N-600 Final-Stage Wait Rises to 106 Days in a Preliminary Early Read

The N-600 final-stage wait rose to 106 days this week, a 24-day gain from last week's 81. That preliminary reading comes from 133 approved cases, roughly half the typical weekly volume for this form, so it may revise upward or downward as additional approvals are recorded. The 12-week trailing average is 76 days, placing this week's number 30 days above baseline. The same week last year came in at 100 days, across a sample of 68 cases, so the year-over-year gap is about 6 days.

The spread between the 25th percentile (p25) and the 75th percentile (p75) widened considerably this week. The p25 sits at 38 days while the p75 reached 251 days, an interquartile range (the spread from p25 to p75) of 213 days. In the prior week, that same spread ran from 35 to 180 days. The elevated p75 at 251 days means a meaningful share of cases in this week's approval set waited well beyond the median, a pattern consistent with the form's variable evidentiary demands.

The 8-week regression slope for N-600 is +5.0 days per week, meaning the median has added roughly 5 days per week on average over that window. The R² of the fit is 0.32, which is well below the 0.70 threshold for a confident trend: week-to-week medians have ranged from 49 days to 117 days across the 12-week window, with no steady staircase pattern. The direction is consistent over the period, but the weekly values jump around the trend line rather than hugging it.

The direction has been upward for eight weeks, but the line itself is too noisy to treat as a reliable guide for any single week.

All N-600 approvals this week processed through a single channel: IOE (electronic filings), with 133 cases at a median of 106 days. There is no center-level divergence to explain the swings because this form routes entirely through the e-filing portal. The volatility appears to reflect N-600's lower weekly volumes rather than any routing or staffing artifact. A week with 300-plus cases, as in W28 (348 cases at a median of 52 days), anchors the average quite differently than a preliminary week with half that count.

An rfe_fast anomaly flag fired this week. Cases that received an RFE (Request for Evidence), USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for additional documentation, and then submitted a response, cleared with a median of 25 days. Plain cases without an RFE took a median of 82 days, making the RFE-response group 3.28 times faster than the non-RFE group. This is a counterintuitive inversion: RFE-touched cases almost always take longer in aggregate because the RFE process adds weeks to the timeline. The rfe_fast flag marks the inversion as statistically unusual against the prior 8-week baseline. The RFE sub-sample is small, and one-week readings like this typically reflect a timing coincidence, such as a batch of older RFE responses that happened to clear together, rather than a systemic change in how USCIS handles those cases.

Receiving an RFE is not a denial signal. The approval set this week includes cases that responded to an RFE and cleared quickly, likely because those responses were filed around the same time and moved through adjudication (USCIS's case decision step: approval, denial, or a further request for information) as a group. This week's RFE inversion should not be read as a forecast for future RFE-response cases; a single week at a small sample size is not enough to confirm any underlying mechanism.