- Hyderabad has the longest listed B1/B2 wait: 12 months for the next interview opening.
- The September seventeenth update shows Kolkata at 6.5 months, the shortest next-slot estimate among five Indian posts.
- The Department of State says these figures are estimates, not guarantees of an individual appointment date.
Hyderabad has India’s longest listed wait for a US visitor-visa interview, with the next opening shown at 12 months, according to the latest US Visa Wait Times data. The figures cover B1/B2 interviews at five consular posts.
The Department of State updated its appointment dashboard on September 17, 2026. It lists Hyderabad and Mumbai as the posts with the heaviest queues, while Kolkata has the shortest listed delay among the five.
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Those numbers describe estimated interview availability, not a confirmed appointment date. The dashboard’s B1/B2 Appointments figures apply to first-time visitor-visa interviews in Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and New Delhi.
The spread is substantial. Kolkata’s listed next opening is several months earlier than Hyderabad’s, while Mumbai and New Delhi also remain in the longer-wait group.
A second measure appears alongside the next available slot. It gives applicants another view of the wait, though it does not turn an estimate into a booking guarantee.
The figures cover visitor visas. They should not be read as a measure of every U.S. visa category processed in India.
The five posts show a wide spread in listed waits
| U.S. visa post | Next available B1/B2 appointment | Average wait |
|---|---|---|
| Hyderabad | 12 months | 11.5 months |
| Mumbai | 11.5 months | 11 months |
| New Delhi | 10 months | 7.5 months |
| Chennai | 7.5 months | 7 months |
| Kolkata | 6.5 months | 6 months |
The next available appointment is the dashboard’s main measure. The average-wait figure is also provided when the next opening is more than three months away.
The two measures are not interchangeable. One identifies the estimated interval until the next slot; the other reports an average wait. Reading them together gives a fuller picture of the queue at each post, but neither establishes the date an individual applicant will secure.
The dashboard presents the numbers as estimates. Appointment availability can therefore differ from the listed interval, and the figures are not fixed promises of when a particular interview will take place.
August changes split between longer and shorter queues
The latest figures show that the direction of change was not uniform across cities. Hyderabad’s listed wait had been 9.5 months in August, then rose in the September update. Mumbai moved the other way: its August figure was 14 months before the later reading came down.
New Delhi’s wait increased from 9 months in August. Chennai appeared in the September figures, but the cited tracker had not shown a comparable earlier measure for that post.
Those shifts make a single national description misleading. Hyderabad and Mumbai both sit near the top of the current queue, yet their recent movement differed. The same dashboard offers a city-level snapshot rather than one wait estimate for all applicants in India.
No cause for the contrasting monthly movements appears in the appointment figures themselves. The data records estimated availability; it does not explain why one post’s queue lengthened while another’s shortened.
Visitor queues remain longer than student and exchange waits
The same dashboard showed substantially shorter waits for student and exchange visas than for B1/B2 visitor visas. The available figures here do not provide numerical comparisons for those categories, so the contrast is limited to the direction reported.
The agency’s Bureau of Consular Affairs maintains the Global Visa Wait Times page from which the appointment figures are drawn. Its September update places the longest listed visitor-visa delay in Hyderabad and the shortest among the five Indian posts in Kolkata.
The September 17 update is the latest dated reading cited for these city figures. It gives applicants a point-in-time comparison across the five posts, with the next available interview estimates ranging from 6.5 months in Kolkata to 12 months in Hyderabad.
