I-130 Final-Stage Wait Falls to 12-Week Low as Backlog Grows 135%

The 36-day figure measures the time from a case's last reported status to approval, not the full span from filing. Readers with pending cases should not interpret this as their expected total wait. The week-over-week drop of 6 days (from 42) continues a partial recovery from the W28 rebound and pushes the reading well below the 53-day 12-week trailing average. The same-week figure from 2026-W30 a year ago was 45 days, though that comparison rests on only 267 cases and carries substantial sampling uncertainty.

The 12-week arc is not a clean downward slope. Medians ran between 55 and 76 days from late May through mid-June, then fell sharply to 25 and 31 days across W26 and W27, rebounded to 44 and 42 days in W28 and W29, and have now resumed falling. The 8-week regression slope of -4.3 days per week points downward, but R² is only 0.36, meaning the fit is loose and week-to-week swings are large relative to the trend. The direction appears to follow a downward path, but the signal should not be read as a settled trajectory.

The active pending backlog stood at 142,557 cases as of July 27, up 135.5% from roughly 60,544 on May 7 (an 81-day window). The largest contributor is the May 2026 filing-month group: of the 30,141 cases filed that month, 28,877 remain active, a clearance rate of just 3.1% after 12 weeks. Monthly receipts data shows USCIS took in 23,007 to 24,405 new I-130s each month from March through June 2026, while approvals over the same period fell from 6,290 in March to 920 in May and just 28 in June. The intake-to-approval gap explains why the active pool has grown so rapidly even as final-stage waits have shortened.

Walking through the filing-month cohort (cases filed in the same month, tracked cumulatively) burndown gives a clearer sense of pacing. The April 2026 group, at 16 weeks of age, is 10.9% approved across 33,092 cases filed that month. The March 2026 group is 17.9% approved at 21 weeks, across 35,251 cases. February 2026 is 24.1% approved at 25 weeks, across 30,175 cases. In every case, the large majority of 2026 filers are still pending. For context, USCIS's own published processing times for the I-130 IR-category (Immediate Relative) list a median of 1,560 days, or roughly 52 months, as of July 15, 2026. That figure is an 80th-percentile estimate across multiple offices and is not directly comparable to the 36-day final-stage median reported here.

IOE, the routing code for electronically filed I-130s, accounts for 4,508 of this week's 4,529 approvals and posts a 36-day median. The MSC (National Benefits Center in Lee's Summit, MO), with only 21 approvals this week, shows a 189-day median, a 153-day gap that triggered the uneven_centers anomaly flag. MSC also carries a rising 8-week slope of +5.1 days per week, but its R² of 0.10 makes that slope statistically unreliable. The 21-case sample is too small to draw firm conclusions; the difference likely reflects case-mix routing, since MSC processes a different segment of I-130 filings than the electronically filed IOE pool. Readers with MSC-routed cases should note the wait is substantially longer in the current data, while recognizing that the thin sample limits what can be inferred.