Got the approval email for one applicant but not the other? Why naturalisation decisions arrive separately
Yes — each person's application is considered and decided separately, so approval emails routinely arrive at different times. If your child's came through this morning and yours hasn't, that is normal and does not indicate a problem with your case. There is no single shared decision: your application (an adult naturalisation on Form AN) and your daughter's (a child registration on Form MN1) are different applications, assessed on different criteria, often by different caseworkers, and finalised whenever each one is ready.
- Each application is decided on its own — there is no combined or family-wide decision.
- Approval emails commonly arrive days or weeks apart; getting one first is routine.
- An adult applies by naturalisation (Form AN); a child under 18 applies by registration (Form MN1) — two different applications.
- The Home Office aims to decide naturalisation usually within 6 months, and will contact you before then if yours will take longer.
- A gap between decisions is not a sign of refusal — most pending cases are simply still in the queue.
Why one approval arrives before the other
When a parent and child apply at the same time, it is easy to picture the Home Office working on them as a single bundle. It does not. Each application is logged, checked and decided individually, so even applications submitted together on the same day can finish on different days.
Your daughter's application is a registration of a child under 18 as a British citizen, made on Form MN1. Yours is a naturalisation as an adult, made on Form AN. These are governed by different parts of nationality law and involve different questions — for an adult, that includes the residence, English language, Life in the UK test and good-character requirements; for a child, the assessment turns on the registration entitlement and the welfare of the child. Two different sets of checks naturally finish at two different times.
The upshot is simple: a separate email per person is exactly what you should expect, and the order they arrive in tells you nothing about the strength of either case.
What the timescale actually means
GOV.UK states you will usually get a decision within 6 months of applying for naturalisation, and that some applications can take longer. Critically, it adds that if yours will take longer, you will be told before the 6 months are up. The registration route for children carries the same six-month service-level aim.
You applied on 7 February 2026. That means your six-month window runs to around early August 2026. Receiving your daughter's approval first, well inside that window, is comfortably within normal behaviour — your own decision simply has not been finalised yet.
The Home Office aims to decide most naturalisation applications within 6 months — and contacts you before that point if yours will take longer.
Should you do anything right now?
No. There is nothing useful to do while you are still inside the standard window. Chasing a case that is only a few months old does not speed it up, and an early enquiry usually produces a holding reply rather than a decision. The sensible action is to wait, keep an eye on the inbox you used to apply (including spam), and make sure the Home Office can reach you — tell them if you move house, as decision letters and any requests for more information go to the address on file.
For a fuller picture of the wait and what counts as out of timescale, see how long a British citizenship application takes.
A gap of days or weeks between a parent's and a child's decision is routine and not a cause for concern. Only treat your own application as genuinely overdue if you pass the 6-month service standard with no decision and no letter or email warning you of a delay. That is the point — not before — to consider contacting UKVI. See how to chase a delayed naturalisation application.
What happens after each approval
Approval is not the final step. Both you and your daughter will be invited to a citizenship ceremony, and you each receive your own certificate of British citizenship there. Because the decisions are separate, the ceremony invitations can also arrive separately — and you may well end up attending the same ceremony, or different ones, depending on local scheduling. Children are registered at a ceremony in the same way adults are naturalised.
So if your daughter's approval has landed and yours follows in a week or two, you have lost nothing: you simply move through the final steps on slightly staggered timelines. The key thing to hold onto is that her approval is good news about her case, and silence on yours — while you are still inside six months — is just an application that has not yet reached the top of the pile.