canadiangirl78 said:
My husband can apply for citizenship in August of next year. I realize things can change a lot in a year but how long is it taking start to finish right now? CIC is saying 24 months!!! Is that accurate for the majority?
It varies on a number of factors. Your case processing office location is one -- some have more manwpower than others. Other issues directly related to one's application would be:
(1) the need for security/background checks (e.g. fingerprints) -- some have non-unique names which need verification
(2) out of country travels -- frequent travels outside Canada can potentially raise doubts about physical residency
The 24-month timeline is rather all-inclusive and represents the majority of cases handled by CIC nationally. It does not take into consideration regional/office differences and individual cases. Let's say that it takes 24 months for CIC to make decisions on 80% of the cases they handled right now but it doesn't mean that all of these cases were processed for 24 months. In fact, a substantial amount of these would have been processed much earlier.
For a better breakdown of application timelines according to CIC, kindly check the CIC report on their target for cutting down the backlog:
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/department/media/backgrounders/2014/2014-02-21.asp
In this report, the citizenship grant inventory as of Dec 2013 is broken down as follows:
46% of applications aged up to 1 year (12 months)
20% of applications aged 13-18 months
12% of applications aged 19-24 months
22% of applications aged more than 2 years
You can also check the timeline tabulations in my signature for specific city/CIC processing office.
