I've looked at the processing times by month, fiddling with the new processing time information (available here: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigratio...vices/application/check-processing-times.html ).
And I'm a dork, so I couldn't help but eventually tabulate and make this chart, and in case it's useful to anyone.
In tabular form:
[Sorry, pasting in a table seems beyond my capabilities right now. I'll update when I figure out how to do that or paste in a picture of the table.]
My preliminary thoughts and comments, just my interpretation, if others have thoughts (or corrections!), please do comment:
-note that the 'months remaining' is right hand scale; and below two months the IRCC page shows "yours is taking longer" message. (What IRCC also calls a non-routine or complex file or whatever.)
-I've done backwards (most recent to left and earlier applications to right) on the chart, because that shows the 'number of files ahead of you' declining. A matter of taste - if you want to see it the other way, data is out there and feel free to re-do.
-Interpreting exactly what the 'difference in # of applications' (i.e. difference in outstanding month to month) means requires, I think, some caution. Presumably this is what it says, e.g. # applicants ahead of an applicant in January and February fell by 8100. Because the numbers fall between November and October by 1400, perhaps this means 1400 were processed and completed in a month (children? Special cases? I don't know) - BUT it might just be that this number includes files sent back and/or rejected for some ineligibility reason. I don't know.
-The change in number of applicants (ahead of) an applicant from August to July is enormous - and seems implausibly high @ 99 thousand in a single month. Could that really mean that almost 100k applicants from the July 2025 cohort got citizenship in ~ four months? I haven't been following close enough but a glance at the citizenship tracker tells me this doesn't seem plausible (as of 26 November, 20 days after IRCC changed these figures, we don't have anyone on the tracker showing got citizenship yet).
-I don't have any other obvious explanation - perhaps it's a glitch and previous months would tell us something, maybe a bunch were found not eligible for some reason (did a whole bunch of people apply on some citizenship-by-descent procedure that got moved somewhere else? I have no idea.)
-Since no explanation, I'm going to go with 'most likely explanation is this is some weird outlier' and best to ignore. More normal and seems plausible is that citizenship grants are ramping up - at current rates - to mid 20ks after ~3-4 months, peaking shortly thereafter (what actual peak is I do not care to guess, but excluding that high figure, ~30k/month?), and then after ~6-7 months starts declining fairly rapidly (fewer and fewer are left in each monthly cohort too, of course - so this doesn't mean excessively slow but mathematically the numbers have to go down).
-I obviously didn't go back before June 2024 - I presume the 'remaining ahead of you' (mostly approvals by that point?) numbers keep falling. (For interest I just now pulled a few months - Dec/Nov 2023, difference was 2100; Feb/Jan 2023 was 400; a few other random checks for early 2023/late 2022 were like that, 400 a month or so (and presumably falling montly before that). Perhaps someone's interested in seeing how small these numbers get/when they run out, I'm not sufficiently so to keep at it.
-I'm interested in seeing how these figures change when they're next updated - early December? - but not sure I'll do this kind of detailed analysis to compare.
And I'm a dork, so I couldn't help but eventually tabulate and make this chart, and in case it's useful to anyone.
In tabular form:
[Sorry, pasting in a table seems beyond my capabilities right now. I'll update when I figure out how to do that or paste in a picture of the table.]
My preliminary thoughts and comments, just my interpretation, if others have thoughts (or corrections!), please do comment:
-note that the 'months remaining' is right hand scale; and below two months the IRCC page shows "yours is taking longer" message. (What IRCC also calls a non-routine or complex file or whatever.)
-I've done backwards (most recent to left and earlier applications to right) on the chart, because that shows the 'number of files ahead of you' declining. A matter of taste - if you want to see it the other way, data is out there and feel free to re-do.
-Interpreting exactly what the 'difference in # of applications' (i.e. difference in outstanding month to month) means requires, I think, some caution. Presumably this is what it says, e.g. # applicants ahead of an applicant in January and February fell by 8100. Because the numbers fall between November and October by 1400, perhaps this means 1400 were processed and completed in a month (children? Special cases? I don't know) - BUT it might just be that this number includes files sent back and/or rejected for some ineligibility reason. I don't know.
-The change in number of applicants (ahead of) an applicant from August to July is enormous - and seems implausibly high @ 99 thousand in a single month. Could that really mean that almost 100k applicants from the July 2025 cohort got citizenship in ~ four months? I haven't been following close enough but a glance at the citizenship tracker tells me this doesn't seem plausible (as of 26 November, 20 days after IRCC changed these figures, we don't have anyone on the tracker showing got citizenship yet).
-I don't have any other obvious explanation - perhaps it's a glitch and previous months would tell us something, maybe a bunch were found not eligible for some reason (did a whole bunch of people apply on some citizenship-by-descent procedure that got moved somewhere else? I have no idea.)
-Since no explanation, I'm going to go with 'most likely explanation is this is some weird outlier' and best to ignore. More normal and seems plausible is that citizenship grants are ramping up - at current rates - to mid 20ks after ~3-4 months, peaking shortly thereafter (what actual peak is I do not care to guess, but excluding that high figure, ~30k/month?), and then after ~6-7 months starts declining fairly rapidly (fewer and fewer are left in each monthly cohort too, of course - so this doesn't mean excessively slow but mathematically the numbers have to go down).
-I obviously didn't go back before June 2024 - I presume the 'remaining ahead of you' (mostly approvals by that point?) numbers keep falling. (For interest I just now pulled a few months - Dec/Nov 2023, difference was 2100; Feb/Jan 2023 was 400; a few other random checks for early 2023/late 2022 were like that, 400 a month or so (and presumably falling montly before that). Perhaps someone's interested in seeing how small these numbers get/when they run out, I'm not sufficiently so to keep at it.
-I'm interested in seeing how these figures change when they're next updated - early December? - but not sure I'll do this kind of detailed analysis to compare.
