Estimating time to completion for ALL cohorts

Hello fellow undocumented Canadians!

I thought it would be useful to figure out how long it's taking to process different cohorts based on application date. You can see a little more details on how I computed this based on another thread on I calculated it for the July 2025 cohort. Basically, I computed the numbers based on the actual decrease in queue count month over month, as reported by IRCC. I wrote a script to estimate the actual speeds of completion for the cohorts.

By looking at all the cohorts, we might be able to learn something. Like, are things truly first in first out? Etc.

So here are results:

• Dec 2024: best 1.6 m, likely 1.9m, worst 3m
• Jan 2025: best 1.4m, likely 2.5m, worst 17m (only 100 processed last month)
• Feb 2025: best 1.3m, likely 3m, worst 26m
• Mar 2025: best 3.2m, likely 5.3m, worst 39m
• Apr 2025: best 4.2m, likely 6.8m, worst 27m
• May 2025: best 5m, likely 8.4m, worst 35m
• June 2025: best 6.1m, likely 9.7m, worst 43m
• July 2025: best 6.8m, likely 10.9m, worst 34m. So likely will be June 2027, two full years!
• Aug 2025: best 7.8m, likely 12.6m, worst 31m
• Sep 2025: best 9.4m, likely 14.8m, worst 37.5m
• Oct 2025: best 10.5m, likely 16.4m, worst 59.3m
• Nov 2025: best 8.9m, likely 15.6m, worst 51.2m
• Dec 2025: best 1.9m, likely 7.7m, worst 57.8m
• Jan 2026: best 1.9m, likely 8.6m, worst never (since there was an increase one month)
• Feb 2026: best 1.0m, likely 7.2m, worst never
• Mar 2026: best 1.1m, likely 7.1m, worst never
• Apr 2026: woah, numbers ever increasing!
• May 2026: same
• June 2026: same

Some observations:

• First of, yes, it does look like older cohorts should ignore the estimates from IRCC. Being in PSU does look like it subjects you to a different timeline entirely.
• Look at what happens to everyone from December 2025 to March 2026. They are being processed differently, and the timeline is much faster.
• But April 2026 and on are going backwards. They aren't getting processed at all, in fact the queues are getting larger for them! The interpretation from elbow-macaroni-42 was that reflected AOR backing up, which would make sense.
• It does look like the older cohorts are being processed, and that it is mostly FIFO. You'll note the likely processing time for December 2025 through April 2025 looks like it increases about one a month, so those seem to be processed at a predictable rate.
• These estimates are kind of depressing, but honestly if they published this and told you to expect it, I think we'd all be a little more understanding of the situation. I'm aware of other countries that have 2-3 year waits on citizenship by descent applications, and people just kind of expect that. And for many people this is quite urgent, so not knowing what to expect makes it harder to work around.
• This is a lot weirder than I expected. The early and mid 2026 cohorts are really odd. If it is the AORs that are late, you pretty much can't trust anything from April 2026 on. And it makes me a little suspicious of the predictions for January through March.