Why We Never Show Success Rates or Approval Odds
You will not find a success rate, an approval percentage, or an "odds of being approved" number anywhere on Immimaps. That's not an oversight — it's a rule we hold ourselves to, because we don't have trustworthy data to back a number like that, and publishing a guess dressed up as a statistic would be worse than publishing nothing.
Publishing a guess dressed up as a statistic would be worse than publishing nothing.
Why this is harder than it sounds
A believable-looking success rate is easy to produce and almost impossible to make honest. To calculate a real approval rate for a program, you'd need reliable data on every application filed for it, including the ones nobody talks about publicly, and you'd need to know the actual outcome of each one. Most of that data doesn't exist anywhere in a form anyone can access — governments rarely publish it at the level of detail that would make the number meaningful, and the applications that get discussed online skew heavily toward people who are either very happy or very upset, not a representative sample.
Anyone showing you a specific approval percentage for a given program is, in practice, either citing something they can't actually source, or presenting a rough impression as if it were a measured statistic. Both are a problem, because the number looks precise. Any specific approval percentage reads as fact, not as an estimate, and that precision is exactly what makes it persuasive — and exactly what makes it dishonest when it isn't backed by real data.
The rule we actually follow
Every number we show has to trace back to a real source: an official program rule, a published cost figure, a documented processing step. Where we don't have that kind of grounding for something, we say so plainly instead of estimating. This applies everywhere on Immimaps, not just to success rates — it's the same reason our document check quotes the specific rule it's comparing your document against, rather than issuing a general "this looks risky" verdict with no basis shown.
We think of this as a floor, not a preference. It would be easy to make Immimaps feel more impressive by adding confident-sounding numbers throughout. We've chosen not to, because the entire value of a tool like this comes from being trustworthy when the stakes are real — and a fabricated statistic, even a well-intentioned one, undermines that the moment someone finds out.
News and our thoughts — not legal advice or consultation.
What we show instead
Rather than a success rate, our comparisons and reports show you the actual, verifiable facts a decision depends on: what a program requires, what it costs, what the real steps and rough timeline look like, and — for a document you've submitted — exactly where it does or doesn't match those requirements. These are things that can be checked against an official source, which means they're things you can trust, or at least verify yourself.
Where a genuine risk exists — a step commonly missed, a requirement people misunderstand, a term that shows up unevenly across contracts for a given pathway — we'll describe that risk directly, in plain language, rather than compress it into a misleading number.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere
A wrong statistic on a shopping site costs you a bad purchase. A wrong statistic on an immigration decision can cost you your savings, your timeline, or your legal status in a country you've already committed to. The stakes are exactly why we hold this line as firmly as we do — this isn't a category where "roughly accurate" is good enough, and it isn't a category where we're willing to guess just because a number would look more polished on the page.
If you're weighing a decision that needs a real number
If a proposal or an agency has given you a specific success rate or approval percentage, that's worth checking rather than trusting at face value — ask where the figure actually comes from. Our free document check won't manufacture a probability for you either, but it will tell you whether the document's other claims hold up against the program's real, sourced rules.
Run a document through the free document check, or read more about how our data is sourced and kept current in the FAQ.