I-140 Final-Stage Wait Holds Steady at 17 Days as Active Backlog Doubles

This week's 17-day median is 7 days below the 12-week trailing average of 24 days, which was elevated by a stretch of higher readings in late June. The 8-week regression slope is -0.8 days per week, but the R² of 0.06 is far below the 0.40 threshold for a meaningful directional signal, so no trend claim is warranted. The week-over-week drop of 1 day (from 18 to 17) is similarly noise-level. The headline number, in short, is unremarkable, and that stability itself is worth noting given what is building in the pipeline.

Over the past 12 weeks, the median oscillated between 17 and 23 days from early May through mid-June before rising to 41 days in the week of June 22 (W26) and 32 days the following week. The W26 reading was roughly double the preceding weeks' pace. Since then, the median has retraced fully, reaching 20 days in W28 and 17 days this week. What caused the W26 elevation is not identifiable from this data alone; the data brief does not distinguish among possible mechanisms such as a batch of older cases clearing, a routing change, or a temporary volume shift.

The spike also widened the interquartile range (the spread between the 25th percentile, p25, and the 75th percentile, p75) noticeably. In most weeks the p75 runs between 54 and 69 days, but in W26 it reached 102 days, meaning a quarter of cases that week waited at least 102 days from their last reported status to approval. That stretched tail has since compressed: this week's p75 is 69 days and the p25 is 13 days. The median, then, conceals a distribution that can widen quickly, even in weeks where the central reading looks calm.

The more consequential development this week is not in the completion times but in the volume of cases still waiting. Total active pending cases across tracked filing-month groups rose from roughly 20,533 to 41,762 between May 7 and July 27, a 103% increase in 81 days. The June 2026 filing-month group (a cohort (a group of cases), meaning all cases filed in that same calendar month) is the largest single contributor, with 10,068 active cases out of a group total of 15,122. Cohort (filing-month group) approval rates for the most recent months range from 33.1% for the June group to 41.6% for May, meaning the majority of the 2026 intake wave is still awaiting the adjudication (USCIS's case-decision step: approval, denial, or a request for more information) step. If the pace of approvals does not scale with the rate of new filings, final-stage medians may rise in coming months, though the current data does not confirm that shift.

Comparing the February 2026 filing-month group (25 weeks old, 58.5% cleared) to the June 2026 group (8 weeks old, 33.1% cleared) requires an age adjustment before drawing any conclusion: older groups have had more time to accumulate approvals by definition. The week-8 approval rate for the February group is not available in this dataset, so a direct same-age rate comparison cannot be made. What the data does show clearly is a volume difference: the June 2026 group's 15,122 total cases is nearly triple the size of the February group's 17,433 cases filed across the entire month, and the June group is only at week 8 of its clearance curve. That scale, not any sign of slower individual-case processing, is the forward-looking signal.