You refresh the tracker, and there it is again: the same one-word status that's been sitting there for weeks. In progress. What does that even mean? Is your file moving? Stuck? Flagged? IRCC's application status tracker tells you just enough to worry and not quite enough to understand.
Here's a plain-language decoder for every status you'll see — and, just as importantly, which ones are normal and which ones actually need you to do something.
First: the tracker only wakes up after your AOR
Status updates only start appearing after you receive your Acknowledgement of Receipt (AOR) — the letter or email confirming IRCC has your application and has checked that it's complete. Before that, you might only see the date they received it and your contact information. So if a freshly submitted application shows almost nothing, that's expected, not a glitch.
The overall status (top of the page)
At the very top, you'll see one of three words:
- Received — IRCC has your application in their system. This is the earliest stage.
- In progress — they're reviewing your application. This is where your file spends the vast majority of its life, often for many months, and seeing it here is completely normal.
- Closed — a final outcome was reached: your application was approved, refused, or withdrawn/abandoned. IRCC says it contacts you before closing a file, so the accompanying message tells you which it is. "Closed" is not automatically bad news — for most people it's the word that appears when they're approved.
The section statuses (the detailed view)
Below the overall status, your application is broken into sections IRCC reviews — things like eligibility and background verification. (Some sections, such as a medical exam, may show as Exempted for a citizenship grant, because they don't apply to you.) Each section carries one of these:
- Not started — they haven't begun reviewing this section yet.
- In progress — this section is under review.
- Completed — they've finished reviewing this section.
- Exempted — you don't need to complete this section at all.
- Waiting on you — ⚠️ this is the one that needs you. It means IRCC needs more information or documents before they can continue.
If you see Waiting on you, go straight to the "Your next steps" section of the tracker. That's where IRCC spells out what they need — police certificates, passport copies, a certified translation, a fee payment. Acting on it quickly is the single best thing you can do to avoid adding months to your wait.
The statuses you'll see around the test
The citizenship test has its own set of tracker messages, and they confuse a lot of people. While your test result is still being reviewed (or if a test was cancelled and rescheduled, or invalidated), your status keeps showing In progress. Once you receive an official pass or fail, that section of your tracker moves to Completed, and your next step shows up as one of four messages:
- Decision made on your application
- Invitation for an interview
- Invitation for a retest
- Invitation for a hearing
Don't over-read these — an interview or a hearing isn't a rejection (we explain the hearing and retake path in a separate guide). And because IRCC won't email you about test results, the tracker is the only place you'll see them — so check it.
When the silence really does warrant action
Most "is something wrong?" anxiety is answered by this page: if your status is In progress and you don't see Waiting on you, your file is simply in the queue, and there's nothing to fix. The waiting is the system working.
The exception is time. If your application has now exceeded the published processing time for a citizenship grant, that's the point where it's reasonable to ask IRCC directly — first through the web form, and, if that goes nowhere, by contacting your MP or ordering your GCMS notes to see what's happening inside. You can always check the tracker yourself and compare against IRCC's official status definitions.
Stop refreshing. Start preparing.
Here's the reframe that saves a lot of nervous energy: checking the tracker more often does not make it move. The one milestone that genuinely rewards your effort is the test — and the invitation for it can arrive with little warning. The people who breeze through are the ones who treated the quiet "In progress" months as study time, not waiting time — a few practice questions at a time instead of a last-minute scramble.
So decode your status, act fast if it ever says Waiting on you, and otherwise let the queue do its thing while you put the wait to work on the one part of this that's fully yours to control.