When will I have an interview?

I get a lot of people asking the same question – here is my case number – when will I get interviewed? It is tiring answering that same question so let me try and explain my thoughts so that people can figure this out for themselves.

Every year is different, the case numbers reached in one year does not necessarily indicate a maximum number in the following year – many factors affect that. So – the most accurate answer to the question being asked is – I DON’T KNOW FOR SURE!

However, I do understand that people want to know something – so those of us that are experienced in DV lottery will often look at the previous year to give an approximate timeline. This isn’t a certain method – but it is possibly better than giving no answer at all – as long as people realize it is just a guess.

So – using the assumption that DV2016 will be approximately similar to DV2015 and applying some lessons learned I have created the charts below to give an APPROXIMATE idea of when processing will get to each number range per month. Now this is a GUESS. It is not 100% accurate!! Just a guess – OK?

You will note I have only taken the numbers up to August. That is because I do not want to give concern about where cutoffs will fall – and we are so early in the process NO ONE really has any certain idea of the final numbers.

So to find your APPROXIMATE date of interview find your number range in your region on the left scale and see where it falls on the month scale. At this point it could be a month wrong either way, so treat these dates as GUESSES.

The other question is when will the 2NL arrive. The 2NLs are sent around 5 weeks before the start of the interview month. So – the first DV2016 2NLs doe October interviews will be sent around late August. Then the 2NLs sent in late September will be for November interviews.

Lastly, late submission of your DS260 could change these dates. So, your case number might indicate an October interview, but that won’t happen if you don’t send in your DS260 until August. I hope that is clear.

I hope this will help and I will encourage people to check this post rather than answering this question multiple times every day.

One last point, the early months progress was faster than it should have been (because of the delays in processing DS260). So early months are AHEAD of these guesses below, and over time the monthly progress will slow down so that later months are more in line with the guesses. So – look at the VB and understand what has happened by the early fast progress.

So – here we go:-

Note: Ethiopia and Egypt will probably be slowed down a little behind these numbers.

When will I have an interview