When you submit your Express Entry e-APR, IRCC assigns your file to a visa office. Most applicants find out which one only after AOR, and then a quiet realization sets in: the office matters. The same application, with the same complexity, can take two and a half months at one office and five and a half at another.
This is the quarterly refresh of our visa office report, now built on 1,119 community-submitted timelines from the Express Entry Tracker, of which 229 have run end to end from AOR to eCoPR. The June edition used 163 completed timelines. Forty percent more data has changed two of the conclusions, which is exactly why these reports get refreshed instead of left up.
What changed since June
Two findings reversed. Both are worth stating plainly before the tables.
Ottawa fell from second fastest to slowest. In June it showed an 85-day median on 7 completed timelines. It now shows 162 days on 15. A 7-file sample was too thin to publish and we published it anyway. That was our error, and the correction is the single biggest movement in this dataset.
CEC is no longer the fastest stream. June showed CEC at 76 days against PNP at 100. CEC now sits at 118 days against PNP at 104. PNP files have overtaken plain CEC files.
Processing has also slowed across the board. The overall AOR to eCoPR median has moved from 86 days in June to 116 days now, and for applications that actually finished during 2026 it is 143 days.
The 86-day gap between offices
| Visa Office | Median AOR to eCoPR | p25 | p75 | Sample (n) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Etobicoke | 76 days | 70 | 98 | 20 |
| Sydney | 104 days | 86 | 153 | 17 |
| Montreal | 128 days | 118 | 162 | 31 |
| Vancouver | 153 days | 126 | 168 | 31 |
| Ottawa | 162 days | 85 | 223 | 15 |
The median Etobicoke applicant finishes in 76 days. The median Ottawa applicant takes 162. That is an 86-day gap for what is, on paper, the same federal program. In June the same gap was 56 days, so the offices are diverging rather than converging.
Etobicoke is the one genuinely stable number in this table: 75 days in June, 76 days now, on a sample that did not grow. Vancouver has deteriorated from 131 to 153.
Nine offices are excluded because they have fewer than seven completed timelines between them: Paris, Calgary, RROC, Winnipeg, Lima, Accra, Edmonton, Toronto, and Sudbury, each with one or two. The Ottawa correction is a good argument for that threshold being higher rather than lower.
About Ottawa specifically
Look at Ottawa's percentiles before concluding the office has broken. Its p25 is 85 days and its p75 is 223. That is not a slow office so much as a bimodal one: a cluster of files moving at roughly Etobicoke speed, and a cluster taking three times as long, with very little in between.
A median is a poor summary of a distribution shaped like that. If your file is at Ottawa, the honest read is that your outcome is close to a coin flip between fast and very slow, and the median of 162 describes almost nobody.
The caveat that has not changed
Before anyone screenshots that table and concludes "avoid Vancouver": different offices handle different stream mixes, so part of the office spread is a stream spread in disguise.
| Stream | Median AOR to eCoPR | p25 | p75 | Sample (n) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CEC - Education | 86 days | 85 | 86 | 5 |
| CEC - French | 102 days | 85 | 166 | 6 |
| PNP | 104 days | 86 | 124 | 27 |
| CEC - Healthcare | 111 days | 71 | 134 | 12 |
| CEC | 118 days | 72 | 159 | 159 |
| FSW - French | 128 days | 103 | 180 | 15 |
The reversal here matters for anyone choosing a route. In June, the advice that fell out of this table was that CEC is structurally faster than PNP. That is no longer true in our data. PNP now completes 14 days faster at the median, and the category-based CEC streams sit between them.
Plain CEC also has the widest interquartile range of any large sample here, 72 to 159 days. It is not that CEC became slow; it is that CEC became unpredictable.
One caution: CEC carries 159 completed timelines and PNP carries 27. The CEC figure is far more trustworthy. Treat the ordering as real and the exact 14-day gap as provisional.
Stage by stage: where the time goes
Across all 1,119 timelines, measured from AOR:
| Milestone | Median days from AOR | p25 | p75 | Sample (n) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biometrics request | 40 days | 22 | 62 | 900 |
| Final decision / PPR | 84 days | 51 | 123 | 419 |
| Background check complete | 88 days | 64 | 119 | 304 |
| eCoPR | 116 days | 76 | 156 | 229 |
Biometrics still arrive early. Median 40 days from AOR, up from 33 in June. A quarter of applicants see a request within three weeks. Past 62 days without one, you are in the slower quarter.
The long wait is the first one. Getting to PPR is a median of 84 days; everything after it is fast. Once the passport request lands, our data shows a median of 12 days to submit and 9 more to eCoPR. Roughly three weeks, against the roughly three months that preceded it.
That shape is worth internalising, because it tells you when refreshing the portal is pointless. For more on that stretch, see our background check guide, and if your file is well past the p75 it may be time to order GCMS notes.
Note that each row draws on a different sample, since applicants log the stages they happen to reach. The eCoPR row is the only one describing a completed journey.
What drives the differences
Stream mix
Still the largest single factor, and still the reason the office table overstates genuine office-to-office differences. Etobicoke processes largely inland CEC files.
Caseload
IRCC does not publish per-office staffing or backlog data. Vancouver has been flagged as slow for years and our data does not show it improving: 131 days in June, 153 now.
Complexity triggers
Files flagged for extended background checks or eligibility concerns route into specialized queues. In a small per-office sample, a handful of those pulls a median a long way up, which is most of what the Ottawa p75 of 223 days represents.
How to use this data
If you know your office: compare your elapsed days to your office's median and p75. Below the median, normal. Between median and p75, slow but unremarkable. Past p75, you are in the tail and it is reasonable to start asking questions.
If your office shows as unknown: 105 completed timelines never recorded one, and that group runs a median of 84 days, faster than every named office except Etobicoke. Most of them are probably inland CEC files.
If you are still choosing a route: the June version of this post told you CEC was the fast lane. This version does not. The gap between streams is now smaller than the gap between offices, and you control neither.
Compare your own file
Add your timeline to the tracker to see where you sit against the medians for your stream, office, and complexity. These reports are only as sharp as the data the community contributes, and the Ottawa correction is a direct illustration: it took eight more completed files to find out the first number was wrong.
Already have PR? The citizenship calculator picks up where this leaves off, and our eCoPR to citizenship timeline covers the whole arc.
The next refresh is due December 2026.
Frequently asked questions
How can you tell which visa office processes your application?
After AOR, the office appears in your IRCC secure account under the application details page. Some applicants only see it confirmed at the biometrics or eligibility stage.
Can I request a transfer to a different office?
Generally no. IRCC assigns files by residence and stream and does not take transfer requests for timeline reasons. Rebalancing happens internally.
Why did Ottawa change so much?
The June figure rested on 7 completed timelines. It now rests on 15, and the additional files were mostly slow ones. The first number was not wrong arithmetic, it was too small a sample to mean anything, which is a good reason to treat any row here with n under about 20 as provisional.
How does this compare to IRCC's published processing times?
IRCC publishes a 6-month service standard for Express Entry. Our 116-day median is still inside it, but the gap has narrowed considerably since June. The IRCC figure is a service commitment covering 80% of files, not a typical case; ours is the typical case.
What if my office is not in the table?
We likely do not have seven completed timelines for it yet. Add yours when you finish and it will appear in a future refresh.
Methodology: Data pulled from 1,119 community-submitted Express Entry timelines on September 29, 2026. Of those, 905 recorded a biometrics request date, 311 a background check completion date, 420 a final decision or PPR date, and 229 an eCoPR date. Each percentile is computed only on rows holding both dates for that interval, so sample sizes differ by row and are printed in every table. Offices with fewer than seven completed timelines are excluded. Submissions are self-reported and not verified against IRCC records.