I-140 Final-Stage Waits Run 38 Days Shorter Than a Year Ago, Backlog Shrinking

The final-stage wait for I-140, Immigrant Petition for Alien Workers, the adjudication (USCIS's case decision step) step that carries a case from its last recorded status to approval, came in at 22 days this week, a 6-day improvement from last week's 28 days. More telling is the year-over-year picture: the same ISO week in 2025 showed a median of 60 days across 3,644 approvals, equal to the 3-year same-week average. This week's 22-day reading is 38 days below that benchmark.

The improvement is not a one-week artifact. The 12-week trailing average has also held near 22 days, and weekly medians over the past 12 weeks have ranged from 16 days (the weeks of July 27 and August 3) to 41 days (the week of June 22), with this week's reading near the center of that range. No anomaly flags fired this week, consistent with a system operating within its recent norms.

Across all filing-month groups combined, the active I-140 backlog of pending cases shrank by 3,634 cases (-2.1%) over the 28 days ending September 14, 2026. The May 2026 filing-month group posted the largest single-cohort reduction, shedding 1,254 active cases during that window. These figures cover the full population of I-140 cases across all filing months, a much larger pool than the individual cohort rows discussed below.

Looking at the most recently filed groups, the filing-month cohort (cases filed in the same calendar month) data offers a view of how newer cases are progressing. Cases filed in June 2026, now 15 weeks old, have reached 44.7% cleared out of 15,185 total filings. Cases filed in May 2026, now 19 weeks old, stand at 52.6% cleared out of 16,683 total filings. The April 2026 group, at 23 weeks of age and 20,123 total filings, has reached 58.6% cleared. Each successive month shows a higher clearance rate as the group matures, consistent with a system steadily working through its queue.

The stage-duration data (drawn from the 30-day raw percentile window) shows where most I-140 cases spend their time before the final clearance step. The largest share of live cases, 60.1%, sit at the "USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case" status, which shows a median of 80 days, a 25th percentile (p25) of 44 days, and a 75th percentile (p75) of 150 days across 168,582 cases. A separate queue, cases where a Request for Evidence (RFE) was sent asking for additional documents, accounts for 17.0% of live cases (47,539 cases) and shows a median of 84 days at that stage, with a p25 of 66 days and a p75 of 93 days. Cases that have already submitted their RFE response sit at a median of 28 days at the response stage (p25: 15 days, p75: 52 days, across 32,790 cases).

Despite those longer mid-process durations, RFE-stamped cases arrive at the final clearance step in nearly the same time as cases that never received an RFE. This week, cases with an RFE response on file cleared their final stage in a median of 21 days; plain-processing cases cleared in 22 days. The one-day gap is not a meaningful difference. An RFE is not a denial signal, and this week's data is consistent with that: the final-stage wait is essentially the same regardless of whether a case passed through an RFE.

For I-140 cases this week, receiving an RFE did not add a single day to the final clearance step.