US visitor visa wait times soar after 32% staffing cuts
If you're planning a trip to the US brace yourself: getting a visitor visa interview now takes much longer than it used to.
Thanks to a 32% cut in full-time staff working on visitor visas worldwide, average global wait times for appointments have shot up from 26 days in fiscal year 2019 to a whopping 201 days in fiscal year 2025.
This slowdown is making travel for tourism, business, and family visits a lot trickier.
Severe backlog for Indian US visas
The delays are even tougher for Indian applicants.
1,455,255 nonimmigrant visa applications in fiscal year 2025 were handled by just 68 officers, leaving each officer with approximately 21,401 applications!
The US Government Accountability Office says better workforce planning is needed and recommends regular staffing reviews.
Other countries like Colombia are also struggling with long waits, so it's not just an India-US thing.
All this matters because tourism brought $176 billion into the US economy last year, still not quite back to pre-pandemic levels.