K-1 Fiancé Petition Waits Reach 296 Days, Up 28% From a Year Ago

Cases approved during the week of Oct 5 waited a median of 296 days from the date USCIS received the petition to its approval, up from 231 days the same week last year, a 28% year-over-year increase. That comparison draws on 811 approvals in the same ISO week of 2025. As of Oct 13, 97,326 cases remain pending across all filing months, up from 95,052 twenty-eight days earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is computed from cases that were already approved; none of them describes how long those pending cases have waited.

This week's approved cases clustered tightly: the 25th percentile (p25) was 295 days and the 75th percentile (p75) was 301 days, a 6-day spread suggesting a cohesive group of petitions from a similar filing window cleared together. Seven percent of approvals (33 of 479) waited more than a year, and zero cases were approved within 45 days of filing.

The time from the last status update to approval, the final-stage wait, stood at 155 days in the week of Aug 17 and has risen to 282 days as of Oct 5, a 127-day increase over eight weeks. The 8-week regression slope is +19.0 days per week with an R² of 0.96, meaning the acceleration has been nearly linear, with very little scatter around the trend line. The week of Sep 28 was the prior high in the 12-week window at 290 days; this week's reading of 282 days is a modest pullback but remains well above any earlier observation in the series.

Eight weeks of near-perfectly linear acceleration, at 19 days gained per week, with no flattening visible in the data.

Last year's final-stage figures for the same period held in a range of 215 to 261 days. The gap between this year's readings and last year's has widened from near parity in late July to about 62 days by Oct 5. That widening appears to follow a sustained change in throughput pace, though the data brief does not identify the cause.

The active pending backlog (cases not yet adjudicated, across all filing months) stood at 97,326 as of Oct 13, a 2.4% increase from 95,052 twenty-eight days earlier. Pending applicants should note: the 296-day total wait and the 282-day final-stage figure both describe cases that have already been approved. A case still sitting at 'Case Was Received' has waited at least as long as those approved cases, and likely longer, since the faster-moving cases tend to clear first.

Looking at stage durations from the last 30 days (raw percentiles across 76,518 observed cases at all stages): 41.8% of cases carried a last status of 'Case Was Received', with a median time at that stage of 252 days, a p25 of 227 days and a p75 of 297 days, across 31,972 cases. Another 31.4% were at 'Case Was Approved' pending downstream steps, at a median of 45 days across 24,008 cases. These figures give pending applicants a rough sense of where cases sit in the pipeline, though individual routing may differ.

An RFE (Request for Evidence) anomaly flag fired this week. Cases where a response to USCIS's evidence request had been submitted cleared in a median of 15 days, compared with 296 days for cases that processed without an RFE. The inversion is not a sign that receiving an RFE accelerates a case in general. It reflects that this week's RFE-response approvals came from a small group where adjudication (the USCIS case-decision step) was already substantially complete by the time the response was received, so the final step was short. An RFE is not a denial signal; most cases that receive one are ultimately approved.