I-131 Total Wait Median Drops to 278 Days as Pending Backlog Climbs 7 Percent

The 278-day median is the lowest total wait reading in the 12-week window, but it carries an important qualifier. The outlier_week_low anomaly flag fired at -7.86σ against the prior 8-week trend, a level indicating the dip is statistically atypical. Among the 2,614 cases with a known filing date, 44% waited more than a year before approval, while 2% cleared within 45 days of filing. That wide spread, with the 25th percentile (p25, the fastest quarter of cases) sitting at just 105 days and the 75th percentile (p75, the slowest quarter's threshold) at 439 days, is consistent with a composition effect: the cases that happened to clear this week skew toward faster-processing types, pulling the overall median down without necessarily signaling a broad shift.

The pending backlog of I-131 cases reached 515,264 active cases as of Nov. 9, up from 481,667 four weeks earlier, a gain of 33,597 cases (7%) over 28 days. Wait figures throughout this brief are measured only on cases that received an approval during the reference week; the 515,264 pending cases have not been decided and their eventual waits are unknown. A falling weekly median and a growing pending count can coexist because they measure different populations: approved cases this week versus all cases filed across many months that have not yet received a decision.

A large single-week drop in the median and a growing backlog can coexist: each measures a different population entirely.

The 12-week total wait record does not trace a clean directional line. The window opened near 288 days the week of Aug. 17, then rose to the 435-to-444-day range for several consecutive weeks through early October. A brief dip to 238 days the week of Sep. 21 was followed by a return to the 435-day range before this week's reading of 278 days. The p25 this week, at 105 days, is the lowest in the entire 12-week window, suggesting a subset of fast-clearing cases pulled the median down. Without a stable directional pattern in the total wait, one week's reading is difficult to extrapolate.

The time from each case's last status update to approval, a secondary metric distinct from the total filing-to-approval wait, tells a steadier story. That final-stage wait fell from 323 days in late August to 140 days this week, a slope of -15.7 days per week with an R² of 0.79 over the past 8 weeks. The directional trend in this metric is cleaner, though the two measures reflect different things: the final-stage wait excludes the time a case spent between filing and its most recent recorded status, so it is shorter than the total wait and not a substitute for it.

IOE-routed cases (e-filed cases processed through USCIS's electronic system) produced 1,268 approvals at a final-stage median of 80 days this week. LIN (Nebraska Service Center) produced 1,077 approvals at a final-stage median of 223 days. Together the two centers account for about 95% of this week's approvals. The uneven-centers anomaly flag fired at a value of 221.51, marking a wider spread between centers relative to the prior 8-week trailing baseline. Neither center had a meaningful transferred-case share (both at 0%), so the population mix is comparable on that dimension, though case mix across document types (Advance Parole, Reentry Permit, Refugee Travel Document) may still differ between the two centers and those differences are not visible in this data. Receipt prefix records where a case was originally filed, not the eventual processing center; routing decisions are internal to USCIS.