I-90 Final-Stage Waits Are a Third Shorter Than Last Year, but a Preliminary Read Shows a Summer Climb

The preliminary median final-stage wait for I-90 this week is 67 days, compared with 101 days in the same week of 2025, a 34.1% reduction. That gap is the most directly reassuring figure in this week's data for applicants mid-case. The W36 sample covers 4,239 approved cases, roughly 50 to 70% of a typical week's volume in recent months, so the 67-day figure is an early read that may revise upward or downward as more approvals are logged.

The metric here is the median days from a case's last reported status to approval, what the brief calls the final-stage wait. It captures how long cases spent in the adjudication (the USCIS case decision step) queue immediately before approval, not the full time from original filing. The cohort burndown section below tracks full filing-to-approval pacing separately.

The 12-week arc is one of steady, if uneven, upward movement. Medians opened at 15 days the week of Jun 15 (W25) and have reached 67 days the week of Aug 31 (W36), a 52-day rise over the full 12-week window. The sharpest single-week move came in W34 (Aug 17), when the median reached 104 days, up 58 days from W33's 46-day reading, before easing back to 66 days in W35 and 67 days this week. The 8-week regression slope is +5.8 days per week (R² = 0.44), a moderate fit that signals a real directional trend without accounting for week-to-week swings. The data brief does not tell us why the W34 reading was elevated; the subsequent retreat to 66 days in W35 is consistent with a batch effect, but a single week is not enough to confirm any mechanism.

Despite the summer climb, context matters. The current 67-day preliminary median sits well below the 3-year same-week average of 101 days and also below the 12-week trailing average of 45 days only when the early-summer readings of 15 to 21 days are included. The more recent 8-week window, which the slope captures, reflects a different and rising baseline. Both frames are real; which one is more relevant depends on how long a reader's case has been pending.

An anomaly flag fired this week for RFE (Request for Evidence, USCIS's standard follow-up letter asking for missing documents) response cases. Cases that received an RFE and submitted a response cleared in a median of 20 days, compared with 37 days for cases that never received an RFE. The speed ratio is 1.87x in the direction that is counterintuitive: the group that went through extra scrutiny finished faster. This does not mean applicants should seek an RFE. The difference reflects which cases happened to be approved during this particular week's sample, likely a group of RFE responses that were filed close together and cleared as a batch. The data brief does not supply a mechanism; a single week is not sufficient to draw a conclusion.

RFE-response cases cleared faster this week because of which cases happened to be approved, not because extra scrutiny speeds things up.