I-129 Total Wait Falls to 17 Days, Down 87% From a Year Ago

Cases approved in the week of November 2 waited a median of 17 days from USCIS receipt to approval, compared with 131 days in the same week of 2025. Of the 6,892 cases with a known filing date, 59% resolved within 45 days and 2% waited longer than a year. As of November 9, 64,087 petitions remain pending (not yet adjudicated), down from 66,879 four weeks earlier. None of the wait times in this brief describe those pending cases; every figure is drawn from cases that have already been approved.

Looking at the 12-week total-wait table, medians have ranged from 17 to 48 days since mid-August. A reading of 48 days arrived the week of October 5 and has since fully unwound, returning to the low-to-mid teens. The interquartile range (25th percentile, p25: 9 days; 75th percentile, p75: 142 days) is wide, which signals that while fast-track cases resolve in days, a tail of more complex petitions still runs into months. The data does not tell us why processing times are 87% lower year over year than in 2025; the pattern may reflect changes in petition mix, routing, or adjudication (USCIS's decision step) capacity, but a single metric cannot isolate the cause.

The time from the last status update to approval (the final-stage wait, a secondary metric distinct from the total filing-to-approval wait) held at 8 days this week, unchanged from the prior week and well below the 121-day reading from the same week a year ago. The 8-week slope is -0.4 days per week with an R-squared of 0.59, consistent with a noisy but essentially flat trajectory. Weekly medians have hovered between 8 and 12 days for most of the past 12 weeks. The moderate R-squared means week-to-week readings carry real scatter, so the flat description is more reliable than any directional claim.

Cases without an RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents) posted a median final-stage wait of 10 days this week. Cases that received and responded to an RFE waited a median of 24 days. The 14-day gap between the two groups is not unusual for I-129; reviewing an RFE response adds adjudication (the USCIS case-decision step) time regardless of outcome, and most RFE-stamped cases are still approved. This is a process-pace difference, not a denial signal.

The Stage durations (30-day raw) table adds further context on cases still in process. Cases currently at the "USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case" status show a raw median of 88 days, with the 25th percentile at 40 days and the 75th percentile at 134 days, across 316,815 cases making up 63.8% of the active pipeline. Premium-flagged cases sit at medians of 10 to 11 days, in line with the 15-calendar-day guarantee for premium processing. These stage figures describe the in-progress population; they are a different dataset from this week's approvals.