I-131 Total Wait Reaches 379 Days, Up 108 Days in One Week

The median I-131 total wait reached 379 days for approvals recorded the week of October 26, rising 108 days from last week's 271-day figure. A year ago in the same week, the median was 129 days, making this week's reading nearly triple that level. As of November 3, 510,864 I-131 cases remain pending, up from 479,401 four weeks earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is measured on cases that were approved that week; none of them describes how long those pending cases have waited.

The spread was wide this week. The 25th percentile (p25) sat at 149 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 441 days, meaning half of all approvals fell somewhere between roughly five months and more than a year. Fifty percent of cases with a known filing date waited more than a year before approval, while only 2% cleared within 45 days. These are population snapshots for cases approved this particular week, not predictions for any individual case.

The 379-day median describes cases already approved this week, not the 510,864 still in the queue.

Looking across the 12-week window, total-wait medians were elevated and clustered between 433 and 444 days from late August through mid-October, then dipped to 237 days the week of September 21 and 271 days the week of October 19, before this week's 379. The alternating pattern of high and lower medians may reflect differences in which cases happen to be approved in a given week: weeks dominated by older, longer-pending cases produce a higher median than weeks in which USCIS clears a share of more recently filed applications. USCIS does not publish adjudication (USCIS's decision step) sequencing data that would explain the alternation, so this remains a plausible but unconfirmed interpretation.