of family reunification Visa D. Understandably so, as no one (or almost no one) likes to be separated from their loved ones for a prolonged period of time.

I therefore decided to take an analytical look at all the information available here on the forum regarding the waiting times, mostly from 2018 and onwards, and get more information on the average and median waiting times. The waiting time starts as from the date that the request is submitted to the embassy. This analysis was only possible thanks to all the helpful contributions from the members here regarding their experience.

Total sample size: 22 items.

I created a table showing the waiting time in buckets of 1 month, going from 0-1 months to >6 months:

Waiting time # of samples       % of samples         Cumulative % of samples

0-1 months              0                           0%                                      0%

1-2 months              2                           9%                                      9%

2-3 months              6                          27%                                    36%

3-4 months              6                          27%                                    64%

4-5 months              3                          14%                                    77%

5-6 months              3                          14%                                   91%

> 6 months              2                           9%                                    100%

We can draw a few interesting conclusions from this:

• It is unlikely that your waiting time will be less than 2 months, as only 9% of the visas were approved within 2 months.
• There is slightly more than 1/3 chance that your waiting time will be less than 3 months, as 36% of visas got approved within 3 months.
• The majority of the visas are approved within 4 months, 64% to be precise. This implies that the median waiting time for the visa is between 3 and 4 months, and based on the data I have, the median waiting time was exactly 3 months and 13 days.
• 23% of the visas took longer than 5 months to get approved. The longest waiting time was reported at 6 months and 24 days. More on this below on how to avoid such long waiting times.

Here some information and a few tips & tricks regarding the waiting times:

• Visa processing time will take longer during the holiday season, this is even explicitly mentioned on the government website. The main holiday season in Belgium is July and August, where people often take 2 to 4 weeks of leave. If your visa processing runs over this period, it might take longer than average. Other important holidays are the Christmas holidays late December (the government even shuts down their offices from 24 December to 1st of January) and the Easter holiday in April.
• The single best way within your control to keep the waiting time as short as possible is to ensure a complete file. In many of the cases where it took 5 months or longer, it was due to additional information requests from the government. When you provide the additional information, it can take one month (or even longer) for the government to process this again and finally approve your file. There are also cases where it only took a few days, but you can't count on that! Therefore, make absolutely sure that your file is complete. Do not rely on the embassy for this, they often don't know exactly what information is needed and they might tell you everything is complete, only to get an additional request for information afterwards from the government. The median waiting time above includes samples with incomplete information and therefore longer waiting times. If I exclude these samples from the analysis, I estimate that the mean waiting time for complete files is approx. 3 months (rather than 3.5 months).
• The maximum waiting time for reunification with an EU citizen is by definition 6 months. For non-EU citizens, this can be up until 9 months. However in this data set and as mentioned, none of the cases took longer than 7 months.
• Some of the embassies can process family reunification visa without sending this to the government in Brussels. In this case, it will only take 1 to 3 weeks. However this seems to be very exceptional as usually, the embassy decides to send the request to the government anyway as they don't want to take the responsibility.
• It is possible to track your request on the website of the IBZ, however it can take up until 2.5 months for your request to appear there. I even have seen cases where the request never appeared on the website, but the visa got approved in the meantime. The government will look at the original date of request when chronologically processing your visa, they will not look at the date when the request appeared on the website. Therefore, there is no need to stress if it takes long to appear on the website, it will not delay the processing of your visa.

That's all, I hope this is helpful for those currently waiting.

Ruben.