I-539 Total Wait Hits 143 Days, Nearly Double Last Year's Reading

Cases approved in the week of November 2 waited a median of 143 days from when USCIS received their I-539 to approval, up 29 days from the prior week's 114-day median and up 63 days from the same week in 2025 (80 days, based on 3,291 approvals). The 4,541 approvals issued this week include 4,491 with a known filing date. 183,080 cases remain pending as of November 9, up slightly from 182,613 four weeks earlier. Every wait figure in this brief covers only cases that were already approved; it says nothing about how long those 183,080 pending cases have been waiting.

The total wait series in the Lead metric table tells a fuller story of the climb. Medians rose from 65 days in the week of August 17 to a high of 130 days in late September, then settled into a range of 112 to 120 days through most of October, before this week's jump to 143 days. The spread is wide: the 25th percentile (p25) sat at 70 days, meaning a quarter of approvals cleared within about two months, while the 75th percentile (p75) reached 240 days. Nine percent of approvals waited more than a year.

The anomaly detector flagged this week's time from the last status update to approval at z = 2.30, computed against the prior 8-week trailing regression, which is the threshold for an outlier_week_high signal. That 8-week regression carries an R² of only 0.13, indicating a noisy, directionless pattern. The slope of -1.7 days per week is too shallow to assert any direction. This week's reading of 141 days on the final-stage series is a one-week departure above a broadly flat range of 103 to 141 days over the past 12 weeks; on its own it is not evidence of a new upward trend.

One week above the statistical threshold does not confirm a new direction when the underlying 12-week pattern has been this flat and noisy.

SRC (Texas Service Center) handled the largest share of approvals this week at 2,742 cases, with a median of 126 days. EAC (Vermont Service Center) posted the longest median at 323 days across 434 cases. WAC (California Service Center) came in at 295 days on 302 cases. LIN (Nebraska Service Center), though small at 68 cases, carries the steepest 8-week slope among all centers at +20.8 days per week (R² = 0.62, the strongest fit across centers). SRC's 43% transferred share and EAC's 27% mean those populations include cases that passed through another office before approval, while WAC and LIN show 0% transferred share. Because the case mix differs across centers, the medians do not describe a uniform population and should not be read as a direct performance ranking.

LIN's +20.8-day-per-week slope with R² = 0.62 is the clearest upward trajectory among all centers, though the sample of 68 cases this week is small. YSC is the only center with a negative slope (-4.4 days per week) but had just 26 cases. IOE e-filed cases show a 13-day median, the fastest by a wide margin, in line with the distinct population that the electronic filing pathway processes.