United States visitor visa from India

The application fee, known as the MRV fee, is US$185, about ₹17,600, and it is paid before you can book an interview rather than after. It is not refunded whether you are approved or refused, and it cannot be transferred to someone else, so it is spent the moment it is paid. A separate US$250 Visa Integrity Fee was created by Public Law 119-21 in July 2025 and is charged at issuance rather than at application, but collection has not begun uniformly at every consulate, so check the current position before you budget for it rather than assuming either way. Our service charge is ₹14,500. For a family, the MRV fee is per person including children, which is the line that turns a manageable number into a large one and is worth working out early.

Section 214(b) of the Immigration and Nationality Act presumes that everyone applying for a temporary visa intends to immigrate, and requires the applicant to prove otherwise. It is the ground almost every US visitor refusal is issued under, which is why the letter tells you so little: it is naming a presumption you failed to displace rather than a specific thing you did wrong. It does not mean the officer thought you were lying, and it does not mean you cannot afford the trip. It means the evidence of your life in India was not enough to outweigh the starting assumption, in an interview that often lasts under three minutes. That is why ties matter more than bank balance here. Work you would return to, family who depend on you and a reason this trip ends are what the section actually asks about.

It varies by consulate and by season rather than following a single national figure, which is exactly why the State Department publishes a live wait-time tool instead of a fixed number. Check it on the day you plan rather than relying on what somebody was told last year. Delhi and Mumbai tend to have the longest waits and Chennai often the shortest, and the gap between them can be months rather than weeks. Because appointment availability is the long part of this process and the decision itself is usually given on the day, the practical advice is to start as early as you can and to stay flexible about which consulate you attend. A flight to a city with an earlier slot is often cheaper than the trip you would lose by waiting for one closer to home.

You cannot work remotely from the United States on a B-1/B-2 visitor visa. A B-1/B-2 visitor visa does not permit employment, and that includes doing your normal job remotely for an Indian or an American employer while you are in the United States. It also covers freelancing, consulting and any other paid activity, whoever pays and wherever the money lands. This rule catches people out because working from a laptop at a relative's house does not feel like taking a job, and because the salary is arriving in an Indian account from an Indian company exactly as it did last month. The law does not draw the line where intuition does. A violation affects your admissibility and follows every application you make afterwards, which is a heavy price for a fortnight of not taking leave. If you need to work during the trip, that is a different visa and a different conversation.

Up to six months, but the visa itself does not decide it. A Customs and Border Protection officer decides at the port of entry how long to admit you for, and can grant a shorter period, or refuse entry altogether, even though your visa is valid and was issued only weeks earlier. So the date to work to is the one you are given on arrival rather than the one printed on the visa. A ten-year visa is permission to travel to the border and ask to be admitted, repeatedly, not permission to stay for ten years. The distinction matters most for people who visit often or stay a long time each trip, because that is the pattern an officer reads as living in the United States on a visitor visa, and it is the pattern that eventually produces a shorter admission or none.

Bring your old passports to the US visa interview if you still have them, particularly any containing previous US visas or stamps from other countries. Travel history is one of the more useful things an applicant can put in front of an officer, because a record of visiting other countries and returning on time is direct evidence of the behaviour section 214(b) asks that officer to predict. It answers the question the interview is actually about, which words rarely do in three minutes. Bring them even if the visas in them have expired, and even if the trips were years ago. A first-time traveller is not disqualified by having no history, and plenty of first applications are approved, but it does mean one fewer argument is available and the rest of the file has to carry more weight. If the passports are lost, say so rather than leaving the gap unexplained.