My husband filed an I-130 (under the F2A category) for me at the Vermont Service Center (VSC) and received a priority date of Jan 29, 2014. The VSC has been moving very slowly for F2A.... My husband expect to receive naturalization in few weeks. Once done, he will upgrade this petition from F2A to Immediate Relative by sending a copy of his naturalization certificate to the VSC. In this regard, I have two questions: Given that we filed my I-130 in early 2014, how long does it typically take to receive an approval after an upgrade to Immediate Relative is processed? I understand that IR spousal petitions do not have a concept of a priority date, given that visas are immediately available. However, given that U.S. citizen spouse petitions are being processed at VSC within 5 months currently, will my filing of the I-130 in Jan 2014 provide me any benefit in terms of how fast USCIS processes it once the upgrade is processed? ( I am hopeful that USCIS pulls my file from archives or whereever it currently resides, looks at my priority date and processes it immediately. Hopefully I don't have to go to the back of the IR and wait for another 5 months for the approval, since that would defeat the purpose of my filing the I-130 in 2014). Will appreciate your thoughts if you or someone you know has gone through a similar situation. Thank you.

Hey I am in the same boat , I would love to know the answer , i am about to be a citizen and applied for my wife in Jun 2014 , and I want to know that we need to wait another 5 month again after waiting 1 year . Please get back to me if you can i really appreciate it .... shahram_1983 at ya hoo . com thanks

I too am also in the same boat as you guys. My husband filed our petition in September 2014 and we received a priority date of September 9 2014. He recently naturalized in February of 2015 and we subsequently put through a request to have our case upgraded to that of immediate relative. After waiting 15 days from our initial request we received an email that the upgrade could not be processed because it had been requested by me the beneficiary. I am still a bit confused as to how the CSR my husband spoke with got this information incorrect when it was in fact him who made the call to request the upgrade. Anyway my husband called that same day of receiving the email to indicate that his request was processed incorrectly. He spoke to another officer who made the corrections and informed that the case would be upgraded immediately. He received a letter from USCIS a few days later confirming that the case had been upgraded and that it was now in "Active Processing". The letter also indicated that we should use the date of my husband's naturalization as the new benchmark for estimating how long the process should now take. Based on this I presume that since the service center our case was sent to is reportedly taking 5 months to process cases that our case should be processed within 5 months from February when my husband naturalized. My husband also spoke to a USCIS officer after receiving the letter and made mention that our case had still not been approved, the officer again indicated that the case is being processed and we should wait an additional 30 days to receive an approval or letter from them with instructions on how we should proceed. We have already waited 7 months from when our case was first filed and it is heart wrenching right now knowing that the case has been upgraded and we are yet to receive an approval.