Within a few weeks of filing a nonprovisional utility or design patent application, the USPTO issues a First Action Prediction. The prediction provides the approximate number of months until a first Office Action will be submitted for your application. This number is actually a pretty accurate calculation of the time it would take for the Examiner to get through his current backlog to before he gets to your patent application.
If your application has an attorney of record, only the attorney of record can access Private Pair; you’ll have to ask him or her to check the Prediction for you.
If your application has no attorney of record, you can access Private Pair to check the Prediction. Log in, search for your application using your application number, and find the First Action Prediction tab circled below.
The tab leads to a status page, which shows the months left until the first Office Action.
If you need to know where your application is in the Examiner’s queue, or if the predicted number of months has stayed the same for a while, you could call the Examiner.