I-485 Total Wait Holds at 209 Days, Up 32 From Last Year

Cases approved during the week of Oct 19 waited a median of 209 days from the date USCIS received their I-485 application to the approval decision, 32 days longer than the 177-day median posted in the same week last year (n=12,773). Alongside that, 1,157,483 cases are currently tracked as pending (not yet decided) as of Oct 26, up from 1,093,945 just 28 days earlier, a gain of 63,538. None of the wait figures in this brief describe those pending cases; every median here reflects only cases that have already been approved, so the final wait for the pending population remains unknown.

The 12-week total wait series peaked at 252 days in late August, then declined through September and into October, reaching 209 days this week, 3 days below last week's 212. The spread within this week's approved population is wide: the middle half of cases (the 25th percentile, p25, to the 75th percentile, p75) ran from 143 to 371 days, and the slowest tenth waited more than 665 days. The recent pullback from the summer peak is real, but the current 209-day level remains well above last year's pace; this is a partial recovery, not a return to prior-year norms.

The time from the last reported status update to approval (the final-stage wait, a secondary metric that measures a shorter and later window than the filing-to-approval total wait) came in at 69 days this week. In the same week last year, that figure was 106 days, a 37-day difference. The 12-week trailing average is also 69 days, indicating this pace has been consistent rather than a single-week reading.

Over the past 8 weeks, the final-stage wait has followed a downward slope of -1.6 days per week, with an R² of 0.58, a moderate trend that points in the right direction but carries meaningful week-to-week noise. Weekly medians have ranged from 59 to 78 days over the past 12 weeks. An rfe_fast anomaly also fired this week: cases that had received and responded to an RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents) cleared with a median of 27 days, compared with 74 days for cases that went through plain processing without an RFE. This inversion is unusual; in most weeks, RFE-response cases take longer than non-RFE cases. The data brief does not tell us why the pattern reversed this week; a batch effect from cases filed close together is one possibility, but a single week is not enough to confirm any mechanism.

IOE (electronically filed cases) dominated this week's approvals, accounting for 6,051 of the 6,642 cases at a 64-day final-stage median. The National Benefits Center (MSC) handled 326 cases at 90 days. LIN (Nebraska Service Center) approved 106 cases at 100 days and WAC (California Service Center) approved 86 cases at 265 days. SRC (Texas Service Center) approved 73 cases at 44 days. All centers show a 0% transferred share this week, meaning the populations are comparable in that dimension, though the small sample sizes at LIN, WAC, and SRC make single-week readings for those centers unreliable.

LIN shows a steep 8-week slope of -18.8 days per week (R²=0.56), suggesting a meaningful downward trend in final-stage wait at that center in recent weeks. WAC shows an even steeper slope of -20.1 days per week, but its R² of 0.24 is too weak to treat as a reliable trend; the week-to-week variance is high given the small sample (86 cases). IOE's slope is -1.0 days per week with an R² of 0.41, a modest and moderately consistent improvement. The data does not support attributing center differences to staffing, routing policy, or workload; those factors are not available in the current data.