I-130 Final-Stage Wait Falls to 40 Days, Half Last Year's Level
The week of September 7 shows the median final-stage wait at 40 days, down from 83 days in the same week of 2025, even as an RFE inversion and heavy IOE routing concentration complicate the picture.
The I-130 Petition for Alien Relative posted a 40-day median final-stage wait for the week of September 7, 2026, compared with 83 days in the same week last year, a 51.9% year-over-year improvement across 3,335 approved cases. The 12-week trailing average sits at 43 days, confirming this week's reading is close to the recent norm rather than a fresh acceleration. Two anomaly flags add nuance: RFE (Request for Evidence) cases cleared in just 17 days versus 43 days for non-RFE cases, inverting the usual pattern, and a center-concentration flag reflects that 99.5% of approvals ran through IOE, the electronic-filing channel, leaving only 16 cases at MSC (National Benefits Center).
- The median final-stage wait fell to 40 days the week of Sep 7, down from 83 days in the same week last year, a 51.9% year-over-year drop.
- Weekly medians ranged from 25 days (W27, Jun 29) to 55 days (W34, Aug 17) over the past 12 weeks, with a slope of +0.4 d/wk and R² of 0.03, indicating a noisy, trendless pattern.
- Cases that received an RFE cleared in a median of 17 days this week, versus 43 days for cases without one, triggering the `rfe_fast` anomaly flag.
- Of 3,335 approved cases this week, 3,319 (99.5%) came through IOE, with the remaining 16 cases at MSC posting a 415-day median driven by a very small sample.
- The total active I-130 pending backlog grew by 29,466 cases (+4.2%) over the 28 days ending September 14, consistent with intake exceeding clearance across all filing months.
40 days, half of what it was a year ago
The week of September 7 produced a 40-day median final-stage wait for the I-130 across 3,335 approved cases, compared with 83 days in the same week of 2025. That 43-day reduction cuts the wait roughly in half year over year. The 12-week trailing average sits at 43 days, meaning this week's reading is consistent with recent form rather than a new step down. The 6-day week-over-week decline from 47 days appears to follow the same noisy oscillation that has characterized the past three months, not a fresh acceleration.
Stable but not smooth: the range matters more than the direction
The 8-week regression returns a slope of +0.4 days per week and an R² of 0.03, a pattern the model classifies as noisy stable: no meaningful directional drift, but considerable week-to-week scatter. Over the past 12 weeks, the median ranged from 25 days (the week of June 29) to 55 days (the week of August 17), a 30-day swing that reflects real variability in which cases happen to clear in any given week. This week's 25th percentile (p25) sits at 30 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 62 days, meaning a quarter of approved cases cleared in 30 days or fewer, while another quarter took 62 days or more.
Week-to-week noise runs louder than any underlying trend; the direction this week tells you less than the range across the past three months.
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