K-1 Fiancé Petition Wait Climbs to 368 Days, Up 63% from Last Year

Cases approved the week of November 2 waited a median of 368 days from the date USCIS received the petition to its first approval, against 226 days in the same week of 2025 across 693 approvals. That is a 142-day, 63% year-over-year increase. Fifty-three percent of this week's approvals waited more than a year from filing; the 25th percentile (p25) sat at 345 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 402 days. The pending backlog stands at 100,149 cases as of November 9, up 3,013 from 97,136 four weeks earlier. All wait figures in this issue describe only cases that have already been approved; they say nothing about how long those 100,149 still-pending cases have waited.

Looking at the 12-week total-wait series, medians held between 296 and 320 days from mid-August through early October, then moved to 360 days the week of October 19 and continued to 368 days this week. The interquartile range (p25 to p75) is 57 days wide, suggesting the rise is broad-based rather than pulled by a small cluster of outliers. The 90th percentile at 546 days signals a long tail for the slowest-moving cases.

Separate from the total wait is the time from the last reported status update to approval (the final-stage wait), which has moved in the opposite direction. That metric stands at 103 days this week, down from a 12-week peak of 290 days in late September. This is not the total wait from filing: a case that moves quickly through the final stage may still have spent many months sitting at an earlier status. The 8-week slope for the final-stage wait is -25.2 days per week (R² of 0.63), a pattern the data marks as improving fast, though week-to-week variability in this series is wide.

WAC (the California Service Center) accounts for 263 of 285 approvals this week, or 92% of the sample; its final-stage median of 90 days largely drives the aggregate. SRC (the Texas Service Center), with 22 approvals, posts 251 days, a gap of 161 days. Neither center shows transfer-touched cases (0% transferred share at both), so the difference is not an artifact of different case-mix populations. The small SRC sample warrants caution: at 22 cases, week-to-week variance is high. SRC's 8-week slope is 0.0 days per week with R² of 0.00, meaning no discernible trend in either direction. Case mix differs between centers, so this comparison is structural rather than a verdict on relative performance.

An anomaly flag fired this week for unusually fast clearance of RFE (Request for Evidence) response cases. Cases that received and responded to an RFE posted a median of 14 days from last status update to approval, against 300 days for cases with no RFE at all. That is a ratio of roughly 22 to 1 in favor of RFE-stamped cases clearing faster. The normal pattern runs in the opposite direction: adjudicators must review the RFE response before deciding, which typically adds time. When RFE-response cases clear this quickly, it may reflect a batch of responses filed around the same time all clearing together. One week of data is not enough to interpret this as a structural change.