N-400 Total Wait Hits 426 Days, More Than Double Last Year's Figure

The median time from USCIS receipt to first approval for N-400 (Application for Naturalization) cases reached 426 days the week of Nov 2, up from 192 days in the same week of 2025 — a year-over-year increase of 121.9%. Of the 1,244 approved cases with a known filing date, 82% had waited more than a year from filing. The pending backlog of N-400 cases stood at 348,823 as of Nov 9, up 16,184 cases (+4.9%) from 332,639 twenty-eight days earlier. Every wait figure in this brief is measured only on cases that have been approved; none of them describes how long those 348,823 pending cases have waited or will wait.

The median total wait has more than doubled in a single year — from 192 days to 426 days — without a single anomaly flag on the weekly series.

The total-wait median was 355 days the week of Aug 17. It rose through September and October, with only brief interruptions — Oct 12 came in at 408 days, slightly below Oct 5's 421 days, and Oct 19 edged back to 410 — before reaching 413 days the prior week and 426 days this week. The overall direction across the 12-week window has been upward, with this week's reading the highest in the series. The week-over-week move of +13 days continues a pattern that has characterized most of the period since August.

The spread in wait times is wide. The 25th percentile (p25) this week sits at 384 days, meaning even the faster quarter of approved cases waited more than a year from filing. The 75th percentile (p75) stands at 476 days, and the 90th percentile reaches 540 days. The slowdown is not concentrated in a narrow tail; it runs through the full distribution of approved cases.

Looking at the current status distribution across all tracked cases (Stage durations, 30-day window), 23.9% — roughly 203,600 cases — sit at the 'USCIS Is Currently Processing the Case' status, with a median of 118 days at that stage (25th percentile 63 days, 75th percentile 189 days, across 203,596 cases). Another 22.0%, about 188,000 cases, are at the 'Interview Was Scheduled' status, where the median wait is 52 days; the interview is the civics, English, and application review meeting at a local field office. A further 15%, about 128,000 cases, are at biometrics scheduling — the fingerprint and photo appointment required before adjudication (the USCIS case decision step) can proceed — with a median of 22 days at that stage. A smaller group of 2.7% (23,391 cases) carry an 'Interview Cancelled' status, where the median wait is 117 days, nearly as long as the main processing queue.

Among filing-month groups (Status counts by filing month), the October 2025 filing cohort — cases filed in that month that USCIS received and is still tracking — totals 66,399 cases, by far the largest single group still in the system. Of those, 57,106 are currently at the processing stage and 3,282 have reached the interview stage. By contrast, the July 2026 filing cohort (16,190 cases total) has had only 94 cases, or 0.6%, approved so far at 18 weeks of age — appropriate for a group that has not yet had sufficient time to mature through the pipeline. These two cohorts are at fundamentally different stages of their processing lives, and comparing their clearance rates as if they were on the same timeline would be misleading.