PR Processing Times, Priority Order, and Approval-Rate Statistics

PR processing times have risen sharply: in 2024-2025 they exceeded 12-15 months (previously 6-9 months), and by May 2025 stood at roughly 1.5-2 years, reaching up to 2 years in Tokyo; regional offices (Niigata, Hokkaido, Okinawa, Takamatsu, Kanagawa) process faster — from a few months up to about a year — but applicants there must respond to immigration correspondence within 5 days. Real examples: one application filed in October 2023 had received no response as of July 2025 (roughly 2 years of waiting, with "a couple thousand people" reportedly ahead of the applicant in the queue); another filed in March 2023 was approved in December 2024 (about 1.5 years); an application through the Shizuoka/Nagoya bureau took under 4 months, which is atypically fast. Community opinion holds that immigration processes applications in the following priority order: (1) visa renewals/extensions, first; (2) new visas/Certificates of Eligibility (COE), second; and (3) PR applications, last — though this ranking is itself an unverified community opinion. The overall PR approval rate is estimated by community members to have fallen to around 50% (an observation, not officially verified); separate, admittedly imprecise, figures from the site retrohazard.jp put the approval rate at roughly 67.6% for the Yokohama office and roughly 97% for Tokyo. Sources: https://dashboard.retrohazard.jp/ — Unofficial dashboard with approval-rate and processing-time statistics by immigration office.