Community Report · October 2026
Citizenship now runs at two speeds: 140 days standard, 7 days priority.
Standard citizenship decisions issued in September 2026 took a median 140 days (n=84) from application: up from 107 in March and 75% above September 2025 (80 days). Decisions on the new Priority Service (+£500, introduced in July) took a median of 7 days (n=25). Standard ILR is 71 days over the last 90 days (n=31).
Published 3 October 2026 · Data through 2026-09-30 · Methodology · Download CSV
September in numbers
140 days
Standard citizenship median (n=84)
+75% vs September 2025 (80 days) · higher every month since December
7 days
Priority citizenship median (n=25)
Half landed between 6 and 12 days · fastest 5, slowest 24
22%
of citizenship decisions were reported as priority
25 of 115 decisions in September · a count, not a median
71 days
Standard ILR median (n=31)
the 90 days to 30 September 2026 · priority 6 days, super priority 1 day
Standard citizenship: the wait by decision month
Median days from application to decision, by the month the decision was issued. Standard service only: every decision before July 2026 was standard, and priority decisions are shown separately below. Thirteen months of data, through 2026-09-30.
Recent months settle slightly as people add their timelines. All services combined, September is 137 days (n=115), the figure comparable with earlier editions.
Who got a decision in September? Mostly April applicants.
All services combined. A further 29 decisions were on applications made in August or September, and 25 of those were reported as priority. Other application months had fewer than 10 cases each.
- Spread on standard service in September: fastest 70 days, 25th percentile 134, 75th percentile 147, 90th percentile 164, slowest 281 days. n=84. Half of standard decisions landed in a 13-day band.
- Route made little difference (all services): Other 133 days (n=51); Via ILR 139 days (n=26); EU Settled Status 139 days (n=19); Spouse of a British citizen 141 days (n=13).
Priority citizenship
First medians: about a week, well inside the 30-working-day target
The Home Office introduced a citizenship priority service in July 2026: +£500 for a target decision within 30 working days of biometrics, on new applications only. Its Form AN and MN1 guidance on gov.uk says customers applying from within the UK can use it from 20 July 2026. September is the first month with enough reported priority decisions to publish a median.
| Decision month | Priority median (as reported) | Standard median |
|---|---|---|
| July 2026 | 5 days · n=7 | 130 days · n=101 |
| August 2026 | 8 days · n=14 | 134 days · n=79 |
| September 2026 | 7 days · n=25 | 140 days · n=84 |
- September spread: fastest 5 days, 25th percentile 6, 75th percentile 12, 90th percentile 18, slowest 24 days. n=25.
- Different clocks. Our figure counts days from application. The Home Office target counts working days from biometrics, so the two are not a like-for-like comparison.
- Treat this as indicative. This is a small, self-selected sample, and people with a fast decision are more likely to post it. The 30-working-day figure is a target, not a guarantee.
- Decisions classified as priority by timing. 6 more September decisions took 30 days or fewer from biometrics without being reported as priority. Our citizenship tool classifies them as priority too, which gives 31 priority decisions with a median of 7 days. We headline the 25 reported ones, because a rule capped at 30 days cannot be used to measure how long priority takes.
- Start date. Earlier editions gave 6 July. The gov.uk applicant guidance says customers can use the service from 20 July 2026, but two applications in our data that were reported as priority were made before that date, so we say July 2026 rather than a precise day.
The rest of the citizenship journey
Application → biometrics
8 days
Median gap from application submission to biometric enrolment (n=2,807).
CS email → Atlas email
0 days
Median gap between the informal "a decision has been made" reply and the official approval email. 90% within 10 days (max 61, n=454).
Approval → ceremony
22 days
Median wait from approval to ceremony (n=626). 68% choose a private ceremony. 27 ceremonies were reported in September.
Refusal rate (self-reported)
0.5%
9 of 1,842 decisions. Treat as a floor, since refused applicants under-report.
ILR: steady, on small standard samples
standard service · the 12 months to 30 September 2026The ILR figures use the same method as the September edition, on a corpus that grew from 2,498 to 2,672 confirmed decisions across both datasets. Standard ILR is 71 days this month against 98 last month, but both rest on about 30 decisions and the 90th percentile barely moved (174 to 173), so do not read it as a trend.
By service level, last 90 days
| Service | Median | P90 | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standardincluded in fee | 71 days | 173 days | 31 |
| Priority+£500 | 6 days | 9 days | 51 |
| Super Priority+£1,000 | 1 days | 10 days | 26 |
A further 13 decisions in the same window had no service level recorded (median 6 days) and are left out of the table.
By route, standard service, last 12 months
Other ILR forms: 71 days on just 5 decisions, too few to treat as reliable, shown for completeness only.
Application to biometrics: median 5 days (n=915). Refusal rate (self-reported, treat as a floor): 1% (8 of 830 decisions).
Glossary & methodology
CS email: reply from UKVI Customer Service confirming "a decision has been made", an unofficial early heads-up. · Atlas email: the official automated decision email from the Home Office's Atlas casework system (the formal approval; ceremony invite follows). · Pre-bio wait: application submission → biometric enrolment. · Decision month: reports are bucketed by when the decision was issued, not when the application was filed. · Priority: the paid Home Office service for nationality applications, introduced in July 2026.
Source population. Every figure in this edition is computed from publicly posted timelines in Reddit community megathreads: 4,075 timelines, of which 2,672 have a confirmed decision. ILR Tracker holds a further 2,387 timelines from other sources (ECAA, ABCV and users who shared their own), and those are not included in any figure here, because they are collected differently and would not be comparable.
Sample sizes. Every figure states its own n. Where a group is too small to treat as reliable we say so rather than present it as a precise figure. Medians are of self-reported days from biometric enrolment to decision for ILR, and from application to decision for citizenship. Percentiles are of the same distributions.
Standard and priority citizenship. Few people state which service they used, so the split follows the same rule as our citizenship tool: the tier the person gave; otherwise a decision made before 20 July 2026 is standard, and for later decisions 30 days or fewer from biometrics counts as priority and 60 or more as standard. Decisions in between (one in July, none since) are left out of the split. Nobody reported standard service in the months since launch, so every standard figure here comes from that rule. Every priority figure in the headline and the table is a decision the person themselves reported as priority. From this edition the citizenship trend is standard tier only. Every decision before July 2026 was standard, so earlier months are unchanged, and July to September differ from the all-services figure by 1 to 3 days. We cannot verify any tier.
Windows are fixed, not rolling. "the 90 days to 30 September 2026" means decisions dated 2026-07-03 to 2026-09-30 inclusive; the 12-month window is 2025-10-01 to 2026-09-30. They are anchored to the end of the data month rather than to the date we ran the query, so anyone can reproduce these figures later and get the same answer. September figures will settle slightly as more reports come in.
Limitations. This is a self-selected sample of people who chose to post a timeline, not a random sample of applicants, and it over-represents the routes and services that community members use. Refused applicants under-report, so our refusal rates are a floor and not an estimate. Do not read these medians as Home Office service standards.
Reuse. These figures and charts are published under CC BY 4.0: use them anywhere, including commercially, with attribution. Cite the series as ILR Tracker Community Processing Times Report, ilrtracker.com/reports, which always shows the current edition. The aggregate figures are downloadable as CSV (medians, percentiles and n; no individual timelines).
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