DACA Renewal Wait Falls to 144 Days, But the Backlog Keeps Growing

Cases approved in the week of Nov 2 waited a median of 144 days from the date USCIS received their application to approval, down from 222 days the prior week. The 25th percentile (p25) sat at 28 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 235 days, a spread that reflects the uneven composition of approvals in any given week. As of Nov 9, 84,978 DACA renewal cases remain pending, up from 79,382 four weeks earlier. That count covers cases across all filing months that have not yet been adjudicated (the case decision step where USCIS issues an approval, denial, or request for more information), and none of the wait figures in this brief describe how long those pending cases have been waiting.

In the same week of 2025, the total-wait median was 55 days across 1,278 approvals. This week's 144-day reading is 161.8% above that level, against 2,106 approvals. The two populations are not identical: a larger approval volume in a single week can reflect a different mix of case ages than a smaller one. The improvement from the prior week is real in the data; the year-over-year gap is also real, and neither cancels the other.

This week's drop describes who was approved, not what is coming for the tens of thousands still waiting.

Looking across the last 12 weeks of total-wait data, medians have ranged from 138 days (Oct 19) to 222 days (Oct 26), without a clear directional trend. Separately, the time from the last status update to approval (the final-stage wait, a secondary metric) registered 117 days this week, down from 177 last week. The detector flagged that move as a statistical outlier at -2.30σ below the 8-week trend, computed against the 8-week trailing regression. The underlying 8-week slope is +2.3 days per week at R² = 0.05, too weak to characterize as a directional trend. The final-stage series is best described as noisy and roughly stable.

Among cases approved this week with a known filing date, 40% waited fewer than 45 days from filing to approval, while just 1 case waited more than a year. That bimodal character (a large fast-clearing group alongside a smaller slower-clearing group) is part of why the p25 to p75 spread runs from 28 days to 235 days. It reflects the renewal backlog's composition at a given point in time rather than any single policy change.

The pending backlog of DACA renewal cases reached 84,978 as of Nov 9, up 7.0% from 28 days earlier (a net addition of roughly 5,596 cases across all filing months over that window). In practical terms, more cases entered the pipeline over the past month than were cleared. The weekly total-wait figure measures approved cases only; cases still in the queue may face longer or shorter waits depending on where they sit and how the mix of approvals shifts from week to week.

Cases filed in June 2026 (now 23 weeks old) are 46.9% approved, and cases filed in July 2026 (18 weeks old) are 41.6% approved. Because the two cohorts are at different ages, a direct comparison should be made carefully: the June cohort (a group of cases) has had five more weeks to clear. The October 2026 filing-month group, at only 5 weeks old, is 12.0% approved; that rate is not atypical at that maturity and should not be read as a signal that adjudications have slowed for new filings. Approval rates on immature cohorts reflect age, not pace.