Calculating what an immigration delay costs your company

Immigration delay never appears in a management report, which is why it is tolerated for years. The fix is arithmetic: convert the delay into a monthly carrying cost using numbers the finance team already maintains.

The five components

1. Direct productivity. Fully burdened monthly cost of the affected employee multiplied by the share of their role that is blocked. An employee who cannot be moved onto a project is not zero-productive, but they are not fully deployed either. Use a defensible fraction and say what it is.

2. Avoidable filing cycles. Extension filings that would not be needed if the underlying petition were adjudicated. Fees plus counsel plus internal handling, per cycle, times the number of cycles the delay adds. This is the cleanest number in the model — it is a real invoice.

3. Replacement risk. Probability the employee leaves during the delay, times the cost of replacing them. Recruitment fee, vacancy period, and ramp time to full productivity. Most organisations already have a benchmark for this from HR; use theirs rather than inventing one.

4. Project and revenue impact. The hardest to quantify and often the largest. If a named deliverable slips because a named person is unavailable, that slippage has a value. If it does not, say so — an honest zero here makes the rest of the model credible.

5. Household and retention factors. Where a dependent's work authorization is blocked by the same pending petition, the household income effect is a real driver of attrition. It belongs in the retention probability at component three rather than as a separate line.

Turning it into a monthly rate

Sum the components, divide by the number of months of excess delay — measured against the agency's own posted processing time, not against your expectations. That produces a monthly carrying cost.

The monthly rate is the number that changes decisions, because it can be set against a one-time intervention cost. Premium processing, where available, has a fixed price. A federal filing has a fixed price. Both become obvious purchases once the carrying cost is stated per month.

The delay cost calculator runs this model with your own inputs. Nothing is transmitted anywhere; it computes in the browser.

Presenting it without overreaching

Three rules keep the analysis credible in front of finance:

• Use the agency's posted time as the baseline. Excess delay is what you are costing, not total pendency. The queue itself is not a grievance.
• Show the assumptions as assumptions. A model with three visible estimates survives scrutiny. One with a single confident total does not.
• Give the low case. If the honest range is wide, present the bottom of it. A conservative number that clears the intervention cost is more persuasive than an aggressive one that invites argument.

Then the recommendation follows on its own: here is what waiting costs per month, here is what acting costs once, here is the crossover.

Questions

Isn't this just an argument for premium processing every time?

Where premium processing is available it is usually the right first purchase. The model matters for the cases where it is unavailable, already used, or where the petition sits past the premium guarantee — which is where the expensive delays actually live.

How do you handle a delay affecting many employees at once?

Model one representative case properly, then scale. A per-employee monthly carrying cost multiplied by an affected population is more persuasive than an aggregate figure with no visible derivation.

What baseline applies when no processing time is published?

Some queues have no meaningful published standard. In those cases the defensible baseline is comparative: what happened to similar filings from the same period.

General information, not legal advice. Rules and processing practice change; verify against the agency's own published figures and take advice on your own facts.