I-130 Petitions Approved This Week Waited a Median of 190 Days, Up 37% From a Year Ago

I-130 petitions approved the week of Oct 5 waited a median of 190 days from the date USCIS received the case to its approval, compared with 139 days the same week last year, a 37% gap. The 25th percentile (p25) sat at 126 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 387 days, reflecting a wide spread across approved cases. As of Oct 13, 755,152 I-130 cases remain pending across all filing months, up from 735,791 twenty-eight days earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is measured on cases that were already approved; none of them describes how long those 755,152 pending cases have waited.

Over the 12-week window from Jul 20 through Oct 5, the total wait from filing ranged from 179 days (the week of Jul 20) to 221 days (Aug 17), with this week's 190 days near the lower end of that range and down 11 days from last week's 201. The final-stage wait, measured as time from the last status update to approval, tells a different story: 38 days this week against 104 days the same week last year, a 66-day improvement. These two metrics measure different things. The total wait counts from filing and reflects the age of cases clearing the queue now; the time from the last status update to approval measures only the last leg, how quickly USCIS moved a case from its most recent reported status to the approval decision.

Cases approved this week were filed a median of 190 days ago. The elevated total wait is consistent with a large group of older cases, filed during a high-volume period, now reaching the front of the queue. That pattern would produce a higher total-wait median even if current adjudication (the USCIS case decision step) is running faster than before. It is also possible that case-complexity mix plays a role; the data does not let us distinguish among these explanations. What is clear is that 940 of the 3,444 cases with a known filing date, or 27%, waited more than a year from filing to approval.

The active pending count grew by 19,361 cases over the 28 days ending Oct 13, reaching 755,152. A growing backlog of pending cases generally sustains upward pressure on future total-wait medians, because older cases accumulate and eventually clear. Whether that pressure builds or eases depends on the pace of new filings relative to approvals in the coming weeks.

USCIS is moving cases through the final stretch faster than it did a year ago, but the cases arriving at that stretch have been waiting longer to get there.