Preliminary I-130 Data Shows 198-Day Filing-to-Approval Wait, Up 48% Year Over Year

This week's figures are preliminary: the sample of 2,692 approvals is roughly 50% to 70% of the prior 12-week median approval count, so the 198-day median could shift as the week's data completes. With that caveat stated, the number is consistent with a sustained trend. The 198-day median total wait, from USCIS receipt to approval, is up 8 days from last week's 190 and up 64 days from the same week in 2025, when the figure stood at 134 days across a much larger sample of 4,843 approvals. About 27% of cases approved this week had waited more than a year from filing.

The active backlog of pending cases — those not yet adjudicated across all filing months — stood at 769,578 as of Oct 20, 2026, up from 739,861 twenty-eight days earlier, a gain of nearly 30,000 cases. That population is entirely separate from the approved-case sample this brief measures. The 198-day median and every other percentile cited here describe only cases that reached a decision this week; the 769,578 pending cases have waited an unknown additional amount of time and are not captured in any figure below.

Alongside the rising total wait sits a sharply different number. The time from the last status update to approval, a secondary metric that measures only the final movement before the adjudication (USCIS's case decision step) is recorded, came in at 39 days this week. That is up 1 day from 38 days last week but down 63 days from the same week of 2025, when it stood at 102 days, a 61.5% improvement year over year. This metric is not the total wait and should not be read as how long an applicant's case will take from filing; it captures only the last leg of the journey, after the case has already spent months in upstream queues.

A second signal appeared this week: the data flagged an anomaly in how RFE (Request for Evidence) cases cleared. Cases that received an RFE, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents, and then submitted a response cleared in a median of 19 days this week, compared to 46 days for cases without any RFE. RFE-stamped cases cleared faster than the non-RFE group, the opposite of the typical pattern. The anomaly flag carries a value of 0.47, indicating the inversion is statistically notable. A single preliminary week is too thin a read to draw a firm conclusion; the direction may shift as the sample fills out.

This week's 198-day total wait sits in the middle of the 12-week range. Over the period from Jul 27 through Oct 12, the weekly total-wait median ran from 188 days (the week of Aug 10) to 222 days (Aug 17). The series does not follow a straight upward path; it oscillates week to week, moving from 201 days in late September to 190 days the week of Oct 5 before ticking back to 198 this week. The pattern may reflect variation in which cases happen to reach approval in any given week rather than a consistent directional shift in USCIS processing speed.

Against the same week of 2025, the gap is harder to explain away. A year ago, the total-wait median was 134 days, based on 4,843 approvals, a sample nearly twice the size of this week's preliminary count of 2,692. The 25th percentile (p25) this week sits at 127 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 384 days, an interquartile range (IQR, the spread from p25 to p75) of 257 days, meaning a wide share of cases resolved in very different timeframes. The sustained gap between this year and last year may reflect the growing backlog: with roughly 30,000 more cases accumulating over the past 28 days, cases must wait longer before reaching the final-approval queue.