After Additional Documents, How Long Until PR Approval? 18 Tokyo Cases
For a permanent residency application in Tokyo, if most of your wait is already behind you and this is the last request for additional documents before approval, the median time from mailing the documents to approval is about 70 days.
An earlier article looked at how much additional-document requests slow down PR screening. This one takes up a more practical question: once the documents are in, how much longer until approval?
The conclusion comes with two conditions.
First, most of the wait is behind you. For HSP (incl. deemed HSP) applicants, current cases cluster around 550–620 days of waiting; tracks such as Gijinkoku reach this stage earlier (why HSP and Gijinkoku move at different speeds in Tokyo is analyzed here). You can gauge where you stand with the permanent residency wait-time prediction tool at maybebetter.jp.
Second, this is the final document request before approval. If a new request arrives, restart the count from its mailing date.
If both conditions hold, "approval in about 70 days" is a reasonable base scenario. Half of the cases fall between 59 and 76 days; the fastest took 32 days, the slowest 109. The chart below shows all 18 cases:
A few notes:
Only cases that ended in approval are counted; a document request by itself says nothing about the outcome. This article only tries to answer: if it will be approved, how much longer?
For the same reason, only people whose approval has already arrived can be counted. Those who submitted recently and are still waiting are absent from the sample by construction, so the real distribution may run somewhat longer. For planning, allowing 2.5–3 months is safer.
Occasionally a document request arrives within the first few months after applying; those cases are outside the scope here.
This is Tokyo. Bureaus such as Yokohama are much faster, in line with each bureau's baseline screening speed.
Source: rednote. 130+ valid cases were compiled from 300+ public posts.
Of these, 18 recent Tokyo cases have complete dates (14 HSP-family, 2 Gijinkoku, 2 other), all shown in the chart.
Data through June 2026.
This research was first published on rednote (@ad_astra).
If you would like to share your timeline: [email protected]. The numbers here will be updated as new cases accumulate.