A 99% approval rate is one of the easiest numbers in the world to manufacture. You don't lie. You don't even need to be good at visas. You simply decline the hard cases before they count, and report a percentage on what's left.
This is the dirty secret of visa marketing. The firms with the highest advertised approval rates are often the ones doing the least difficult work. They turn away anyone with a prior refusal, a thin financial profile, or a complicated travel history, and then they put the survivors' success rate on a billboard. The number is real. The impression it creates is a lie.
We'll show you exactly how the trick is built, what an honest provider would put next to the number, and then we'll point the same scrutiny at SaathiVisa. Because if we ask you to distrust everyone else's statistics, we'd better be willing to explain ours.
The denominator is where the magic happens
Every percentage is a fraction. Approvals on top, something on the bottom. The entire game is the bottom number, and a firm gets to choose it.
Consider one firm with one quarter of real activity. A hundred people enquire. The firm pre-screens and turns away thirty whose cases look weak. Of the seventy it accepts, sixty-five get a decision in time and five are still stuck in administrative processing when the quarter closes. Of those sixty-five, sixty are approved.
Watch what happens to the same performance under different denominators.
| What you count | Number | Reported rate |
|---|---|---|
| Approved ÷ decided applications | 60 ÷ 65 | 92% |
| Approved ÷ submitted applications | 60 ÷ 70 | 86% |
| Approved ÷ everyone who came to us | 60 ÷ 100 | 60% |
Same firm. Same quarter. Same sixty visas. The number on the homepage is 92% and it is not false. It simply answers a question no traveller actually cares about. You don't want to know the approval rate among the cases that already cleared the hard filters. You want to know your odds, with your profile, walking in the door.
The visa industry has even split the vocabulary to make this fog easier. Approval rate usually means decisions that went your way among decisions made. Issuance rate means a visa actually landing in the passport. They are not the same number. An application can be approved in principle and then stall on administrative processing, a document request, or a passport that never makes it back in time. A firm can run a 90% approval rate and an 80% issuance rate on the same caseload, and quote whichever flatters it.
Six ways a clean-looking number gets dirty
Once you know the denominator is negotiable, the specific tricks become easy to spot.
1. Cherry-picking the intake
The most powerful lever, and the most invisible. A firm that only accepts strong cases will always show a high rate. The selection happens before you ever became a statistic, so you never see the people who were quietly told "we don't think you're a fit." Survivorship bias with a sales script.
2. Counting resubmissions as fresh wins
Refused in March, reapplied in July, approved. Is that one success or one failure followed by one success? A firm optimising its homepage counts the July approval and forgets the March refusal. Notably, the people who run the actual statistics refuse to play this game. The US State Department, when it computes a country's visa refusal rate, deliberately collapses multiple applications from the same person into a single final status for the year, so a refusal-then-approval counts as one applicant, not a fresh win laundered over a buried loss.
3. The pending-case disappearing act
Cases still in administrative processing are inconvenient. They're neither approval nor refusal yet, and many drift toward refusal. Drop them from the denominator and your rate jumps. Ask any firm quoting a rate: what did you do with the cases that hadn't resolved?
4. Segment laundering
A firm does ninety easy Thailand and Dubai tourist visas and ten genuinely hard US or Schengen cases. It blends them into one rate and lets the easy volume carry the headline. Your hard case is hiding inside a number built mostly from cases nothing like yours.
5. The vanity time window
Pick the best quarter. Quote it forever. A rate with no time period and no sample size attached is a decoration, not a disclosure.
6. The unstated 'eligible' filter
"99% of eligible applicants approved." Who decided eligibility? The firm did. "Eligible" is just the cherry-picked intake wearing a more respectable word.
What the real numbers actually look like
Here is the part the 99% crowd would rather you didn't internalise: official, full-population visa statistics are nowhere near 99%, because they can't be cherry-picked.
The US State Department publishes an adjusted refusal rate for B visitor visas by nationality, computed across every applicant of that country, not a curated subset. The formula is public: refusals minus overcomes, divided by issuances plus refusals minus overcomes. For India in fiscal year 2024 that adjusted B-visa refusal rate was 16.32%. The United Kingdom sat higher at 18.03%, China at 25.37%, Brazil at 15.48%. In other words, roughly one in six Indian visitor-visa applicants was refused, in the real world, on the full population.
Student visas are harsher still. Across the system, F-1 refusal rates climbed from around 23% in 2015 to roughly 35% in 2025, and India specifically saw F-1 denial rates push past 60% in 2025 as scrutiny tightened. Those are the true base rates the headline numbers are competing against.
So when a firm tells you 99% against a backdrop where the honest population number is 84% approval for Indian visitor visas and worse for students, one of two things is true. Either they have found a genuinely repeatable edge worth explaining in detail, or they have quietly excluded everyone who would have dragged the number down. In our experience it is almost always the second.
| The claim | The question that breaks it |
|---|---|
| "99% approval rate" | 99% of what? Started, submitted, decided, or pre-screened cases? |
| "We've never had a refusal" | How many of those cases did you decline to take before they could be refused? |
| "99% across all visas" | Show me the rate for US and Schengen cases alone, separated from easy destinations. |
| "Guaranteed approval" | No private party decides a sovereign visa. What exactly are you guaranteeing? |
| "Thousands of happy clients" | Over what period, and what's the refusal count in the same period? |
What an honest provider would put on the page
If a firm genuinely wanted you to trust its track record, the disclosure would be boring and specific. It would read like a methodology note, not a slogan. It would state the denominator in plain words: approvals as a share of every case we accepted and submitted, including the ones still pending and the ones we lost. It would give a time window and a sample size. It would segment by destination and visa type, because a Dubai tourist rate tells you nothing about your O-1 or your Schengen long-stay. It would count a refusal as a refusal even when the reapplication later succeeded. And it would tell you its intake rate, the percentage of enquiries it declines, because a 99% approval rate on a 40% acceptance rate is a completely different animal from 90% on an open door.
Almost nobody does this. The reason is simple. Honest numbers are less impressive than dishonest ones, and most of the market is buying on the number.
Now point it at us
We would be hypocrites to teach you this and then hide behind a rounded-up figure of our own. So here is how SaathiVisa thinks about its own claims, in the same daylight.
We do not publish a single blended approval percentage, and we won't, because any number we put up would be subject to exactly the six tricks above. We work disproportionately on hard cases: prior refusals, complex financial profiles, founders and HNIs whose travel and money histories take real work to present. That intake choice would, if we wanted, let us publish a low-looking honest number or a high-looking dishonest one. Neither would tell you the truth about your case.
What we will tell you is uncomfortable and specific. We turn cases away, including paying ones, when we think the underlying facts won't support an approval and our involvement would only add a fee to a refusal. We count a refusal as a refusal. When we take a difficult case and it is refused, we tell the client before we tell a spreadsheet. And we will never use the word "guaranteed," because no consultant, however good, decides a sovereign government's visa. Anyone who guarantees one is either lying or quietly planning to decline your case the moment it looks risky.
The honest version of our pitch is not a percentage. It is this: we will tell you your real odds before you pay, we will decline you if the case is hopeless, and the number we care about is whether a specific, complicated person gets a specific, difficult visa, not what looks good above the fold.
How SaathiVisa thinks about this
Treat any approval rate as a marketing asset until proven otherwise, and ask for the denominator, the time window, the segment, and the intake rate before you believe it. We would rather lose a client to a firm with a shinier number than win one by pretending sovereign decisions are ours to promise. If you want a candid read on your own odds, with the hard parts named out loud, that conversation is the product.
FAQ
Is a high approval rate ever a genuine signal?
Yes, but only with its methodology attached. A rate becomes meaningful when the firm states the denominator (every case accepted and submitted, pending and lost included), the time window, the sample size, the destination and visa-type segment, and how many enquiries it declines. A bare percentage with none of that is decoration.
What's the difference between approval rate and issuance rate?
Approval rate is the share of decisions that went your way. Issuance rate is whether a visa actually reached the passport. A case can be approved and still die in administrative processing, a document request, or a missed deadline, so issuance is always the same as or lower than approval. Firms quote whichever flatters them; ask for both.
What are the real base rates for Indian applicants?
On the full population, the US adjusted B-visitor-visa refusal rate for India in fiscal 2024 was 16.32%, meaning roughly one in six applicants was refused. Student F-1 refusals for India ran past 60% in 2025. Any private claim of 99% should be read against those real-world numbers, and the gap explained.