Your Passport Decides How Long the E-2 Paperwork Actually Takes
The criminal record check, the apostille, and the overall timeline for E-2 paperwork depend heavily on your home country. Americans use the FBI, Canadians gained apostille access only in 2024, and each route can run six to twelve weeks before you touch a contract.
Park English2026-09-143 min read
Every E-2 packet needs the same four things: a sealed transcript, a diploma, a background check, and (for most countries) an apostille tying it all together. What almost nobody tells you is that the machinery behind those four things is completely different depending on where your passport is from, and that difference decides whether your paperwork takes six weeks or four months.
Start with the background check, because it's usually the slowest piece.
| Country | Check to order | Typical route | Rough timeline |
|---|---|---|---|
| USA | FBI Identity History Summary | Fingerprint through an FBI-approved channeler | 1–3 weeks via channeler; 8–12 weeks if mailed direct |
| UK | Basic DBS certificate | Online through gov.uk | 1–2 weeks |
| Canada | RCMP-based criminal record check | Fingerprints through an accredited third party | 2–4 weeks with a private provider; months if sent to RCMP directly |
| Australia | National Police Check | ACIC or state police online portal | 1–2 weeks |
| South Africa | Police Clearance Certificate | SAPS in person | 4–8 weeks, sometimes longer |
| Ireland | Garda vetting | Garda Central Vetting Unit, via a registered organisation | Several weeks, varies by office |
| New Zealand | Criminal record check | Ministry of Justice online | 1–2 weeks |
These numbers move around depending on the office and the season, so treat them as planning ranges, not promises, and confirm current turnaround on the issuing agency's own site before you build a schedule around them.
Then there's the apostille, and this is where the recent change actually matters. If your document was issued in a country that's part of the 1961 Hague Apostille Convention, one stamp from the relevant authority (Secretary of State in the US, the FCDO in the UK) is enough, and the Korean consulate doesn't touch it. If your country isn't in the Convention, you need consular authentication instead, which usually means the Korean embassy stamping it after your own foreign ministry does.
Canada is the case worth flagging specifically: it only joined the Apostille Convention on 11 January 2024. Before that, Canadian teachers had to run documents through Global Affairs Canada and then the Korean consulate, a two-stage process that took considerably longer. A lot of the advice still floating around Canadian teaching forums describes that old two-stage process. If you're Canadian and reading a 2021 forum post about "authentication," it's out of date now — you likely just need the apostille, full stop.
A practical order of operations that works regardless of passport:
- Order your degree-granting diploma and transcript apostille (or authentication) first — this has nothing to do with your employer and can start the day you decide to job-hunt.
- Book your background check appointment in the same week. Fingerprint-based checks (US, Canada) book out further than online ones (UK, Australia, NZ).
- Once both documents are apostilled or authenticated, keep the originals somewhere they won't get creased — immigration offices have been known to reject documents over damage, not just content.
- Only once you have a signed contract do you need the E-2 visa application itself, which layers on top of these two documents rather than replacing them.
One thing we genuinely can't standardize for you: individual immigration office staff sometimes interpret document freshness or formatting slightly differently depending on the region. When in doubt, call the office your visa will be processed through, not a general hotline.