N-600 Final-Stage Wait Falls 36 Days, but the Longer Drift Runs the Other Way

N-600 final-stage wait times fell to 81 days the week of September 14, a 36-day drop from 117 days the prior week. The same week last year registered 114 days, based on 51 approvals; this week's 160-case sample puts the year-over-year reading 29% lower. That said, the 8-week linear slope remains +5.0 days per week, with an R² of 0.31, meaning the direction over the past two months still trends upward even though this particular week moved the other way. Week-to-week swings of this magnitude appear throughout the 12-week window, so the single-week reading should not be read as a trend reversal.

This week's 25th percentile (p25) sat at 35 days while the 75th percentile (p75) reached 180 days, an interquartile range (the spread between p25 and p75) of 145 days. That spread is considerably wider than earlier in the window: the week of June 29 ran from a p25 of 5 days to a p75 of 74 days. The width signals that individual N-600 waits vary enormously within any given week, a reflection of the form's mix of acquired-citizenship cases (born abroad) and derived-citizenship cases (through a parent's naturalization), which carry different evidentiary burdens. The 160-case sample this week also falls below the 200-case level where weekly medians become more reliably stable, which is an additional reason to treat the single-week reading with caution.

The series' volatility is visible in the two weeks before this one: the week of August 31 posted a median of 52 days, then the week of September 7 came in at 117 days, a 65-day swing in a single week. The low R² of 0.31 on the 8-week regression reflects this pattern: the upward slope is a loose fit on a noisy series, not a confident trendline. Direction is plausible; magnitude and timing are not.

Cases that received and responded to a Request for Evidence (RFE, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents) posted a median of 24 days from last status to approval this week, compared with 77 days for cases that went through plain processing with no RFE. The rfe_fast anomaly flag fired with a value of 0.30. The most plausible reading is that a batch of older RFE responses happened to clear together this week rather than that RFE-stamped cases are inherently faster. Stage-duration data shows that the 'Request for Initial Evidence Was Sent' status itself carries a median of 43 days across 2,089 cases in the last 30 days, and the adjudicator review period after a response adds further time. A single week's inversion does not change that baseline picture. The data brief does not tell us which specific cases drove the clustering.