Federal law gives noncitizens ten days to report a move. What AR-11 covers, why mail forwarding is not enough, and the separate five-day court rule.
Reviewed by Ekaterina Fitenko, Esq. — Florida Bar #1064536. With 20+ years of experience in the legal field, she advises applicants and permanent residents on registration duties, USCIS correspondence and the consequences of missed notices, in English and Russian.
If you are not a U.S. citizen and you move, you have ten days to tell the government your new address. The deadline comes from 8 U.S.C. § 1305(a), which requires every registered noncitizen to give written notice of each change of address within ten days of the change, and from 8 C.F.R. Part 265, which names Form AR-11 as the way to do it.
Ten days runs from the day you actually move, not from the day you sign a lease, not from the day your furniture arrives, and not from the day your case is next due for something. There is no grace period written into the statute and no provision for filing late with an explanation.
Most people hear about this obligation for the first time when something has already gone wrong — an interview notice that never arrived, a green card returned to USCIS as undeliverable, a Request for Evidence whose deadline expired while the envelope sat in a mailbox at the old apartment. The duty is easy to satisfy and expensive to ignore, and that asymmetry is the whole point of this article.
The requirement covers noncitizens aged 14 and older who are in the United States for 30 days or longer, including lawful permanent residents. A green card does not end the obligation. Permanent residents are the group most likely to assume the rule stopped applying to them, and they are the group with the most to lose, because removability for failure to report is written into the statute rather than left to discretion.
U.S. citizens, including naturalized citizens, are not covered. Once the oath is taken the duty ends. Holders of A and G visas — accredited diplomats and representatives of certain international organizations — are exempt under the regulations, as are certain other narrow categories.
Parents or guardians file on behalf of a child under 14. The child's own obligation begins at 14, and within 30 days of a fourteenth birthday there is a separate registration step for some categories. If you are filing for a household, file for each person separately rather than assuming one notice covers everyone.
A change-of-address order with the U.S. Postal Service does not notify USCIS, and it does not protect the documents that matter most. USCIS sends secure documents — green cards, employment authorization documents, travel documents — in envelopes that carry postal endorsements instructing the carrier not to forward them. When the address is stale, those envelopes go back to USCIS rather than on to you.
The practical consequence is a card that exists, was produced at your expense, and is sitting in a government facility. Recovering it means contacting USCIS, and in many cases filing to have it reissued. A forwarding order also expires, typically after twelve months, while an immigration case commonly runs longer than that.
Tell the Postal Service as well — it helps with ordinary mail from other senders. Just do not treat it as the filing. They are two different acts with two different audiences.
As of September 2026, the fastest route is the change-of-address tool inside a USCIS online account at uscis.gov/ar-11, which satisfies the AR-11 obligation and lets you attach the receipt numbers of pending cases in the same session. There is no fee for any of it.
A paper Form AR-11 mailed to USCIS remains available and still satisfies the statute. It is slower, it produces no confirmation you can rely on, and it does not update pending cases. Use it when an online account is not workable — and if you do, send it in a way that gives you proof of delivery, because the burden of showing you filed is yours.
Keep the confirmation. Save the screen, the confirmation number, or the certified-mail receipt in the same place you keep receipt notices. Nearly every dispute about this rule is a dispute about evidence, not about intent, and a confirmation number ends the argument before it starts.
Satisfying the ten-day statute and moving the mail on a pending case are two separate results, and the second one is what determines whether your interview notice reaches you. The online tool does both when you list your receipt numbers; a bare AR-11 does the first only.
List every pending receipt number, not the most important one. A family with an I-130, an I-485, an I-765 and an I-131 in flight has four receipt numbers, and they do not update one another. The same applies to a petitioner and a beneficiary at different addresses: each filing carries its own address field.
After the update, watch for the confirmation notice on each case and check the address shown in your online account against what you entered. Where an address change lands in the system but not on the case, the failure is invisible until a notice goes missing — which is exactly the failure mode this step exists to prevent.
If you have a case before an immigration judge, AR-11 does not update the court. The Executive Office for Immigration Review keeps its own record, changed with Form EOIR-33/IC, and it is due within five working days of the move — a shorter deadline than the ten days USCIS works with.
The stakes here are higher than a missed envelope. A hearing notice sent to the address in the court's file is effective even if you never saw it, and failure to appear can produce a removal order issued in absentia. Reopening such an order is possible in defined circumstances, but it is litigation, and it starts from a worse position than simply having filed the form.
Anyone with both a pending USCIS filing and a court case files in both places, separately, on both clocks. If you are unsure which describes you, our guide to deportation defense explains how the two systems run in parallel, and the firm's case strategy practice covers cases that sit in both at once.
Applicants with a pending VAWA self-petition or a T or U filing have confidentiality protections that an ordinary address change can undercut. These cases are handled by a dedicated USCIS unit, and there is a separate procedure for updating an address so that the new location is not disclosed to an abuser or a petitioning relative.
If this is your situation, confirm the current procedure before using the general online tool, and consider doing it through counsel. Our guidance on the VAWA self-petition covers the confidentiality rules in more detail.
Willful failure to file is a misdemeanor under 8 U.S.C. § 1306(b), punishable by a fine of up to $200, up to 30 days of imprisonment, or both. Prosecutions are rare. The immigration consequence is the one that matters: a noncitizen who fails to comply is deportable under INA § 237(a)(3)(A) unless the failure was reasonably excusable or not willful.
In ordinary practice, the damage is quieter and far more common than either of those. Notices go to the old address, deadlines pass unanswered, a case is denied for abandonment, a green card is returned undelivered, and a naturalization examiner asks why the file shows an address the applicant has not lived at for two years. Each of those is fixable, and each costs months.
Good faith matters and the statute says so, which is why the confirmation number from the paragraph above is worth more than any explanation you can give later. If a notice has already been missed, the response depends on which one — a missed Request for Evidence is handled differently from a missed interview, and our guidance on responding to a USCIS Request for Evidence sets out the first of those.
An address change can transfer a pending case to the field office with jurisdiction over your new home, and that transfer has its own timing. Field offices do not process at the same speed, so a move from one part of Florida to another can lengthen or shorten the wait for an interview independently of anything about the case itself.
Posted processing times are published by form and by office, so you can compare the two offices before you assume a delay is a problem with your file. Where the move is imminent and an interview is close, the sequence is worth planning: an interview notice already issued for the old office is generally not rescheduled simply because you have moved.
Moving out of the United States entirely is a different question, and permanent residents should read it as one. Extended absence raises abandonment issues that a change of address does not solve; that subject is covered in our article on the reentry permit and long absences.
Yes. Lawful permanent residents are covered by the ten-day requirement in 8 U.S.C. § 1305 in the same way as other registered noncitizens, and failure to report is a ground of deportability under INA § 237(a)(3)(A). The obligation ends only at naturalization.
No. A Postal Service forwarding order does not notify USCIS, and it does not reach secure documents such as green cards and work permits, which are mailed in envelopes marked not to be forwarded. File with USCIS as well.
File now. There is no late-filing form and no penalty payment; the statute asks for notice within ten days, and a late notice is better evidence of good faith than none. Then check the address on every pending case and on your online account, since notices may already have gone to the old address.
Yes, if the new address is where you actually live. The statute speaks to each change of address, not to permanent moves. A temporary address you will genuinely receive mail at is reportable, and so is the return.
No. The immigration court keeps a separate record, updated with Form EOIR-33/IC within five working days of the move. A hearing notice sent to the address in the court's file is effective whether or not you received it, and failure to appear can result in a removal order issued in absentia.
No. Neither the online change-of-address tool nor the paper Form AR-11 carries a fee. Filing fees for applications and petitions are separate and are listed in the current USCIS fee schedule.
$200 for 30 minutes, in English or Russian. Call (305) 315-3425 or email fitenkolaw@gmail.com to schedule.
This article is informational only and is not legal advice. Form editions, fees and processing times change; confirm current requirements with USCIS before filing. Reading this page does not create an attorney-client relationship.
Fitenko Law PLLC, 11555 Heron Bay Blvd, Suite 277, Coral Springs, FL 33076 (main office); 600 Three Islands Boulevard, Hallandale Beach, FL 33009 (by appointment only). Phone: (305) 315-3425. Email: fitenkolaw@gmail.com