I-765 EAD Wait Reaches 205 Days, Triple Last Year's Median as Backlog Grows

The 205-day median is more than triple the 64-day reading from the same ISO week in 2025, a year-over-year increase of 220%. A statistical outlier flag fired at z = 2.89 against the prior 8-week trailing mean, placing this week's result well outside the recent pattern. The data does not reveal a single cause; the shift may reflect changes in the mix of cases reaching approval this week, volume pressure at specific service centers, or both. The 205-day figure is the median for cases that were approved this week, not a forecast of how long cases currently in the queue will wait.

Pending I-765 cases stood at 1,242,467 as of November 2, up 57,309 (4.8%) from 1,185,158 four weeks earlier, on October 5. Every wait figure in this brief is measured on cases that were already approved; none of those figures describes how long these 1.24 million pending cases have waited or will wait. The backlog growth suggests that new filings are arriving faster than approvals are clearing them.

The 205-day median this week sits atop a distribution that is wide enough to make it a limited planning guide. The 25th percentile (p25, the fastest quarter of cases) cleared in 41 days or fewer. The 75th percentile (p75, the threshold above which the slowest quarter waited) was 362 days. The 90th percentile reached 538 days. Put differently, 27% of approved cases with a known filing date cleared within 45 days of filing, while 25% waited more than a year. The typical window, from p25 to p75, spans 41 to 362 days, a range of 321 days, which is broad enough that the median alone gives incomplete guidance on what individual applicants might expect.

The volume approved this week (11,695 cases, 11,473 with known filing dates) is down from the late-September pace of roughly 17,000 approvals per week. A smaller approval cohort (a group of cases) can shift the overall median if the proportion of fast-clearing versus slow-clearing cases changes within it. The data does not indicate why the mix shifted this week.

A secondary metric useful for tracking week-to-week movement is the time from the last reported status update to approval, the final-stage wait. This week that figure reached 153 days, up 22 days from 131 days last week and up from 88 days during the same week last year. The 12-week low was 86 days on September 21. The 8-week slope is +4.4 days per week, but R² is only 0.25, meaning week-to-week swings are large and the overall pattern is best described as noisy and roughly stable rather than a clear upward trend.

The center-level picture is more differentiated. IOE handled 8,870 cases this week (about 78% of all approvals) and cleared them in a median of 123 days, with a slope of +2.8 days per week and R² of 0.10, essentially flat. SRC (Texas Service Center, 1,693 cases) sits at 238 days with a slope of +17.9 days per week and R² of 0.66, a meaningful and confident upward trend; 35% of SRC's approvals this week were transfer-touched cases, so the population its median describes differs from IOE's. EAC (Vermont Service Center, 302 cases) is the slowest at 444 days, with a slope of +19.8 days per week and R² of 0.50. MSC (National Benefits Center, 270 cases) and WAC (California Service Center, 109 cases) are both on declining trajectories (slopes of -6.0 and -6.7 days per week respectively), though their combined case volume is small relative to IOE. Because a receipt-number prefix records where a case was filed rather than where it is decided, readers should not use their prefix alone to gauge which center's median applies to their case.