I-751 Total Wait Hits 565 Days, Up 51 Percent Year Over Year as Backlog Grows

Cases approved in the week of Nov 2 waited a median of 565 days from the date USCIS received their I-751 petition to approval, compared with 374 days in the same week of 2025 and 530 days just last week. Seventy percent of approved cases waited more than a year, and not a single case cleared within 45 days of filing. The pending backlog of petitions not yet decided reached 401,656 as of Nov 9, up from 385,441 four weeks earlier, an increase of 16,215 cases (+4.2%). Every wait figure in this brief describes cases that have already been approved; the 401,656 still-pending cases have not yet been decided, and their eventual wait is unknown.

To put 565 days in context: conditional permanent residents file I-751 within a 90-day window before their 2-year green card expires, then wait for USCIS to issue the unconditional 10-year card. The median filer approved this week waited roughly 19 months from that filing. The process feels long, but the receipt notice extends their lawful permanent resident (LPR) status during pendency, so the wait does not threaten their right to live and work in the United States, even as the calendar advances.

Through September, the weekly total wait medians for I-751 ranged from 150 days (the week of Aug 31) to 298 days (the week of Sep 7). The week of Oct 5, the median rose to 492 days and has not fallen below 475 since. This week's 565-day figure is the highest in the 12-week series. The shift is not confined to the slowest cases: the 25th percentile (p25), which a quarter of approved cases finished by, rose from roughly 150 to 190 days in August and September to 262 days this week, confirming the movement extends across a broad portion of the approval pool. The sample is 548 cases with known filing dates out of 550 approved, so the percentile estimates are reliable.

Separate from the total wait is the time from the last reported status update to approval, the final-stage wait. This week that figure was 126 days, up 12 days from 114 days last week. A year ago the same metric was 194 days, so viewed in isolation the year-over-year picture looks better. But the 8-week slope is +5.5 days per week with an R² of 0.49, meaning the final-stage wait has been rising since mid-September. At the 12-week low in mid-August it was 66 days; it has since nearly doubled over 12 weeks.

Looking at where active cases currently sit, the stage duration data (raw percentiles across the last 30 days) shows that 40% of tracked cases are at 'Biometrics Appointment Was Scheduled,' with a median of just 19 days at that status, still early in the pipeline across 97,727 cases. A more concerning share: 13.9% of tracked cases, across 34,051 cases, sit at 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case,' with a median of 303 days at that status, a 25th percentile of 208 days, and a 75th percentile of 369 days. A smaller group, 0.9% of tracked cases across 2,098 cases, has reached 'Case Was Updated To Show Fingerprints Were Taken' and shows a median of 1,214 days at that status (25th percentile 936 days, 75th percentile 1,312 days). These cases represent the deepest end of the processing queue, not the typical pathway.