I-485 Final-Stage Wait Hits 90 Days, a 12-Week High, as Trend Accelerates

The median final-stage wait for I-485 Adjustment of Status applications (the time from the case's last reported status to approval) hit 90 days in the week of April 27, capping a 12-week range that opened at 59 days on February 9. At 16 days above the 12-week trailing average of 74 days, the reading triggered an outlier flag at z=2.06 against the prior 8-week trend line. A z-score above 2.0 means this week's value is statistically elevated relative to that recent run, not just a large absolute number. A single-week reading at that level can be noise, but the accompanying trend data argues against dismissing it.

The 8-week regression slope sits at +2.2 days per week with R²=0.78, a strong linear fit by the standard that R² above 0.70 signals a real directional trend. Over roughly 11 weeks, that slope compounds to about 24 days of accumulated slowdown. The median rose in 9 of the last 11 weeks. This is not a pattern driven by one unusual week; the direction has been consistent since early February.

The slowdown is not landing evenly across all cases. The 25th percentile (p25, the lower edge of the typical wait window) moved barely at all, from 33 days in Week 7 to 35 days in Week 18. The 75th percentile (p75, the upper edge), by contrast, rose from 93 days to 144 days over the same period, a 51-day increase. Cases in the faster half of the distribution have been largely unaffected; cases in the slower half are waiting considerably longer than they were 11 weeks ago.

The active pending backlog of cases not yet adjudicated also grew, reaching 233,688 cases as of May 10, up roughly 7.0% from approximately 218,490 six days earlier. The April 2026 filing-month group accounts for a large share of that change, adding 9,779 active cases over that window, driven by new receipts entering the pipeline. A growing pipeline at this rate is consistent with the upward slope in medians, as more cases compete for adjudicator capacity.

The top quarter of waits has grown by 51 days since February; the fastest quarter has barely moved.

The uneven-centers anomaly flag fired this week at a spread value of 244 days, reflecting the distance between WAC (California Service Center), which posted a median of just 8 days on a very thin sample of 20 cases, and LIN (Nebraska Service Center) at 146 days on 70 cases, with MSC (National Benefits Center, the USCIS facility in Lee's Summit, MO) at 141 days on 194 cases. IOE, which handles e-filed cases routed electronically, accounted for 1,786 of 2,153 approvals this week (about 83% of the sample) at a median of 85 days. SRC (Texas Service Center) added 83 cases at a median of 42 days. The WAC figure warrants caution: with only 20 cases, it is too thin a sample to treat as a reliable center-level signal. Case mix also differs across centers, meaning these medians are not a direct apples-to-apples performance comparison.