I-140 Total Wait Falls to 19 Days, Down 42% From a Year Ago

Cases approved the week of Nov 2 waited a median of 19 days from the date USCIS received the petition to its approval. The 25th percentile (p25) was 15 days and the 75th percentile (p75) was 81 days, reflecting a wide spread across the population. That 19-day median compares with 22 days the prior week and 33 days during the same week last year, a 42.4% year-over-year improvement. As of Nov 9, 225,171 tracked I-140 cases remain active and not yet decided, up from 210,002 four weeks earlier. The wait figures throughout this brief are drawn from cases that were approved this week; they do not describe how long those still-pending cases have waited.

In distribution terms, 2,122 of the 3,516 cases with a known filing date (60%) cleared within 45 days of receipt. At the other end, 223 cases (6%) waited more than a year. The 90th percentile (p90) reached 188 days, a reminder that the median understates the experience of a meaningful minority of petitioners whose cases take considerably longer.

Separate from the total filing-to-approval wait, the time from the case's last reported status update to approval (the final-stage wait) came in at 15 days this week, down from 16 days last week and from 65 days the same week last year. The 12-week trailing average for this metric is 19 days, so this week's reading sits 4 days below the recent trend.

The anomaly detector flagged this week as an outlier_week_low, with a z-score of -2.75 against the 8-week trend line. That means the final-stage reading is about 2.75 standard deviations below what the trend would project. Such a reading may reflect the particular mix of cases that happened to be approved in a given week rather than a durable shift in adjudication (USCIS's decision step). Watching whether the next two or three weeks confirm or revert the reading will be more informative than any single-week conclusion.

Cases that went through an RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for additional documents) cleared with a median of 19 days from their last status update to approval this week. Cases without an RFE cleared in 18 days. The one-day gap is well within the week-to-week noise range and the data brief characterizes the two groups as clearing at a similar pace. Receiving an RFE is not a denial signal; most cases that receive one are ultimately approved, and this week's near-identical medians are consistent with that pattern.

An RFE is not a denial signal, and this week's one-day gap between the two groups is too small to read as a meaningful difference.