I-129 Final-Stage Approvals Hit 12-Week Low While Active Backlog Grows 114%

The I-129 final-stage wait, which measures the gap between a case's last recorded status and its approval, fell to 13 days during the week of June 8. That is the lowest reading in the current 12-week window and continues an 8-week downward slope of -11.8 days per week. To put the distance traveled in perspective: in the week of April 27 (W18), the median had reached 118 days, likely reflecting a batch of older or more complex cases moving through at that moment. The return to 13 days by W24 represents a recovery across roughly seven consecutive weeks.

The faster final stage does not mean the overall queue is shrinking. The pool of active pending cases reached 49,728, up 114.1% over the 43 days from May 7 to June 19. The May 2026 filing-month group accounts for the largest share of that growth, adding 13,268 active cases. A fast-clearing final stage and a swelling queue can coexist: approvals are moving efficiently through the last step, while new and recently filed cases continue to enter the pipeline faster than the total pending count falls.

Cases near the finish line are moving faster, but the line itself has grown substantially longer over the past six weeks.

The 12-week arc falls into three phases. From W13 through W16 (March 23 to April 13), the median held between 12 and 20 days, and the interquartile range (IQR, the spread from the 25th percentile, p25, to the 75th percentile, p75) was relatively contained. In W17 and W18 the median rose to 68 and then 118 days, consistent with a wave of longer-pending cases clearing in those weeks rather than a systemic change in adjudication pace. From W19 onward, the median fell back and has since settled in the low teens. This week's p25 of 10 days and p75 of 18 days illustrate how compressed the distribution has become: the full W15-W18 spread ran from 8 days at the p25 to 181 days at the p75. The R² of 0.57 on the 8-week regression means the downward slope is a moderate signal, not a certainty, and a single week of heavier older-case clearance could widen the range again.

The stage breakdown (drawn from the Stage durations data, raw percentiles over the last 30 days) shows two very different experiences depending on how a case is being processed. The first and larger group: 65.6% of all tracked cases sit at the 'Case Is Still Being Processed By USCIS' status, across 173,591 cases, with a raw median of 112 days and an IQR of 46 to 173 days. This is the main adjudication queue. The second group: 10.6% of cases are in premium processing, an expedited service available for most I-129 sub-types that guarantees a decision within 15 calendar days for an additional fee. The premium-processing median of 10 days, with an IQR of 6 to 13 days across 27,999 cases, aligns with that guarantee.

A third group merits attention: 6.8% of cases are waiting at an active RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents), with a raw median of 59 days and an IQR of 34 to 83 days across 18,129 cases. Separately, cases whose RFE response has already been received are moving at a 14-day raw median. That reading is close to the overall 13-day final-stage figure for approved cases this week, suggesting adjudicators are not deprioritizing RFE-response cases once the documents arrive. The RFE comparison for this week's approval cohort (a group of cases) puts non-RFE cases at 28 days and RFE-response cases at 26 days, a difference small enough that the data brief characterizes the two as clearing at a similar pace.