My move is employer-sponsored but my wife would come as a dependent. That side feels like an afterthought in everything I read. For those who've done it — what should we be doing now, months ahead?
Start the relationship-evidence folder now — joint bills, tenancy, photos across time, travel together. They want a story told in paperwork, and you can't reconstruct years of it in a week.
Do your application and your partner's in parallel, not one then the other — sequencing them doubled a friend's timeline for no reason.
If kids are involved, their documents were the slow part for us — birth certificates apostilled, sometimes both parents' consent. Pull those together early.
Dependent routes and the evidence they want vary a lot between countries and change over time, so I'd treat any specific "they need X" here as a starting point, not gospel. The Visa section for your destination is the place to check the actual dependent path — then build the folder early, because the evidence is the slow bit no matter the country.
"A story told in paperwork" is exactly the mindset I was missing. Folder started this weekend. Thank you.