I-485 total wait hits 210 days, up 27% from last year, as pending cases top 1.17 million

The median I-485 applicant approved this week waited 210 days from filing, up from 166 days in the same week last year — a 26.5% increase over 12 months. That comparison covers 7,427 cases with a known filing date out of 7,500 approvals. Alongside this, 1,169,682 cases remain pending as of Nov 2, up from 1,093,496 twenty-eight days earlier. None of the wait medians in this brief describes how long pending cases have waited; they measure only cases that reached approval this week.

The positive counterweight sits in the final-stage data. The time from a case's last status update to approval — a secondary metric, not the total wait from filing — was 70 days this week, down from 101 days in the same week last year, a 31.3% year-over-year improvement. The system appears to be reaching cases faster once it gets to them; the longer total wait reflects the growing distance between filing and reaching the front of that queue.

The distribution is wide. The 25th percentile (p25) came in at 145 days, meaning a quarter of approvals this week cleared in under five months. The 75th percentile (p75) was 392 days — more than a year — and the 90th percentile (p90) reached 686 days. In total, 2,115 of this week's approvals, or 28% of those with a known filing date, waited more than a year from filing to approval.

The 12-week total wait trend peaked at 252 days for the week of Aug 24, then fell steadily over the following two months to reach 210 days this week — a 42-day decline over roughly ten weeks. That trajectory is the genuine good news in the data: the pace that drove wait times above 250 days in late summer has moderated, and each of the last several weeks has come in below the August reading.

Even so, this week's 210-day median sits 44 days above the 166-day figure from the same week last year. The improvement from the summer peak does not close that gap; it only shows that conditions are not worsening at the rate they were. Week-over-week movement was just 2 days (208 to 210), well within normal noise for a sample of this size. The pattern is stable-to-slowly-improving, not a new acceleration in either direction.

The active pending backlog (cases filed across all months, not yet decided) reached 1,169,682 as of Nov 2, up from 1,093,496 on Oct 5 — an increase of 76,186 cases, or 7.0%, in 28 days. A growing backlog of this scale typically exerts upward pressure on wait times over the following months, though the relationship is not immediate and the speed of adjudication (the final-stage wait) has moved in the other direction this year.

The filing-month cohort (all cases filed in the same month) data makes the queue depth concrete. The May 2026 group — at 26 weeks old, the most mature filing-month cohort tracked here — has 18.6% of its cases approved, with about 43,303 still active out of 57,606 total. The June 2026 cohort (22 weeks old) is 13.3% cleared. Even if the final-stage wait holds near 70 days, the great majority of these pending cases still face a significant queue before reaching that stage.