The Status Clock

Across the six corridors this product serves, 'when do I stop being temporary' resolves in three structurally different ways, and they call for completely different planning. Some corridors publish a residence requirement you can count against a calendar today, so the date is arithmetic and you can plan a life around it. One corridor publishes such a requirement but is actively rewriting it, so today's arithmetic is correct today and may not survive the year. And some corridors produce no date at all — either because the wait is set by a quota whose movement cannot be forecast, because the decision is discretionary and the criteria are not published, or because settlement in the sense meant here is simply not offered. A single number with a confidence band would flatten all three into one shape and would be wrong in a different way in each. What follows keeps them apart.

Citizenship requires physical presence in Canada for at least one thousand and ninety-five days during the five years immediately before the date of application. The days need not be continuous, and only full days present count. Time spent in Canada before becoming a permanent resident — as a temporary resident such as a worker or student, or as a protected person — counts at half a day per day, up to a maximum of three hundred and sixty-five days toward the total. That last provision is the one people most often leave out of their own arithmetic, and leaving it out can put the date as much as a year later than it actually is. This is a corridor where the date is genuinely calculable from a travel history and a calendar.

Citizenship by conferral generally requires four years of lawful residence in Australia, of which the final twelve months must be held as a permanent resident. Two absence limits sit on top of the residence period and are assessed separately: no more than twelve months outside Australia across the four years, and no more than ninety days outside in the final twelve months. Time lived in Australia on a valid temporary visa counts toward the four years, which matters for anyone who studied or worked there before becoming a permanent resident. This is the second corridor where a date can be worked out today — but note that it is two tests rather than one, and a travel pattern that satisfies the residence period can still fail on the absences.

The five-year qualifying period for settlement remains in force and applies to the routes where it currently applies. It is also the subject of an active and advanced reform: a May 2025 white paper proposed raising the standard qualifying period to ten years, with an 'earned settlement' concept under which some people could still qualify sooner on contribution criteria such as salary or work in priority sectors. A consultation on that ran from November 2025 and closed in February 2026, drawing a reported one hundred and thirty thousand responses, which the department has been reviewing; implementation has been targeted for autumn 2026 with no binding date set, and no new immigration rules had been laid before Parliament as of the most recent reporting this page could reach. So the arithmetic is unambiguous today and may not survive the year. Anyone planning a life around a five-year settlement date in this corridor should be watching this specific reform rather than assuming the date holds.

Employment-based permanent residence is subject to a per-country limit of seven percent of the annual total, applied without regard to the size of the country. For applicants born in India in the main employment-based categories, the effect is a queue measured in many years: the cut-off dates governing those categories have sat in the vicinity of 2013 and 2014 for extended periods, and as of the September 2026 bulletin the employment-based second-preference filing category for India was reported unavailable, the annual limit having been reached. Movement between bulletins is episodic rather than steady, can be substantial in one month and absent for many, and can go backwards. No forecasting method survives that, which is why this page issues no estimate for this corridor: not because the data is hard to obtain, but because a queue whose movement is set by demand nobody publishes and by supply fixed in statute does not produce a predictable date. Absent a change in the law, this is expected to remain a feature of the system rather than a backlog that clears.

Permanent residence in Singapore is not something anybody has a legal right to, and the assessment is discretionary. There is no points system, and the authorities do not publish their evaluation criteria or the weightings applied, beyond broad statements of policy objectives. Recognised applicant categories exist — employment pass holders, family relations, investors, students — but falling into one of them establishes only that an application may be made, not that it will succeed, and each application is assessed individually. So this corridor produces no date, and the reason is the opposite of the American one: there, the criteria are public and the queue is unforecastable; here, there is no queue to forecast and the criteria are not disclosed. Planning that treats a number of years in the country as producing an entitlement has misread how this system works.

The long-term residence commonly called a golden visa is a renewable residence permit of up to ten years, not permanent residence and not a route to citizenship in the way the other corridors on this page contemplate. It is granted against qualifying categories which include a public investment or a holding in a licensed investment vehicle at or above a stated threshold, ownership of property at or above a stated value — both thresholds being in the low millions of dirhams — as well as categories for exceptional talent and for outstanding students. The distinction that matters for planning is that eligibility rests on a continuing qualifying condition rather than on elapsed time: the clock here is not counting toward anything, and a change in the underlying holding can change the basis on which the residence was granted. Someone treating a ten-year permit as equivalent to settlement elsewhere on this page is comparing two different things.

Where a corridor's rules produce a date, this page gives you the rule and you count against your own calendar — because the count needs a travel history that stays in your browser and never reaches a server. Where a corridor's rules do not produce a date, this page says so and explains which of the three reasons applies, rather than manufacturing a number with a confidence band around it. A confidence band on an unforecastable queue is not a measurement of uncertainty; it is a presentation of it, and it invites exactly the life planning that the underlying uncertainty cannot support. The most useful thing this page can tell somebody in that position is that the number they are looking for does not exist, so that they stop searching for a better estimate and start planning against the range of outcomes instead.