A crowd-sourced National Interest Waiver (NIW) approval-and-denial tracker maintained by the r/EB2_NIW community offers a rare, near-real-time window into how EB-2 NIW petitions are faring in mid-2026 — and the latest snapshot underscores just how competitive the category has become.
For the week of May 26, 2026, the tracker logged roughly 130 total entries submitted by applicants. Of those, about 37 cases (~28%) were approvals, around 38 (~29%) were denials, and the remaining 55 (~42%) were still pending. In other words, among cases that had reached a decision, denials slightly outnumbered approvals — a striking ratio for a category that historically saw far higher approval rates.
These numbers come with important caveats. The tracker is self-reported, the sample is small relative to USCIS’s total volume, and applicants who receive denials may be more (or less) likely to report than those who are approved. It is a community signal, not official agency data. Even so, the dataset has become a closely watched barometer because USCIS does not publish week-by-week NIW outcomes, leaving applicants to piece together trends themselves.
The practical message for prospective filers is consistency with what attorneys and applicants have been saying all year: the evidentiary bar is high, and a petition needs to clearly satisfy all three prongs of Matter of Dhanasar. Petitioners are increasingly front-loading their filings with strong documentation — quantified impact, independent recognition, and a crisply argued national-interest case — rather than relying on credentials alone.
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Source: Reddit r/EB2_NIW