I-765 Median Climbs to 165 Days as RFE-Touched Cases Clear Three Times Faster

The I-765 final-stage median reached 165 days the week of August 31, an 11-day rise from 154 days the week before and 23.6% above the 134-day reading from the same week last year. The 12-week trailing average sits at 143 days. That said, the 12-week window has moved considerably, ranging from 79 days (July 13) up to 198 days (July 27) before partially retreating; this week's 165-day reading is a rebound from the recent low of 131 days in mid-August, not the window's peak. With weekly swings of that size, a single week's reading reflects who happened to be approved as much as any underlying directional shift.

A Request for Evidence, or RFE, is USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking an applicant for missing documents; receiving one does not by itself predict denial. This week, cases that had already submitted an RFE response cleared with a median of 47 days, compared to 141 days for cases moving through plain processing. That inversion, nearly 3-to-1 in favor of the RFE-response group, is what triggered the rfe_fast anomaly flag. The most plausible structural reading is that a concentrated batch of older RFE responses, cases that had already been thoroughly documented before the adjudicator returned to them, may have cleared together this week. The data does not tell us why with certainty; a single week is too short a window to confirm any particular mechanism. RFE-stamped cases clearing faster than plain-processing cases is the opposite of the usual pattern, and the gap is likely to narrow as the batch effect dissipates.

The 3-to-1 speed advantage for RFE cases reflects who cleared this week, not a lasting change in how RFE processing works.

Looking at where active cases currently sit, the stage-duration data (30-day raw window) shows the two largest holding stages are receipt and active processing. Cases at the 'Case Was Received' status have a median of 85 days at that stage, with the 25th percentile (p25) at 49 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 202 days across 700,386 cases, a wide spread that means individual experiences differ considerably. Cases at the 'USCIS Is Currently Processing' status sit at a median of 158 days, with a p25 of 91 days and a p75 of 224 days across 391,106 cases. By contrast, the biometrics appointment stage (fingerprint and photo scheduling) shows a median of just 25 days across 52,699 cases, suggesting that the biometrics scheduling step is not a primary bottleneck at this moment.