I-765 Final-Stage Wait Doubles in One Week, Rising 93 Days to 172

The week of July 20 produced a 93-day jump in the I-765 final-stage wait, the metric that tracks median days from a case's last reported status to approval. Last week's reading was 79 days; this week's is 172 days. The outlier_week_high anomaly fired at z = 2.42, computed against the prior 4-week trailing mean, meaning this week's reading is more than two standard deviations above that recent baseline. Against the longer 12-week average of 96 days, this week's 172-day reading is 79% higher. One year ago the same-week median was 37 days across a sample of 720 cases; this week's sample is 8,861 cases.

The week-30 reading does not sit in isolation. Over the 12-week window, the median ranged from 45 days (week of June 8) to 128 days (week of June 15), then crossed 100 days in weeks 26 and 28 before reaching 172 this week. The 8-week regression slope is +10.8 days per week, with an R-squared of 0.38, a direction signal that is real but not tight: week-to-week noise is visible throughout the series. The 12-week trailing average is 96 days; this week's reading is 79% above that figure.

The pending backlog (cases that have not yet been adjudicated) adds structural context. Total active cases stand at 300,420 as of the July 27 snapshot, up 87.4% over the prior 81 days. The May 2026 filing-month group accounts for the largest piece of that growth, adding 56,641 active cases over the same window. A backlog of this size is consistent with upward pressure on wait times, though it does not by itself explain the sharpness of this single-week reading. The backlog grew from roughly 160,000 active cases to over 300,000 between early May and late July 2026.

The overall median masks a wide divergence across service centers, and the uneven_centers flag fired this week at a spread value of 212 days. IOE, the electronic-filing routing channel, handles 7,279 of the 8,861 approvals this week (about 82%) and posts a median of 178 days with a slope of +12.7 days per week. LIN (Nebraska Service Center, 181 cases this week) sits at 397 days, the highest median in the table, with a slope of +24.5 days per week and an R-squared of 0.51, indicating a statistically reliable upward trajectory. EAC (Vermont Service Center, 161 cases) is at 291 days with a slope of +14.9 and an R-squared of 0.80, the most consistent upward trend of any center in the data. At the other end, SRC (Texas Service Center, 661 cases) posts 57 days with a near-flat slope of +0.7. The center-level case mix differs across these channels, so the gap reflects both routing differences and processing pace; the two are not directly comparable on performance alone.