Temporarily longer processing times for residence permit applications

About 9,000 pending applications have been transferred from the police to the Finnish Immigration Service at the beginning of 2017, when all permit matters for foreign nationals were concentrated to be processed by the agency. Some of the applications have been pending at the police for over six months.

The queue of applications that were transferred from the police to the agency will be cleared at the same time as new applications are processed. We will make decisions on the applications that were transferred from the police as fast as possible, but obviously the processing times will be temporarily longer. The estimated processing times given by the police last year will unfortunately not hold up.

You cannot speed up the processing of your application by calling us and a request to expedite an application is effective only in exceptional situations. Long waiting times are in no one’s interest but we are asking for patience also when it comes to this.

Wait patiently, the relevant authority will inform you of its decision

Please wait patiently for the authority making the decision to inform you that your decision is ready. You cannot get information on your decision at our service points or by phone.

As soon as we are able to estimate the processing times for the applications transferred from the police, we will inform you of them on our website migri.fi. The processing times will become shorter once the queue for transferred applications has been cleared.

The Finnish Immigration Service will send all residence cards and residence permit cards by post. The service points are not able to hand over the cards.

Last year’s decisions on travel documents from the police

If you have applied for an alien's passport or a refugee travel document at the police last year and the police have had the time to make its decision during 2016, you will receive the decision from the police. The Finnish Immigration Service does not notify you of decision on travel documents made by the police.