I-129 Final-Stage Wait Holds at 12 Days, Down 87% From a Year Ago

The I-129 final-stage wait (the median days from a case's last reported status to approval) came in at 12 days this week, identical to the reading in each of the four preceding weeks. The stability is notable: from W34 (Aug 17) through W38 (Sep 14), the median has not moved by a single day. The year-over-year comparison gives that plateau its full weight. In the same week of 2025, the median stood at 92 days across 4,330 approvals. The current reading is 80 days lower, an 87% reduction. That improvement appears to reflect a structural shift rather than a seasonal artifact, though the data brief does not identify a specific mechanism.

The 12-week trend shows a two-step trajectory. Medians ran at 17 to 18 days through late June and early July, then dropped to 14 days in late July (W31), before settling at 12 to 13 days from mid-August onward. The 12-week trailing average is 14 days, slightly above the current floor. The 8-week slope of -0.4 days per week and an R² of 0.69 indicate a noisy but effectively flat trend: there is a mild downward lean, but the week-to-week scatter means the direction does not carry strong statistical confidence. The pattern designation in the data is `noisy_stable`, which describes the picture well.

One number in this week's data deserves a brief note: the 75th percentile (p75) for W38 sits at 67 days, well above the 15 to 24-day range seen in the prior several weeks. The median itself did not move, which means this is a distribution tail, not a shift in the typical experience. A small share of cases in the approval pool this week had longer final-stage waits before clearance, pulling the upper end of the spread wider. Based on the prior weeks' pattern, this tail is likely to narrow as those slower-moving cases work through the queue.

Cases that moved through plain processing (no RFE) cleared in a median of 14 days this week. Cases that received and responded to an RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for additional documentation) took a median of 22 days. The 8-day gap is present, but both groups remain well under a month. Receiving an RFE does not by itself predict denial; most RFE'd cases are ultimately approved. In the 12-week approval cohort, the RFE-response group accounts for 1,298 cases, the smallest and slowest-moving segment, rated at the "medium" speed tier against the faster plain-processing majority.