ustraveldocs India: MRV Fee, OFC Splits and Locked Accounts

ustraveldocs India is the official US visa scheduling portal, run under contract by CGI Federal. It states every rule for booking, paying and rescheduling an appointment. It does not state what happens when a rule bites. Three mechanics decide whether an application goes smoothly: the MRV fee attaches to a receipt number, not an appointment, and survives a reschedule. The biometrics city and the interview city can legally differ. A hijacked account, meaning the security-question-answers kind rather than a stolen password, has a documented free fix the portal never advertises. Each rule gets one line here, sourced to the portal itself. The rest of the page covers what it doesn't say.

What ustraveldocs is, and what CGI Federal is — two names, one system#

ustraveldocs India is, by its own masthead, the "Official U.S. Department of State Visa Appointment Service." It is not a third-party agent. It is also not the government directly. CGI Federal Inc., the contractor named in the site's own footer copyright, runs the logistics: the DS-160-linked account, fee collection, appointment scheduling and document courier. The actual booking engine sits on a second domain, usvisascheduling.com — this is where an applicant creates a ustraveldocs India login, sets three security questions, and picks slots. The decision itself is made elsewhere: a US Department of State visa officer at the Embassy or a Consulate approves, refuses, or sends a case to administrative processing, and CGI Federal employs none of them.

That split matters for one reason: when something goes wrong with an account, a payment or a slot, the fix usually runs through ustraveldocs/CGI Federal support, not through the Embassy. Confusing the two wastes the one channel that can actually help.

OFC vs VAC vs the consulate: three appointments people merge into one#

A standard, non-waiver application needs two appointments, not three. The confusion is that the first one has two names. "OFC" (Off-site Facilitation Center) and "VAC" (Visa Application Center) both refer to the same biometrics stop: photo and fingerprints, run by the contractor. Every OFC appointment is a VAC visa application centre appointment under a second name, with the same photo and fingerprints taken by the same contractor staff. One applicant's own account of setting up the booking makes the equivalence explicit: a "biometric appointment called VAC or OFC," followed by "the interview called Consular or Embassy appointment," where a visa officer actually questions the applicant (another applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 19 January 2025). Both legs are booked in a single flow: the portal only opens the consular slot picker after an OFC/VAC slot is selected, and a confirmed appointment requires both choices in the same session. Bring the printed appointment confirmation letter to that stop: the barcode staff scan at the counter is the one printed on that letter. The DS-160 confirmation page is a second, separate sheet with its own DS-160 confirmation barcode, and it comes back stamped rather than scanned (the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 19 January 2025; a third applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 8 January 2026).

A third object exists but applies to a narrower group. Applicants eligible for the interview-waiver ("dropbox") route skip both the OFC/VAC visit and the interview and instead drop documents at a Document Drop-off Centre — a courier-style handover with no biometrics and no officer present, open only to renewals that qualify (a fourth applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 12 August 2025; the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 8 January 2026). Five cities double as both the OFC/VAC and the consulate: New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Submission and collection at any of those five carry no contractor fee at all. Six further cities run drop-off centres exclusively, and there the contractor charges ₹1,200 per application on submission: Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Cochin, Jalandhar and Pune (the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 12 August 2025). What the second ₹1,200 buys is where the two documented cases stop agreeing. The August 2025 Pune applicant records it as optional premium delivery, declined without penalty. The January 2026 Bangalore applicant was charged ₹1,200 again at the counter simply to collect the passport (the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 8 January 2026). Neither ustraveldocs nor the contractor publishes a collection-fee schedule, so budget for the second ₹1,200 at a drop-off centre and treat it as a contractor service charge, never as part of the government fee.

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The MRV fee: what it actually attaches to#

The MRV fee is a US government charge of $185, set in dollars, and it attaches to a receipt number generated at payment rather than to any particular appointment. That is why reported cases show it surviving a cancellation and a fresh booking profile, as long as the same passport and DS-160 are reused.

The dollar figure is the only fixed one. What leaves the card is whatever the rupee was worth that day, and the corpus shows the gap plainly. An applicant paying in January 2025 recorded $185 as "around 15.5k INR" (the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 19 January 2025). An applicant paying eleven months later recorded the identical $185 as roughly ₹17,000 (the same applicant, r/usvisascheduling, 8 January 2026). Nobody publishes a forward rate for this, so read the amount off the payment screen rather than off any page, including this one. Everything the contractor charges, the ₹1,200 drop-off fee and the optional delivery, sits outside the $185 as a separate line, covered in this site's US visa fees from India.

Officially, that anchor is called the MRV fee receipt number. Fee receipt validity runs 365 days from payment, and the fee is non-refundable and non-transferable to a different person, whatever the interview outcome — properties already public. What is not published anywhere in the official pages is what happens to that receipt number when a booking, not the applicant, changes.

One applicant, writing on r/USVisaIndians on 19 April 2026 after tracking community booking failures for several months, described the mechanism directly: "the MRV fee will show as already paid because its tied to the receipt number, not the appointment. the fee is reusable." What that post reports is a sequence people had run when the counter locked them out. The appointment cancelled. A full 48 hours allowed to pass rather than 24. Then a fresh profile created on ustraveldocs against the same passport and DS-160, at which point the fee showed as already settled instead of demanding a second $185. Four people were reported to have come through it. One who rebooked after only 12 hours hit an error instead, which is what makes 48 the load-bearing number rather than a round one.

Read that as reported system behaviour, not as a route to take. Cancelling inside the active rescheduling window can lose the slot outright if the wait is cut short, and a cancel-and-recreate cycle is exactly the shape of activity the portal's own rate-limiting exists to catch (covered in full on the slot-monitor mechanics page). Nobody at ustraveldocs sanctions it, and no page here recommends it.

A separate, more common receipt-number scenario is the payment glitch: the confirmation screen fails to load, but the money has already left the account. The same 19 April 2026 post covers that one, and here the reported fix is the boring one. Do not re-pay, because a duplicate MRV payment is not easily refunded. Check the status again after 24 hours against the confirmation number, and if it still shows unpaid after 48 hours, email support-india@ustraveldocs.com. That route is reported to take three to ten days rather than minutes, but it costs nothing.

The reschedule counter: what it counts, and what resets it#

As of 1 January 2025 the portal's reschedule allowance dropped to one attempt — two total booking attempts per DS-160 — down from the three or four reported earlier, and the counter does not reliably distinguish a genuine reschedule from its own bugs.

the same applicant (r/usvisascheduling, 19 January 2025) documented the rule change directly: "As of 1st January 2025, you can reschedule your appointment ONLY ONCE not 3/4 times like earlier meaning you have a total of 2 attempts at booking slots." Call it what applicants in this corpus call it — the appointment reschedule counter — and that single number is the budget every mechanic on this page has to work around.

One documented case does not draw on it. The same January 2025 account describes a common half-booking failure: an OFC/VAC slot is selected, but the following screen shows no available consular slot. The portal holds the OFC pick open for a few hours to let the applicant find one, and auto-cancels it if none appears — and, in mountain-ew's own words, "this is not counted as one of your appointment scheduling attempts." A failed half-booking is not the same as a burned reschedule.

A separate, newer pattern reported over a year later shows the opposite: the counter firing when it shouldn't. The same 19 April 2026 account on r/USVisaIndians described applicants who "selected a VAC slot, tried to book the consular interview, and got the message 'you have only ONE rescheduling attempt remaining.' they never confirmed any interview date. just picked a VAC slot and the system counted it as a reschedule." That post treats it as a probable bug rather than a rule, which is the right weight to give it: a glitch to check for, not something that fires on every attempt. It also argues against the instinctive response of cancelling and re-paying the MRV fee, and points instead at the receipt-number sequence described above, carrying the same 48-hour risk.

1. Select the biometrics (OFC/VAC) slot first. The portal will not show consular options until this is locked in.
2. Continue straight to the consular slot picker in the same session. The portal does hold the OFC pick for a few hours, but the confirmation only exists once both legs are submitted together.
3. Confirm both in one attempt. If no consular slot appears, the portal holds the OFC pick for a few hours before auto-cancelling it — that auto-cancel does not spend a reschedule attempt, but the reported miscounting bug above shows the counter is not perfectly reliable even so.

Splitting cities: OFC in one post, interview in another#

The biometrics leg and the interview leg do not have to sit in the same city — only the interview is tied to the post selected at booking, and the OFC/VAC appointment carries no geographic restriction at all.

The 19 April 2026 r/USVisaIndians account listed pairings the community has used in practice: "kolkata OFC + chennai consulate (for east india folks who cant get chennai OFC)," "hyderabad OFC + mumbai consulate (for south india folks wanting mumbai)," and "delhi OFC + anywhere (delhi OFC is usually easiest to book)." One ordering rule is fixed either way: the OFC appointment must fall before the interview date and cannot be booked after it. Book the OFC leg first, then search for a consular slot at the intended post. Separately, the same applicant's January 2025 account puts a ceiling on how far apart the two legs can sit, "consecutive days or... a maximum of 30 days gap between them." That figure is worth re-verifying on the current calendar, since the scheduling system has changed more than once since that post.

A second, distinct kind of split applies to interview-waiver-eligible renewals only. the same applicant (r/usvisascheduling, 8 January 2026) booked a dropbox slot under the Chennai consulate (the only choice the drop-down offered alongside Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Kolkata) while living in Bangalore, then physically submitted documents at the Bangalore VFS drop-off centre instead of travelling to Chennai. The portal's own screen told the applicant this was fine: any booked post could pair with document drop-off "at any convenient drop-box location across India." That case ran DS-160 to passport-in-hand in 21 days, 18 December 2025 to 8 January 2026. The contractor took ₹1,200 on submission and ₹1,200 again at collection, both separate from the $185 government fee, which this applicant recorded as roughly ₹17,000 at December 2025 rates.

Consular jurisdiction — which post you may use, and when that stops being a choice#

Jurisdiction is not enforced for a B1/B2 application in India — any resident may book any of the five posts — and that single fact is the reason every cross-city trick on this page works at all.

Consular post jurisdiction is not a phrase ustraveldocs India uses about itself, but it is the mechanism behind every cross-city trick on this page. This site's own US visa appointment wait times by city states the underlying rule plainly, verified 17 July 2026: any Indian resident may schedule at New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad or Kolkata, regardless of home address. the same applicant's DS-160 walkthrough corroborates the mechanism from the applicant side — the city entered when starting the DS-160 "is only important for the country, the city you receive an appointment in may be different and that is not an issue." Nothing in the corpus or the official pages describes a state-residency requirement for a B1/B2 posting inside India, unlike some other visa regimes.

The six drop-off-only cities — Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Cochin, Jalandhar and Pune — are not tied to a fixed post either. Which of the five consulates a drop-off centre's paperwork is filed under depends on the post the applicant selected at booking, not on the drop-off centre's own location: the one documented case in this corpus (Bangalore routed to Chennai) is a single data point, not a published rule. ustraveldocs India does not publish a fixed centre-to-post map anywhere on its own site.

If you miss the appointment, or the fee expires#

A missed interview-waiver (dropbox) appointment reportedly gets one further reschedule, opening within a few days of the miss; a missed standard interview draws on the same single reschedule allowance covered above; and an MRV receipt left unused for 365 days simply expires, with no override available at the counter.

a fifth applicant (r/visas, 14 November 2025) missed a dropbox slot entirely — a forgotten appointment surfaced only by a same-morning calendar reminder — and reported the outcome plainly: "Luckily, one reschedule is permitted, and my rescheduling option opened a couple of days after my missed date." A new slot appeared within a couple of days. The applicant attended on the second attempt, and the passport was ready for pickup within seven working days of submission.

For the fee side, this site's own US visa fees from India states the rule without qualification: the receipt is valid 365 days from payment, and "letting a receipt expire means paying US$185 again; nobody at the counter can revive it." Combine the two: a missed appointment costs a reschedule attempt, of which there is only one — not the fee itself. Running out of both the reschedule allowance and the 365-day window in the same stretch means starting over from a fresh DS-160 and a fresh payment.

Account recovery when someone else has your login#

A password reset does not recover a hijacked ustraveldocs account, because the actual lock is the security question answers set at account creation, and a reset leaves those answers untouched. Support can still migrate the entire profile to a new email address, free of charge, without paying the person holding the account. One 2024 applicant who timed the whole recovery put it at two working days.

The mechanism is built into the portal's own design. Profile creation ustraveldocs runs through a single flow on usvisascheduling.com: ID, password, email, and three security questions, set once (the same applicant's account-setup walkthrough, r/usvisascheduling, 19 January 2025, describes this step and advises keeping a note of the answers). Two 2024 account-takeover reports add the part that matters: the login then asks for two of those three answers, shuffled between attempts, on a second screen after the password. A standard "forgot password" flow replaces only the password. It never touches the security question answers, and that gap is precisely what a recurring scam exploits. An "agent" asks for the ustraveldocs login to "book faster," changes the security answers rather than the password, and locks the applicant out while holding a screenshot of a completed-looking booking as leverage for further payment. This is not a historical pattern. A thread on it was still drawing replies on r/usvisascheduling on 30 March 2026. One of them was the flat observation that the WhatsApp slot sellers turn out to be scammers "every single time."

The fix costs nothing and does not run through the person holding the account. Two separate 2024 reports describe recovering access through ustraveldocs/CGI Federal support instead of the scammer:

1. Do not pay the new demand. Nothing about a completed-looking screenshot obligates the account holder, and every documented case shows the amount rising after the first payment clears.
2. Create a brand-new email address, one never associated with the compromised account.
3. Email support-india@ustraveldocs.com from that new address, describing the compromise and attaching the passport photo page. Ask specifically whether any other request, an email-change request in particular, has already been filed against the same passport number: in one reported case the person holding the account had tried to claim the new email address too.
4. Once support confirms the migration, set new security questions immediately from the new login. This is the step that actually shuts the previous holder out.
5. Check the MRV fee separately. Because the fee is tied to the receipt number rather than the login (see above), the migrated account should still show it as paid, and it does not need to be repurchased as part of this recovery.

The two 2024 reports differ in how they reached support and agree on what support did. One went through consular customer care by phone and describes the representative porting the entire backend profile across to a fresh email address. The other used the support-india@ustraveldocs.com mailbox with a callback number, and is the account that timed it: the email change itself confirmed in 24 hours, the whole recovery closed in two working days. Nothing in either account cost money.

What ustraveldocs and CGI Federal will not do for you#

Nobody with a genuine reason to help needs your ustraveldocs login. A real dropbox eligibility check, a real emergency-appointment request and a real reschedule all run on the applicant's own session, and none of them requires handing credentials to a third party. Anyone asking for the login "to check faster" or "to book for you" is asking for exactly the one thing a password reset cannot undo: the security question answers. Whether hiring a visa agent for anything else is worth the money at all is a separate, larger question, covered on should I hire a visa agent. The fuller mechanics of how these slot scams run, beyond the ustraveldocs-specific fix on this page, are covered on how visa agent fraud works. For the fee itself, see the full India fee breakdown; for how the five posts compare on wait time, see wait times by city; and for what to do while no slot is showing at all, the slot-monitor mechanics page covers the free and paid tracker landscape this page deliberately leaves out.

ustraveldocs India and CGI Federal are the US Mission's contracted appointment service. VisaGyan is not affiliated with either, and we operate no account on anyone's behalf.

Reschedule, fee-receipt and jurisdiction rules verified on 31 July 2026 against ustraveldocs India, travel.state.gov and this site's own US visa fee and wait-time pages; community observations dated as cited.

Sources cited only — expert review pending. This page has not yet been reviewed by a named immigration professional. Every procedural claim on it is paired with the official page that governs it. Fees and portal behaviour change without notice, so verify against ustraveldocs India and travel.state.gov before you act on anything here.