I’ve now been an author on enough papers to have a reasonable sampling of what the experiences can be like. In short, it minimally takes 2 months to go from initial submission to eventual manuscript acceptance. These experiences typically are those that require little to no experiments for revision. The process, especially when requiring hefty experiments or multiple rounds of revision, can easily stretch to half a year. In some cases it can take *much* longer (in one experience I’ve seen, a journal did the “rejected but amenable to resubmission if sufficient additional impact is added”, which resulted in an informal span of ~ 800 days!!! ). Anyway, at least for the manuscript submissions I was involved with where I had access to an author portal (or received emails when things happened), I noted when the reviews were returned and revisions submitted, to also keep track of how much of that time was technically under one’s control (manuscript with authors; red) or completely out of one’s control (manuscript with journal; blue). See below:

Also, part of the reason it makes sense to post manuscripts to bioRxiv; why have a completed manuscript that is essentially publication-worthy sit in the dark for half a year?

Note: Obviously this data is for manuscripts that eventually got accepted. Rather pleasantly, I’ve never been first or corresponding author for a paper that got rejected, so I don’t have nearly as good a sampling of that experience. But sitting on the sideline as a middle-author for a handful of such occasions, it would seem to take anywhere between a week (eg. immediate desk rejection) to a couple of months (eg. rejected upon peer review) per submission; when sequentially shopping across multiple journals to find a taker, this would seem to add up.