I-140 Final-Stage Wait Jumps 8 Days, Triggering a 4.25-Sigma Anomaly Flag

The I-140 final-stage median rose 8 days in a single week, reaching 28 days as of August 31. That reading triggered an outlier flag at z = 4.25 above the 8-week trend line, the largest anomaly in the current 12-week window. The 12-week trailing average stands at 22 days, and 28 days is the highest weekly reading since the week of June 22, when the median briefly hit 41 days before retreating. The z-score is computed against the prior 8-week trailing fit, not the longer 12-week average; against the full 12-week average of 22 days, this week is 6 days above.

This metric measures the final-stage wait, the time between a case's last recorded status and its approval, not the full filing-to-approval span. It is not comparable to USCIS's published 80th-percentile processing times. With that framing in place: this week's 28-day reading sits 43 days below the same week last year (71 days, based on 3,528 approvals), a year-over-year improvement of about 60%. The spike is real, but it arrives against a backdrop of sustained, broad-based acceleration.

The 8-week regression slope of +1.2 days per week (R² = 0.52) indicates that the median appears to be rising at a moderate pace, though the R² is not strong enough to call the direction definitive. The median touched its 12-week low of 16 days during weeks 31 and 32 (late July and early August), then edged up to 17, 21, and 20 days in the three subsequent weeks before this week's 8-day jump. The gradual climb had added roughly 4 days over six weeks; this week alone matched that entire prior move.

The 25th percentile (p25) this week held at 13 days, barely changed from the prior weeks' range of 12 to 15 days. The 75th percentile (p75) came in at 62 days, toward the lower end of the recent 58-to-103-day range. The p25 stability and the modest p75 suggest the week's jump is concentrated in the upper portion of the case distribution rather than a broad shift affecting all filers equally.

Looking at the active case queue using the Stage durations (30-day raw) data: 60.3% of active I-140 cases sit at the main processing status ('USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case'), with a 30-day median of 80 days and a 25th-to-75th-percentile spread of 44 to 151 days across 165,062 cases at that stage. Another 17.1% are at the RFE (Request for Evidence) stage, with a median of 85 days across 46,770 cases. And 11.7% are at the RFE response stage ('Response To USCIS' Request For Evidence Was Received'), with a 30-day median of 28 days across 31,952 cases. The coincidence between that 28-day stage median and this week's overall final-stage median of 28 days is consistent with a meaningful share of this week's approvals coming from recently-responded RFE cases clearing quickly, though the data does not confirm this directly.

On the 12-week weighted-average basis from the approval cohort (a group of cases) breakdown, both RFE-stamped and non-RFE cases show a weighted-average median of 22 days, a speed ratio of 1.00x. RFE'd cases and non-RFE cases clearing at a similar pace is unusual; RFE-response cases more often take meaningfully longer. This may reflect a batch of older RFE responses that cleared in close succession, but the data does not identify the mechanism.