N-400 Final-Stage Waits Hit 61 Days, Highest in 12 Weeks and 30% Above Last Year
This week's median reached the top of the 12-week range, well above the same week in 2025, even as the underlying 8-week trend remains too noisy to confirm a clean acceleration.
The N-400 naturalization final-stage wait reached 61 days this week, the highest reading in the 12-week window and about 30% above the 46-day figure recorded for the same week in 2025. The 12-week series has ranged from 31 to 61 days, meaning this week lands at the ceiling of recent experience. At the same time, no anomaly flags fired, the 8-week slope carries an R² of only 0.20, and the week's sample of 659 cases is lower than recent norms. The honest read: waits are elevated relative to last year, but the within-year trend is noisy enough that a single week's reading can move substantially in either direction.
- The N-400 final-stage median hit 61 days this week, the top of the 12-week range (31 to 61 days) and +30.5% above the same-week 2025 figure of 46 days.
- The 8-week slope is +1.9 days per week, but R² of 0.20 is well below the 0.40 threshold for a moderate trend, making the direction tentative rather than confirmed.
- RFE (Request for Evidence)-stamped cases cleared in a median of 37 days this week, 8 days faster than the 45-day median for plain cases, an inversion of the typical pattern.
- Cases at the 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case' stage show a median of 112 days (25th percentile 60 days, 75th percentile 174 days) across 187,071 active cases, making it the single largest time consumer in the pipeline.
- The 4-week forecast carries a wide confidence band: if the recent trend continues, the week of Sep 14 projects to approximately ~42 to 82 days, reflecting the weak regression fit.
61 days: a new 12-week high, and a 33% jump from last year
This week's 61-day median sits at the top of a range that ran as low as 31 days in early August, when a burst of quicker approvals briefly compressed the figure. The 12-week trailing average is 44 days, and the same-week 2025 reading was 46 days, placing this week roughly 17 days above both reference points. The week's sample of 659 approved cases is smaller than the prior several weeks, which ranged from 730 to 1,054 cases; smaller samples can amplify week-to-week swings, so the 61-day reading reflects who happened to be approved as much as any underlying shift in the adjudication (the USCIS case-decision step) queue.
A rising slope, but a weak one
The 8-week regression produces a slope of +1.9 days per week. Held steadily from June through September, that rate would add roughly 22 days over the full 12-week window. But the series did not hold steadily: it dropped to 31 days in early August before rebounding to 61 days, a swing of 30 days that the linear model cannot capture cleanly. An R² of 0.20 is well below the 0.40 threshold for a moderate trend, which means week-to-week noise accounts for most of the variation. The data supports describing the range (31 to 61 days) more than the slope.
The cleaner signal may be the year-over-year gap. From W29 through W36, last year's same-week medians held in a narrow band of 39 to 46 days. This year's readings for those same weeks came in at 48 to 61 days, consistently above. That persistent elevation across multiple weeks is a different and more stable signal than the noisy within-2026 slope, and it does not depend on any single week's sample.
Eight consecutive weeks above last year's band matters more than any single reading at the top of the range.
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