USCIS’s newest monthly report to Congress covers August 2026. It shows the agency denying family petitions far more often than a month earlier. It also shows processing times still rising across the forms most green-card applicants depend on. The figures come from USCIS’s “Number of Service-Wide Forms by Month, Form Status, and Processing Time” report, which the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2022 requires. The August file is now posted on uscis.gov. A r/USCIS user flagged the release today.
I-130 denials nearly tripled in one month. USCIS denied 14,704 Form I-130 family petitions in August, up from 5,480 in July, an increase of about 168%. Approvals went the other way, falling from 30,430 to 28,025. That puts denials at roughly 34% of all I-130 decisions, compared with about 15% in July and similar levels in May and June. The I-130 backlog grew to 2,475,445 pending petitions, and 2,165,902 of them have waited more than six months. The report does not explain the spike. It is the first full month after USCIS’s August 5 evidence policy, which lets officers deny a filing without first sending an RFE or NOID when required initial evidence is missing. The data cannot show whether that policy caused the jump. Petition-to-remove-conditions (I-751) denials also doubled, from 467 to 983.
Employment-based green cards are slowing too. Average processing time for employment-based I-485 applications reached 11.8 months in August. It was 9.3 months in May, 10.0 in June and 10.5 in July, so it has gone up every month. Approvals fell to 11,694, the lowest of the four months, while denials rose to 1,323. In May there were 863, so the denial share of EB adjustment decisions went from about 6% to about 10%. About 270,857 EB I-485s are pending, and 137,354 of them are older than six months. EAD (I-765) processing averaged 6.8 months, up from 4.7 in May.
The naturalization backlog passed 813,000. N-400 approvals dropped to 15,349, down from 18,439 in June, while USCIS received 54,492 new applications. Pending cases rose to 813,453, about 100,000 more than in May (712,572). More than 513,000 of them have waited over six months. The average N-400 processing time is now 12.7 months, compared with 10.1 in May. Denials were about 22% of N-400 decisions.
What it means for applicants. For NIW and other EB-2 filers, the I-485 numbers matter most. Even when a priority date is current, the adjustment step is taking close to a year on average and is getting slower each month. With FY2027 visa numbers opening October 1 and the October Visa Bulletin still unpublished, many applicants may soon become eligible to file. They should plan for longer waits and send complete initial evidence. Under current policy, a missing document can lead straight to a denial instead of an RFE. Note that these are national averages across all completed cases, and USCIS says they can differ from the processing times posted on its website.
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Source: Reddit r/USCIS (u/Quiet-Mammoth7441) — USCIS monthly report to Congress, August 2026