USCIS got slower on 133 lines in one month
The finding: between the July 11 and August 6, 2026 captures of USCIS’s official processing-times tool, 163 of the 251 form/office combinations we track moved. 133 got slower. 30 got faster. Roughly four out of five lines that moved, moved against the applicant.
USCIS never publishes this. The official tool shows today’s figure and overwrites yesterday’s, so the direction of service levels — improving or deteriorating, and where — is invisible from the source alone. We bank every capture and difference them.
Window measured: 2026-07-11 → 2026-08-06 · 251 combinations compared · 163 moved (133 slower, 30 faster, 77 unchanged) · median move 1 months
The biggest slowdowns
| Form | Category | Office | 2026-07-11 | 2026-08-06 | Change (months) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I-130 | Permanent resident filing for a spouse or child under 21 | All Field Offices | 129.5 | 139 | +9.5 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Santa Ana CA | 17 | 23.5 | +6.5 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | San Jose CA | 17 | 23.5 | +6.5 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Portland ME | 14.5 | 20.5 | +6 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | San Francisco CA | 15.5 | 21.5 | +6 |
| N-600K | Application for Citizenship and Issuance of Certificate Under Section 322 | Chicago IL | 30 | 35.5 | +5.5 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Agana GU | 12.5 | 17 | +4.5 |
| I-212 | Permission to reapply for admission after deportation and removal | All Field Offices | 37.5 | 41.5 | +4 |
| I-360 | Afghan or Iraqi Translators and Afghan or Iraqi nationals who worked for on or behalf of the U.S. government | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 11.5 | 15.5 | +4 |
| I-765 | Based on being an L-2 spouse of an L-1 nonimmigrant [(a)(18)] | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 12.5 | 16.5 | +4 |
| I-539 | Change of status to L dependent | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 10.5 | 14 | +3.5 |
| N-600K | Application for Citizenship and Issuance of Certificate Under Section 322 | Newark NJ | 5 | 8.5 | +3.5 |
| I-102 | Initial issuance or replacement of a Form I-94 | National Benefits Center | 13 | 16 | +3 |
| I-102 | Initial issuance or replacement of a Form I-94 | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 13 | 16 | +3 |
| I-130 | U.S. citizen filing for a spouse, parent, or child under 21 | All Field Offices | 72 | 75 | +3 |
The lines that improved
| Form | Category | Office | 2026-07-11 | 2026-08-06 | Change (months) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| I-130 | U.S. citizen filing for unmarried son/daughter 21 or older | All Field Offices | 216 | 195 | -21 |
| I-130 | U.S. citizen filing for a married son or daughter | National Benefits Center | 64.5 | 56 | -8.5 |
| I-817 | Voluntary departure under the family unity program | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 8.5 | 5 | -3.5 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Baltimore MD | 21 | 19 | -2 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Imperial CA | 15 | 13 | -2 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Helena MT | 7.5 | 6 | -1.5 |
| I-751 | Removal of lawful permanent resident conditions (spouses of U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents) | All Field Offices | 39.5 | 38 | -1.5 |
| I-130 | U.S. citizen filing for a brother or sister | National Benefits Center | 59.5 | 58.5 | -1 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Anchorage AK | 10.5 | 9.5 | -1 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Cleveland OH | 15 | 14 | -1 |
| I-485 | Family-based adjustment applications | Louisville KY | 12.5 | 11.5 | -1 |
| I-821 | Somalia Initial | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 15 | 14 | -1 |
| I-129 | H-2B - Temporary nonagricultural workers | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 5.5 | 5 | -0.5 |
| I-129 | TN - United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA, formerly NAFTA) professional | Service Center Operations (SCOPS) | 4.5 | 4 | -0.5 |
| I-130 | Permanent resident filing for a spouse or child under 21 | National Benefits Center | 52 | 51.5 | -0.5 |
The two numbers to sit with
139 months. A permanent resident who files Form I-130 for a spouse or a child under 21, routed through a field office, now faces a published figure of 139 months — the time within which USCIS says 80% of cases are completed — over eleven and a half years — and that line added 9.5 months of wait in a single month. A queue that grows by nine and a half months every month is not standing still; it is accelerating away from the people in it.
195 months. The biggest improvement in the window was I-130 for unmarried adult sons and daughters of US citizens at field offices, down 21 months. The improved figure is still a wait of more than sixteen years. On these family lines, “getting better” and “long beyond any planning horizon” are the same fact.
Method
- Source: USCIS’s official Case Processing Times tool, captured by enumerating every form/office combination the tool exposes (43 forms, 251 combinations). Each capture is banked with its date; nothing is overwritten.
- Value semantics: USCIS publishes the time in which 80% of recent cases completed, per form and processing location, in months. A combination counts as moved only when both captures show a published figure and the figure changed; 11 combinations had no published figure at one end of the window and are excluded from the comparison.
- Cadence: captures are roughly monthly. The tables above render from the movement file, which is rebuilt by hand after a capture — it is not regenerated automatically, so the window printed above the tables is the one to quote (see Source, as-of and refresh below).
Source, as-of and refresh
- Exact source: USCIS Case Processing Times — one figure per form, form category and office, read from the result line “80% of cases are completed within …”. USCIS documents the figure on its More Information About Case Processing Times page.
- The publisher’s own as-of stamp: there isn’t one. When we re-read the tool in a browser on October 7, 2026, neither the landing page nor a result showed a “last updated” date. USCIS says only: “We update case processing times on the website monthly with the latest available data.” So every figure we bank carries our capture date instead.
- What we checked on October 7, 2026: the tool’s form menu lists 43 forms, and two live lines matched our newest capture exactly — I-90 10-year renewal at Service Center Operations (10.5 months) and I-130 filed by a permanent resident for a spouse or child under 21 at All Field Offices (139 months).
- Captures banked so far: July 11, August 6, September 10 and October 3, 2026. The October 3 capture added N-400 naturalization times for individual field offices, so it covers more combinations than the first three.
- This page’s window: 2026-07-11 → 2026-08-06, built 2026-08-08. The September and October captures are banked but have not yet been turned into a new movement window, so the tables above are not the latest month. We say so rather than re-date the page.
- Refresh cadence: USCIS updates monthly and publishes no release calendar. Our capture is a manually started browser pull about once a month — the tool sits behind a Cloudflare check that blocks server-side clients, so it is not a scheduled job — and the movement file is rebuilt by hand afterwards.
How the movement is computed
- Each capture stores one value per combination, keyed by form, USCIS category code and
office code (for example
I-130|134A-F21|FOD), with its unit. - Two dated captures are compared. A combination is compared only if it appears in both
captures and both show a published figure in the same unit. Combinations with no
figure at either end, or whose unit changed, are counted separately (
combos_no_figure), and combinations that exist in only one capture are counted as added or removed — never as movers. - Change = later figure minus earlier figure, rounded to 0.1. Positive means slower; negative means faster; zero is “unchanged”.
- The “median move” is the median of the absolute change across the lines that moved.
- The two tables list the 15 largest slowdowns and the 15 largest improvements;
all_moversin the file has every line that moved.
The underlying figure is USCIS’s own computation, not ours: “the amount of time it took us to complete 80% of adjudicated cases over the last six months,” counted from the date USCIS received the case to the date it approved or denied it.
Known limitations
- It is not a median and not a forecast. It is the time within which 80% of cases finished over the previous six months, so it lags real conditions and says nothing about an individual case.
- Some long family lines measure visa availability, not USCIS speed. On the I-130 preference lines, USCIS’s own result carries this note: “This processing time reflects statutory constraints on available immigrant visas, for which the wait times are typically much longer than the time it takes for USCIS to adjudicate the form.” A large move on those lines can reflect the immigrant-visa queue as much as USCIS workload — read them alongside the Visa Bulletin movement data.
- One window can reverse. Both headline I-130 lines on this page moved again in the September 10 capture and were back at their August 6 figures in the October 3 capture. Treat a single month’s move as a signal to watch, not a trend.
- The office list changes. USCIS is relabeling service-center lines as “Service Center Operations (SCOPS)”, and our October capture added N-400 lines for individual field offices. New or relabeled combinations show up as added or removed, not as movement.
Field dictionary — uscis_times_movement.json
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
_meta.window_from, _meta.window_to | The two capture dates compared (YYYY-MM-DD) |
_meta.generated | Date we built the file |
_meta.source_url | The USCIS tool the captures come from |
_meta.value_semantics | What each value is (the 80%-completion figure) |
summary.combos_compared | Combinations present in both captures |
summary.combos_added, summary.combos_removed | Combinations only in the later / only in the earlier capture |
summary.combos_no_figure | Compared combinations with no published figure at one end, or a changed unit |
summary.moved, got_slower, got_faster, unchanged | Counts by direction |
summary.median_abs_delta_months | Median absolute change among the lines that moved |
top_slower[], top_faster[] | The 15 largest moves each way |
all_movers[] | Every combination that moved, largest move first |
key (in each row) | Form, category code and office code joined by | — the join key to the snapshot file |
form, form_name, category, office | USCIS’s own labels |
from_months, to_months | The figure at each capture, in unit |
delta_months | Change, later minus earlier (positive = slower) |
unit | USCIS’s unit for the line |
Download the data
- uscis_times_movement.json — every mover in the window with from/to figures, plus the summary counts on this page.
- uscis_processing_times.json — the full current snapshot: 43 forms and 333 form/category/office combinations, with a capture date per row (snapshot captured 2026-10-03).
Suggested citation: MigrantUSA, “USCIS processing times — month-over-month movement,” migrantusa.com/datasets/uscis-processing-times-movement/, retrieved [date]. To cite one figure, cite USCIS’s tool for the figure and this page for the change, and give both window dates — a move only means something with both ends named.
Related
- USCIS processing times dataset — the snapshot this movement is computed from, with a free embeddable widget.
- USCIS processing times lookup tool — interactive, by form and office.
- Visa Bulletin movement data — the same idea applied to State Department priority dates.
This is general information, not legal advice. Processing times are the figure within which USCIS says 80% of cases are completed, and say nothing about any individual case. Consult an attorney for your specific situation.