N-600 Final-Stage Wait Jumps 32 Days in One Week as Active Backlog Nears 50% Growth

This week's final-stage wait of 155 days sits 32 days above last week's 123-day reading and 76% above the 12-week trailing average of 88 days. The outlier_week_high anomaly flag fired at z=2.04, computed against the prior trend line, meaning this week's reading is more than two standard deviations above the recent pace. A single-week anomaly of this kind can be noise, and the weak 8-week regression fit (R² = 0.31) means the trend line itself is imprecise. The magnitude of the departure is what the flag is tracking.

The prior two weeks had already shown a rising pattern: the median was 56 days in W21 (week of May 18), then 123 days in W22, then 155 days this week. That trajectory means this week's reading was not entirely without context in the recent run, though it is still the highest in the full 12-week window. The spread across approved cases this week is wide: the 25th percentile (p25) sits at 59 days while the 75th percentile (p75) reaches 196 days, an interquartile range (the spread between p25 and p75) of 137 days, indicating high variability in who cleared approval this particular week.

Total active N-600 pending cases stood at 6,376 as of June 7, up 49.8% over the prior 31 days (from May 7 to June 7). In plain terms, roughly one additional case for every two that were already waiting entered the active queue in a single month. The largest contributor was the April 2026 filing-month group (cases filed in April 2026), which added 900 active cases and now holds 1,275 active cases out of its 1,290 total filed, up from 375 active cases in the prior snapshot.

The filing-month cohort (all cases filed in the same calendar month) data makes the clearing pace concrete. The January 2026 group is only 7.9% approved at 22 weeks of age. The February 2026 group is 5.8% approved at 18 weeks. Even by N-600's historically long processing baseline of 14 to 18 months, these early-month clearance rates are low: at 7.9%, the January 2026 group has approved 124 cases out of 1,568 filed, with 1,438 still active.

A near-50% increase in active pending cases in one month, paired with approval rates below 8% across every 2026 filing group, points to a pipeline filling faster than it is emptying.