I-821 Final-Stage Wait Jumps 43 Days, Yet Sits Well Below Last Year's Pace
Week 34's 99-day median is sharply up from last week's 56 days, but still 47% below the same week in 2025. A 19% backlog reduction over 28 days adds a second, more encouraging signal.
The final-stage wait for I-821 (Application for Temporary Protected Status) approvals rose to 99 days in the week of August 17, up 43 days from 56 days the prior week. That single-week move is large, but the year-over-year picture runs in the opposite direction: the same metric sat at 186 days in the equivalent week of 2025, making this week's reading 47% lower. The 12-week trailing average is 102 days, so the current reading is roughly in line with recent norms. Meanwhile, the total active backlog of pending cases fell by about 28,415 cases (19.2%) over the 28 days ending August 26. Both signals are real; neither cancels the other.
- The final-stage median rose 43 days week over week, from 56 days (W33) to 99 days (W34, n = 165 cases approved).
- Despite the single-week jump, the 99-day median is 47% below the same week in 2025, when the figure stood at 186 days.
- The active backlog shrank by roughly 28,415 cases (19.2%) over 28 days (July 29 to August 26), though not all exits represent approvals: termination activity is a major driver.
- The 12-week median series swung from 2 days to 439 days, making any single week's reading difficult to interpret in isolation; the 8-week regression R² is only 0.57.
- If the current slope continues, the 4-week forecast band runs from ~68 to 156 days (week of Aug 24) widening to ~106 to 194 days by mid-September, reflecting the substantial uncertainty in the trend.
A jump this week, a much quieter year
The final-stage wait for I-821 approvals came in at 99 days the week of August 17, up 43 days from the prior week's 56-day reading. That is a 76.8% one-week move. Taken alone, it reads as a meaningful reversal. Taken in context, it lands close to the 12-week trailing average of 102 days, and it is nearly half of the 186-day reading from the same week in 2025. The year-over-year improvement is real and sizable; the week-over-week jump is also real, and the two coexist.
Twelve weeks of swings that defy a simple trend line
The 12-week median series for I-821 has not moved in a straight line. The median sat at 419 days the week of June 1, fell to 2 days in late June (W26 and W27), climbed back to 50 days in mid-July, dipped to 4 to 5 days through the end of July, then rose again to 94 days on August 3 before settling near 56 days and now 99 days. The 8-week regression slope is +12.7 days per week, pointing upward, but the R² of 0.57 means the linear fit accounts for only about half the week-to-week variance. That is a moderate fit at best, and it means the direction is more reliable than any specific projected number.
One structural factor may be shaping these fluctuations. In the last 30 days, IOE processed about 39,387 case transitions, with 'terminated' as the dominant status. The stage table shows two 'TPS Country Designation Terminated by FRN' entries together accounting for roughly 0.8% of observed cases across all statuses, though the two termination-status buckets together cover about 1,927 cases out of more than 220,000 observed. When a country's TPS designation is terminated, a wave of cases exits the active queue, changing the age distribution of who remains. The timing of these termination batches is consistent with the erratic weekly medians, though it does not by itself explain every swing.
The backlog lost nearly a fifth of its cases in four weeks
Across all I-821 filing cohorts, the active backlog of pending cases stood at approximately 119,911 as of August 26, down from roughly 148,326 on July 29, a decline of about 28,415 cases (19.2%) over 28 days. This figure covers the full population of pending I-821 cases, not just the recent filing months shown in the cohort (a group of cases) table below. Among the filing-month groups tracked in that table, the largest reduction was in the March 2026 filing-month cohort (filing-month cohort: all cases filed in the same calendar month), which shed 13 active cases over the same window.
The per-cohort approval rates tell a more cautious story. The June 2026 filing-month cohort leads recent months at 9.4% approved at 12 weeks of age (5 of 53 cases). The March 2026 cohort sits at 3.5% approved at 25 weeks (3 of 85 cases). These rates look low, but they reflect normal cohort immaturity: recent filers simply have not had enough time for adjudication (the USCIS case-decision step: approval, denial, or a request for more information) to reach most cases. Comparing a 3-week-old cohort to a 25-week-old cohort as if they were on the same trajectory would be misleading; each cohort is at a different stage of its natural burndown arc.
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