USCIS processing times, explained

The processing time USCIS publishes for a form is one number, and most people read it as a forecast. It is not. The agency's own explanation of the figure says the displayed time is the amount of time it took to complete 80 percent of adjudicated cases over the previous six months. It is a description of the recent past for a particular form, category and office, and it is the same for everyone who files there.

How the 80 percent figure is built

USCIS takes every case of one form and category that an office decided in the last six months, approved or denied, and measures each one from the date the agency received it to the date it was completed. It then finds the point within which 80 percent of those cases finished. The agency's worked example: if 1,000 Form N-400 applications were completed in the previous six months and 800 of them were completed within 60 days, the page shows two months. Ten percent were faster than the median suggests and one in five took longer than the figure shown. That last group is why the number cannot be a promise.

Two consequences follow. The figure lags reality, because it measures cases that have just finished rather than cases that have just been filed; when an office clears a backlog of old cases, its published time goes up even as new filings move faster. And the figure is blind to what happened inside a case: a request for evidence, an interview, a transfer to another office and the applicant's own delays are all inside the count. What a Request for Evidence means covers the commonest of those.

A few forms still use an older method that USCIS calls cycle time, which measures how many months' worth of pending cases an office has on hand. The tool labels those forms. For them, a case is outside normal processing times when it has been pending longer than 130 percent of the cycle time.

Reading the tool

The processing-times page asks for three things and all three are on your receipt notice: the form number, the form category, and the office. The category matters more than people expect. Form I-485 has separate figures for family-based, employment-based, asylee and refugee adjustments; Form I-765 has more than a dozen categories keyed to the eligibility code in brackets on the notice; Form I-130 splits by the relationship claimed. Picking the wrong category gives a figure for someone else's queue.

The office is the one that sent your receipt notice, which is not always the one nearest you. Forms decided at service centers are now reported under Service Center Operations, because USCIS moves that work between centers and no longer publishes a figure per location. Forms decided at field offices, chiefly the N-400 and family-based I-485, are reported office by office, and the spread between offices is wide. FactFiled keeps the full set on USCIS processing times: every form and office, with the field-office lists on N-400 processing times by field office and I-485 processing times by field office, refreshed each month after USCIS updates the tool.

The case-inquiry date

Below the figure, the tool asks for your receipt date. This is the part that decides whether USCIS will talk to you. The agency accepts a case inquiry only when a case has been pending longer than the time it took to complete 93 percent of adjudications, a stricter cut-off than the 80 percent figure on display. USCIS states the formula: the case-inquiry date is the time to complete 93 percent of cases, minus the time your case has already been pending. Its own example: checking on January 1, 2022 for a case filed on January 1, 2021, with a 93 percent time of 13 months, gives an inquiry date of February 1, 2022.

If your case is past that date, the tool gives you a link to submit a case inquiry through e-Request. If it is not, the tool tells you the date on which you may ask, and an inquiry before then is answered with the same date. FactFiled's tracker pages print the 93 percent figure and the qualifying receipt date for every row, so the arithmetic is already done.

What an inquiry can and cannot do

A case inquiry asks USCIS to look at a case that is outside its own published range. It does not move the case ahead of others, and the typical response is a notice that the case is pending review, followed in many instances by action within a few weeks. Before filing one, check case status online with the receipt number; a request for evidence already sent, an interview already scheduled or a transfer already made is the usual explanation for a case that seems stuck.

An expedite request is a different thing. USCIS considers it on the narrow grounds set out in its Policy Manual: severe financial loss to a company or person, urgent humanitarian reasons, a nonprofit organization's request in furtherance of the cultural or social interests of the United States, a government interest, or clear USCIS error. Wanting the case decided sooner is not a ground.

For a short list of forms, chiefly the I-129 petition for a temporary worker, the I-140 immigrant petition and certain I-765 and I-539 filings, USCIS sells premium processing on Form I-907, with a commitment to act within a set number of business days. There is no paid fast lane for the N-400, the I-130 or the I-485.

When USCIS does not answer

If an inquiry produces nothing, the next step is outside the agency. The CIS Ombudsman, an office within the Department of Homeland Security but independent of USCIS, accepts requests for case assistance on Form DHS-7001 from people who have already tried USCIS's own channels. Congressional offices also make status inquiries for constituents. Neither can order a decision, but both can get a case looked at.

The figures on this site's tracker pages are copied from the USCIS tool on the day stated at the top of each page and are not adjusted. USCIS publishes new figures once a month and states the data window it used; the tracker pages are refreshed after each update.