How Long Should a GEDCOM Upload Take? (And When to Give Up and Retry)

There's no official answer to "how long should this take?" — and that uncertainty is itself part of the problem, because it means you can't tell a genuinely broken upload from one that's just working through a large file slowly.

What FamilySearch actually publishes

Nothing. FamilySearch's Help Center documents the 100 MB size cap and the roughly-100-names manageability recommendation, but nowhere states an expected processing time for an upload of any size. There's no progress percentage, no estimated time remaining, and no published service-level target you can check your experience against.

What real reports show

Based on FamilySearch Community forum threads, actual upload times vary enormously and don't correlate cleanly with file size alone:

• Genealogy software developer Louis Kessler reported a 6,413-individual file uploading in under a minute — the file transfer itself was fast even though the file was well past the 100-name recommendation.
• The slower part, for that same file, was the compare-and-add step afterward: roughly 15 minutes to run the comparison, then a couple of hours of manual review across 42 potential-match conflicts and 1,406 new individuals added one at a time.
• By contrast, a file just 31.6 MB — well under the 100 MB cap, and not obviously large by individual count — was reported stuck at "processing" for four days, completing only "half way," with no error and no resolution described in the thread.

Read together: the raw upload of a file, even a large one, can complete quickly. What varies unpredictably is the compare-and-add process behind it, and in some reported cases, the file simply hangs with no indication of why.

A practical rule of thumb

Since there's no official benchmark, treat these as rough signals rather than rules:

• Under a few minutes with visible progress: normal, even for moderately large files — let it finish.
• Processing with no progress indicator for several hours: worth checking your file's size and individual count against FamilySearch's documented limits while you wait, so you have a plan ready if it doesn't resolve.
• Stuck for a full day or more with zero change in status: treat it as a hang, not a slow success. Reported cases at this point have gone on for days without resolving on their own.

Why the compare-and-add step, not the upload, is usually the bottleneck

The raw file transfer to FamilySearch's servers is typically the fastest part of the whole process — it's moving a file that's often just a few megabytes to a few hundred megabytes, which shouldn't take more than a minute or two on a normal connection regardless of individual count. The time sink is what happens after: FamilySearch has to compare every individual in your file against Family Tree's existing records, one at a time, and flag potential matches for you to review manually. Kessler's 1,406 new individuals, added one at a time after the initial comparison, illustrates why a large file's total time to fully process can run into hours even though the upload itself finished in under a minute — the bottleneck is human review, not server processing.

What to do if it's genuinely stuck

Don't just retry the identical file — if size, individual count, or a structural issue caused the hang, uploading the same file again will most likely reproduce it. Run the file through the Upload Readiness Checker first to see whether it matches a known risk pattern, and if it does, split it with the Tree Splitter before trying again. A smaller, cleaner file is both less likely to hang in the first place and faster to retry if it does.