I-821D Final-Stage Waits Hit 161 Days, Up From 9 Days a Year Ago

The final-stage wait for I-821D — the time from a case's last reported status to approval — stood at 161 days this week, against 9 days in the same week last year. That year-over-year gap of more than 1,700% is the dominant signal in this issue. The week-over-week movement was minimal: down 1 day from last week's 162. This is not a sudden change but a structural shift that built across the 12-week window. As recently as the week of June 8, the series opened at 21 days (across 5,057 cases that week); by the week of July 27 it had reached 181 days before settling near the current level.

The 12-week trailing average is 136 days, and the statistical pattern is classified as noisy-stable: the 8-week regression slope is +5.0 days per week, but the fit is weak (R² = 0.17), meaning week-to-week variance is wide. The 25th percentile (p25) this week sits at 124 days and the 75th percentile (p75) at 166 days, an interquartile range (the spread between the 25th and 75th percentiles) of 42 days. Readers tracking their own cases should keep in mind that the final-stage metric captures only the last leg of the journey: cases still earlier in the queue face the full pipeline duration on top of that.

Looking at stage durations (raw 30-day percentiles from case_flow_stats), the largest share of pending I-821D cases, about 49.3%, carry a 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case' status. Across approximately 81,396 cases at that stage, the median elapsed time is already 92 days, with a p25 of 51 days and a p75 of 145 days. A further 32.1% of pending cases (roughly 53,010 cases) are at the biometrics (fingerprint appointment) stage, where the median elapsed time is just 20 days; that stage is not the current bottleneck. The 16.2% of cases at 'Case Was Received' (about 26,794 cases) show a median of 104 days, meaning early-intake cases are also accumulating wait time before active adjudication (USCIS's case-decision step) even begins.

The total active pending backlog across all I-821D filing groups rose by 3,899 cases, or 12.3%, over the 28 days ending August 31, reaching 35,719 active cases. This figure covers the full population of pending I-821D cases across all filing months, not only the recent cohorts tracked in the burndown table. A backlog growing at this pace, if sustained, is consistent with continued upward pressure on processing times.

Cases in active processing have already waited a median of 92 days at that stage alone, before the final adjudication step even begins.

The filing-month cohort (a group of cases) burndown table tracks what fraction of cases filed in a given month have been approved as of this week's snapshot. The June 2026 filing group (13 weeks old, total cohort size 3,702 cases) is 31.4% approved; the May 2026 group (17 weeks old, 3,982 cases) is 31.6% approved; the April 2026 group (21 weeks old, 2,910 cases) is 28.5% approved; the March 2026 group (26 weeks old, 3,207 cases) is 30.3% approved. Clearance rates appear to plateau near 28% to 32% for groups aged 13 to 26 weeks, indicating the pipeline is absorbing new volume but not accelerating clearance for older groups.

The July 2026 filing group (8 weeks old, 3,205 total cases) is 25.3% approved, tracking slightly below where the June group was at 8 weeks of age. The August 2026 group (4 weeks old, 3,015 total cases) sits at 2.4%, which is expected this early in the cycle. The key constraint to keep in mind is that comparing groups of different ages is not informative on its own: older groups had more time to clear. The relevant signal here is that no mature group in this 6-month window has moved above 32%, suggesting the pipeline has a practical ceiling near that level at current processing rates.