Canadian citizenship: the backlog, month by month

326,200 people are waiting for a decision on a citizenship grant, and 99,500 are waiting on a proof of citizenship. Over the 10 months we have archived, the grant queue grew 15% while the proof queue grew 181.1%.

IRCC data as of June 2026 · verified July 2026

What happens after you apply

Most of the worry along the way is not knowing which step you’re on. Here is the whole path for a citizenship grant. IRCC publishes the order of these steps, but not how long each one takes, so read this as the map, not a timetable. If you see a specific wait quoted for any single step, it isn’t coming from IRCC.

1. 1
   You apply

   You send in your application, online or on paper. IRCC first checks it’s complete. An incomplete one gets returned to you, which costs weeks, so it’s worth double-checking before you send.

2. 2
   Acknowledgement of receipt

   IRCC confirms it has your application and adds it to its system. This is the point your wait really starts from, and it’s the moment you count from on the chart above.

3. 3
   Checks and processing

   IRCC runs background, security and criminal-history checks. It may ask for more documents, or for your fingerprints, sometimes well into the process. A request like that is a normal step, not a sign something is wrong.

4. 4
   Test invitation

   If you’re between 18 and 54, IRCC invites you to take the citizenship test. Invitations often arrive at short notice, so keep an eye on your email and account. Applicants under 18 or 55 and over don’t take the test.

5. 5
   Test and, sometimes, an interview

   You take the test, usually online. Some applicants are also asked to meet a citizenship official to confirm their language ability and eligibility.

6. 6
   A decision

   IRCC approves the application, refuses it, or asks for more. The “finalized” count in the numbers on this page covers all three, which is why it isn’t an approval rate.

7. 7
   The oath

   If you’re approved, you’re invited to a citizenship ceremony to take the oath. You become a Canadian citizen the moment you take it.

Following your own application: once your acknowledgement of receipt arrives, give it a few days, then you can track your status in IRCC’s application tracker. It shows where your application sits and anything it needs from you. This page is about the queue as a whole; the tracker is about your file specifically.

The two queues are moving in opposite directions

These are the only two kinds of citizenship application IRCC reports on. A citizenship grant is the one most people mean: a permanent resident applies, meets the requirements, takes the Canadian citizenship test if they are in the age range for it, and swears the oath. A proof of citizenship is a certificate for someone who is already a citizen, most often a person born abroad to a Canadian parent.

Since September 2025, the published wait for a grant has moved from 13 months to 12. The published wait for a proof has moved from 8 months to 19. The queue that used to be the fast one is now the slow one, by a wide margin.

What we can’t tell you is why. These are counts, not explanations, and the numbers on their own don’t point to a reason. Parliament did change the rules on citizenship by descent while this was happening, and it’s fair to wonder whether that is part of the proof-of-citizenship story, but we are not going to pin the whole shift on it. The data can’t tell one cause from another, and we would rather say that plainly than hand you a guess dressed up as a finding.

Why so many people are past the published wait

The published wait is not a deadline and it is not a promise. IRCC works it out from how many applications are already in its inventory, how many staff are processing that type of application, and how many more it expects to receive. It is an estimate of how long a file arriving today should take, not a measurement of how long yours will take.

Separately, IRCC sets itself a service standard. For a citizenship grant that standard is 12 months, and its stated target is to meet it for 80% of applications. Its own reported performance against that target is 86%.

Read those together and the picture is clear enough. The standard was never meant to cover everyone. On IRCC’s own reported figure, roughly one application in seven took longer than 12 months, and IRCC still counts itself as beating its target. So if you are past the published wait, that is not in itself evidence that something has gone wrong with your file.

What IRCC does not publish is how much longer the rest wait. There is no published figure for the slowest applications, so nobody can tell you where the tail ends. Anyone quoting one is guessing.

Can you trust the wait time?

IRCC quotes a wait, but is it realistic? There is a simple way to sanity-check it. Look at how many applications are still in line, then at how many IRCC finishes in a month. Divide one by the other and you get a rough wait of your own, worked out from completely separate numbers.

Counts as of 31 May 2026, rounded by IRCC to the nearest 5. “Finished each month” is this year’s finalizations spread over the 5 months so far. The last column is IRCC’s own published wait for the same month.

Both queues land within a month of each other, which is close enough to say the published wait sits in the right region rather than being plucked from the air.

Be careful how much weight you put on that. The two figures do not measure the same thing. Ours is a rough average: everyone in line, divided by how fast the line moves. IRCC’s is the point by which 80% were finished, which on a queue with a long tail would normally sit above the average rather than level with it. Ours also assumes the queue is stable, and the grant queue has grown 15% over the months we have archived, which pulls our number down.

So read this as a smell test the published figure passes, not as two independent methods agreeing. What is worth watching is the gap between them. If these two ever drift far apart, we will say so here.

Month by month

People waiting for a decision, as published by IRCC and rounded by IRCC to the nearest 100. Processing times in months. Each row is dated to the month the figures describe, not the day IRCC published them, which is usually a week or so into the following month.

A few things worth knowing

None of this tells you your chances. When IRCC says it “finished” an application, that count lumps together the ones it approved, the ones it turned down, and the ones people withdrew. So these numbers show how busy the queue is, never how likely you are to be approved.

“Waiting” means everyone in line. It includes people who applied last week and are moving along normally, not just applications that are running late. A big number mostly means a lot of people are applying, not that the system is stuck.

Your place in line is an estimate. The “people ahead of you” figure is IRCC’s own approximation, not an exact headcount. Treat it as a rough guide, not a promise.

What you won’t find here

A lot of the questions people ask, IRCC simply doesn’t answer in public. No matter where you look, these numbers don’t exist:

• Anything by city or province. IRCC publishes national figures only. Every application goes through the same centralised intake at the Case Processing Centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and is then assigned to a local IRCC office for the decision, so applicants do end up at different offices. What does not exist is any published processing time by office. IRCC has never released one, which means nobody can show that any office is systematically faster or slower than another. If you see one named as the “worst”, that is applicants comparing notes, not IRCC data.
• Test pass rates. IRCC doesn’t publish how many people pass or fail the citizenship test.
• A timeline for the steps. There’s no published figure for how long until your test invitation, or from your test to your oath. If you see one quoted, it isn’t from IRCC.
• A cut-off date. For some applications IRCC says “we’re working on ones received before this date”. It doesn’t do that for citizenship. Any date you see is applicants comparing notes, not IRCC.