Editorial Standards

I'm Chris Terry, and I own and edit ImmigrationCalc. USCIS publishes its fee schedule, its visa bulletin, and its processing-time reports as public documents, but nobody reading them for the first time should have to cross-reference three PDFs to answer "what does this actually cost me." This page explains how that gets turned into a calculator you can trust, and what we do when a number goes stale.

Who builds what

I maintain the six calculators on this site and set the constants they run on: the USCIS filing fees, the 30-month and 18-month physical presence floors, the 5-year and 3-year residency windows, the 90-day early filing rule. Priya Raman writes the guide articles that explain how those rules interact in practice, the naturalization timeline pieces, the N-400 walkthrough, the physical presence and continuous residence explainers. Her background is on the authors page. Every published guide carries her name or mine; nothing goes up unattributed.

Where the fee and timing figures come from

Every dollar figure on this site traces back to USCIS Form G-1055, the fee schedule under 8 CFR 106.2 that took effect April 1, 2024. Physical presence and continuous residence rules come from the Immigration and Nationality Act and the USCIS Policy Manual, not from a summary of a summary. Processing-time ranges are pulled from USCIS's own published data by field office and service center, which is why this site gives ranges rather than a single confident number: the underlying source itself is a range, and reporting it as one figure would be manufacturing false precision.

How we track USCIS fee and rule changes

USCIS updates its fee schedule periodically, sometimes with a public comment period and sometimes with little advance notice. I check the fee schedule and the physical presence and residency rules against uscis.gov at least quarterly, and sooner if a reader flags something that looks off or if I see a rule change referenced in USCIS's own announcements. When a figure changes, every page that cites it gets updated in the same pass, not just the calculator, since a fee quoted in an article that no longer matches the calculator is worse than no article at all.

What the calculators do not do

None of the six tools here determine your eligibility. They apply published rules to the dates and numbers you enter and return an estimate. They do not know about a criminal history that could complicate a case, a prior denial, or a fact pattern that falls into one of the narrower exceptions USCIS carves out for military service or certain employment abroad. Those situations need an actual immigration attorney, and the guide pages say so wherever they come up.

Corrections

If a fee, a date rule, or a processing-time range looks wrong, or does not match what you are seeing at uscis.gov, send it my way. I read every message myself. When a correction is warranted I update the page, adjust the "updated" date to reflect that the figures were actually rechecked, and for anything that meaningfully changes a published number I note it rather than editing around it quietly.