I-130 final-stage wait ticks up 8 days, but sits 60 days below last year

The I-130 final-stage median came in at 51 days this week, up 8 days from 43 days last week, a 19.1% one-week rise. That move is noticeable, but it lands within a 12-week range that has already run from 36 days to 54 days, and it sits only 5 days above the 12-week trailing average of 46 days. The more consequential comparison is year over year: this week's 51-day reading is 60 days below the 111-day median recorded in the same week last year, based on 6,878 approvals at that time. A noisy week, in other words, within a year of genuine improvement.

The 8-week regression slope is -0.6 days per week, pointing very slightly toward improvement, but the R² is 0.08, meaning the regression line accounts for almost none of the week-to-week variance. Over the past 12 weeks, medians have ranged from 36 days (W30, Jul 20) to 54 days (W34, Aug 17), with single-week moves of 11 days, 10 days, and 7 days appearing at various points in that window. This week's 8-day rise is consistent with the form's normal scatter and does not by itself signal a direction change.

This week's approved cases that had received and responded to an RFE (Request for Evidence) posted a median final-stage wait of 18 days, compared with 47 days for cases that went through plain processing with no RFE. That 2.53x inversion is what triggered the rfe_fast anomaly flag. The data brief does not identify a mechanism. Possible explanations include cases filed around the same time completing adjudication (USCIS's case decision step) in the same window, or other cohort-bunching effects; the data available for a single week is not sufficient to distinguish among them. The inversion does not imply that receiving an RFE accelerates a case.

An RFE response is not a fast lane; the 18-day figure reflects when those cases happened to clear, not a structural advantage for RFE-touched filings.