Community Report · September 2026
Citizenship waits have stopped climbing, at 131 days: 82% slower than a year ago.
Citizenship decisions issued in August 2026 took a median 131 days (n=86) from application, the same as July. A year earlier the August median was 72 days. Standard ILR is restated this month on a sample three times larger: 98 days over the last 90 days, and 72% of work-route applicants now pay for priority.
Published 11 September 2026 · Data through 2026-08-31 · Methodology · Download CSV
August in numbers
86
Citizenship decisions in August, median 131 days
+82% vs August 2025 (72 days) · climb has flattened: Jun 123, Jul 130, Aug 131
98 days
Standard ILR median (n=26)
the 90 days to 31 August 2026 · restated on a bigger sample this edition
51
ILR decisions reported in August
35 of 51 used a paid service · a count, not a median
6 / 1 days
Priority / Super Priority ILR
the 90 days to 31 August 2026 · n=44 and n=23
Citizenship: the wait by decision month
Median days from application to decision, by the month the decision was issued. Thirteen months of data, data through 31 August 2026.
September so far: 131 days (n=22), figures settle as people report.
Who got a decision in August? Mostly March applicants.
The remaining August decisions were spread across other application months, each fewer than 10 cases.
- Spread in August: fastest 3 days, 25th percentile 111, 75th percentile 138, 90th percentile 147, slowest 308 days. n=86.
- Route made almost no difference in August: Via ILR 132 days (n=30); EU Settled Status 133 days (n=19); Spouse of a British citizen 132 days (n=11); Other 122 days (n=20).
The rest of the citizenship journey
Application → biometrics
8 days
Median gap from application submission to biometric enrolment (n=2,682).
CS email → Atlas email
0 days
Median gap between the informal "a decision has been made" reply and the official approval email. 90% within 12 days (max 61, n=314).
Approval → ceremony
21 days
Median wait from approval to ceremony (n=599). 71% choose a private ceremony. 34 ceremonies were reported in August.
Refusal rate (self-reported)
0.6%
11 of 1,724 decisions. Treat as a floor, since refused applicants under-report.
Priority citizenship
Still too early for a priority median
The Home Office launched a Priority Service for nationality applications on 6 July 2026: +£500 for a target decision within 30 working days of biometrics, on new applications only. Our community data does not yet separate priority from standard citizenship cases, so we are not publishing a priority median this month. We will add one as soon as enough priority timelines have been reported.
ILR: restated on a bigger sample
standard service · the 12 months to 31 August 2026Since the August edition the ILR corpus grew from about 1,494 to 2,498 confirmed decisions across both datasets, and the route table sample roughly tripled. This month's ILR figures replace last month's rather than continue them.
By service level, last 90 days
| Service | Median | P90 | n |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standardincluded in fee | 98 days | 174 days | 26 |
| Priority+£500 | 6 days | 12 days | 44 |
| Super Priority+£1,000 | 1 days | 10 days | 23 |
By route, standard service, last 12 months
Other ILR forms: 80 days on just 4 decisions, too few to treat as reliable, shown for completeness only.
Application to biometrics: median 5 days (n=861). Refusal rate (self-reported, treat as a floor): 1% (8 of 774 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.
Source population. Every figure in this edition is computed from publicly posted timelines in Reddit community megathreads: 3,872 timelines, of which 2,498 have a confirmed decision. ILR Tracker holds a further 2,296 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.
Windows are fixed, not rolling. "the 90 days to 31 August 2026" means decisions dated 2026-06-03 to 2026-08-31 inclusive; the 12-month window is 2025-09-01 to 2026-08-31. 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. August 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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