I-821 Final-Stage Waits Rise to 74 Days But Remain Far Below Last Year's 203

This week's 74-day median for Form I-821, Application for Temporary Protected Status, holds two distinct signals at once. The near-term picture shows acceleration: the 8-week slope is +9.8 days per week, and the reading has climbed more than 70 days since the single-digit lows of late June. The year-over-year picture is the opposite: 74 days compares to 203 days in the same week of 2025, a reduction of 63.8%. The 12-week trailing average of 46 days reflects just how compressed this summer's early readings were before the shift began.

The shape of the summer is visible in the 12-week trend table. Medians sat at 2 to 4 days from late June through late July, then shifted into the 50-to-97-day range beginning around the week of Aug 3. This week's 74 days follows last week's 66, a week-over-week rise of +7 days (+10.9%). What drove that shift is not clear from the data alone; the timing may reflect a change in which cases were reaching final adjudication (the case decision step where approval, denial, or an information request is issued) during those weeks, though the data does not let us confirm a mechanism.

The stage duration table reflects the broader pending population observed over the last 30 days, not just this week's approvals. The dominant stage is 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case,' where the median wait is 419 days, with the 25th percentile (p25) at 367 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 472 days, across 50,228 cases representing roughly 60% of the observable caseload. An additional 20,138 cases sit at 'Case Was Received and A Receipt Notice Was Sent,' with a median of 296 days. Together those two stages account for about 84% of the pending queue. For applicants currently in the pipeline, the typical wait is measured in months, not the weeks that recent approvals suggest.

The stage data also shows 975 cases at 'TPS Country Designation Terminated By FRN,' with a median of 104 days in current status (p25 of 63 days, p75 of 165 days, across those 975 cases), plus 28 additional cases under an alternate spelling of the same termination status. A termination status indicates that the applicant's country designation has ended; the data does not tell us which countries are affected or whether any legal reinstatement proceedings are underway.

cohort (a group of cases) burndown measures what share of all cases filed in a given month has been approved as of this week's snapshot. Among the filing-month cohorts (cases grouped by the calendar month in which they were filed) tracked this week, the April 2026 group shows 9.6% approved at age 23 weeks, the June 2026 group shows 9.4% at age 15 weeks, and the May 2026 group shows 7.5% at age 19 weeks. The July through September 2026 cohorts show 0 to 1.6% approved, but those are immature groups at ages 1 to 10 weeks; low approval shares at those ages are expected, not a signal of worsening performance.

No prior-year cohort data at the same ages is available in this week's brief, so a same-age comparison is not possible. Separately, the overall active backlog of pending I-821 cases across all filing cohorts (a much larger population than the six cohorts in the burndown table) declined by about 1,770 cases, or 1.5%, over the 28-day window from Aug 17 to Sep 14, 2026, reaching approximately 119,329 active cases. That reduction is modest, but it indicates the pending queue is not expanding at present. The largest decline among maturing cohorts in the burndown table was the May 2026 group, which shed 9 active cases over the same period.