I-130 Total Wait Reaches 267 Days, Up 70 From Last Week and 92% Above Last Year

Of the 3,938 I-130 petitions approved the week of Nov 2, 2026, filing date was known for 3,935. Their median filing-to-approval time was 267 days, 70 days above last week's 197-day figure and 128 days above the same week a year ago (139 days, n=5,903), a year-over-year increase of 92%. The distribution was wide: 42% of approvals this week involved cases that had waited more than a year from filing.

The pending backlog of I-130 cases, meaning cases filed across all months that have not yet been adjudicated (the case decision step where USCIS issues an approval, denial, or request for more information), stood at 781,887 active cases as of Nov 9, up 28,565 (3.8%) from 753,322 four weeks earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is measured only on cases already approved this week. The 781,887 pending cases have been waiting for additional, uncounted time and are not reflected in the medians.

Looking at the 12-week total wait series, the median had stayed in a band of 185 to 222 days from mid-August through the week of Oct 26, 2026. The widest week-to-week move in that span was 29 days (from 185 days the week of Oct 19 to 197 days the week of Oct 26). This week's 267-day reading is 70 days above last week and 45 days above the top of that prior two-month range.

The interquartile range (IQR, the spread between the 25th percentile, or p25, and the 75th percentile, or p75) widened considerably this week. The p25 sits at 133 days and the p75 at 575 days, a gap of 442 days. By comparison, the week of Aug 17 had a p25 of 125 days and a p75 of 384 days, a gap of 259 days. The p90 this week reached 675 days. The widening distribution indicates that a substantial share of approvals this week came from very long-pending cases, which pulled the median upward.

An outlier_week_high anomaly flag fired this week with a value of 4.45. The flag compares this week's reading against an 8-week trailing trend: a result of 4.45 standard deviations above that trend is statistically rare within the recent series. The final-stage metric, that is the time from the last status update to approval (a secondary metric, not the total filing-to-approval wait), also rose sharply this week, from 60 days last week to 108 days, against a 12-week trailing average of 52 days.

A single-week outlier at this magnitude can arise when a large batch of long-pending cases is processed together, which would push the median up for one week before the reading reverts toward the trend. The 8-week slope for the final-stage metric is +6.9 days per week, with an R² of 0.51, indicating a real upward direction over the past two months, but the R² is not strong enough to rule out noise in any individual week. This week's figure should not be read in isolation.

When long-pending cases clear in a concentrated week, the median rises sharply and can fall back just as quickly; one number does not confirm the direction alone.