I-140 Final-Stage Wait Ticks Up to 20 Days, but Year-Over-Year Pace Remains 7 Days Faster

The median final-stage wait for I-140 petitions — the time from a case's last reported status to approval (adjudication, the USCIS case decision step) — came in at 20 days the week of Aug 17, up 3 days (+16.4%) from 17 days the prior week. That single-week move was enough to set off the statistical high-outlier flag at z=4.74 against the prior 4-week trailing regression line. Yet the same week last year posted 27 days, so even after the jump, conditions are 7 days better year over year. The tension between the short-term reading and the longer context is the most informative thing in this week's data.

Over the past 12 weeks, the median final-stage wait ranged from 16 days (the low, reached in both W31 and W32) to 41 days (the high, in W26 of late June). After that W26 reading, the median settled into a 16-to-17-day range before this week's rise to 20. A slope of -1.2 days per week with an R² of 0.33 describes a gradual downward drift, though the low R² signals that week-to-week movement is noisy rather than tightly linear. The 3-year same-week average stands at 27 days; this week's 20-day read sits 7 days below that baseline.

The anomaly flag fires when a single week's median sits more than two standard deviations above what the 8-week regression line predicts. At z=4.74, this week's 20-day read is statistically far above the regression's expectation — but that regression is anchored near 16 to 17 days after weeks of low readings, so even a modest absolute jump produces a large z-score. The residual standard deviation of the 8-week fit is 5 days; the +3-day week-over-week move is well within that noise band. Single-week readings at this sample size should not be extrapolated as a trend break.

Volume is healthy: 2,966 approvals this week is the highest count in the 12-week window, up from about 2,000 cases in W23. Larger approval batches can occasionally shift the weekly median as the composition of which cases happen to clear in a given week changes. No structural change in routing or center mix is apparent: all activity flows through IOE (the electronic filing channel), in line with every prior week in the dataset.

The dominant pending status across all active I-140 cases is 'Case Is Still Being Processed By USCIS', which accounts for 51.2% of the stock. Cases sitting at that status show a median of 55 days, with the 25th percentile (p25) at 31 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 106 days, based on Stage durations (30-day raw) across 206,543 cases. The next largest group is 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case' at 22.5% of stock, with a median of 14 days. Together those two processing statuses cover nearly three-quarters of all pending volume. Cases at the RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's follow-up letter asking for additional documentation) stage show a median of 85 days (p25 at 66 days, p75 at 94 days) across 45,240 cases; those that have already submitted an RFE response sit at a median of 29 days (p25 at 15 days, p75 at 52 days) across 30,443 cases.

For cases that received and responded to an RFE, the final-stage wait this week was 23 days, versus 21 days for cases that processed without one — a gap of just 2 days. That is an unusually narrow difference, and it means the final stretch to approval looks similar regardless of whether a case traveled through the RFE path. Receiving an RFE does not in itself signal denial; most cases that receive one are still approved, and this week's data is in line with that pattern.