New data released September 11 shows U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services falling further behind even though far fewer people are filing. According to the American Immigration Council’s USCIS Immigration Filing Trends Dashboard, the agency’s pending caseload reached 12.1 million in the second quarter of fiscal year 2026 — a 7.2% increase over the year before, and the highest figure in a dataset that goes back to FY2016, when pending cases stood at just over 3 million.
The striking part is that the backlog grew while the workload shrank. Compared with FY2025 Q2, the number of forms USCIS received in FY2026 Q2 fell by 45.0%. Rather than using that lighter intake to work down existing delays, the agency reduced completions by 44.5%, finishing roughly 1.5 million cases — the eighth consecutive quarter of declines. For scale, USCIS completed 3.3 million applications and petitions in FY2024 Q2, more than twice the most recent quarter’s output.
That arithmetic shows up directly in wait times. The Council’s estimated backlog clearance time — how long it would take to clear the queue at the current pace — nearly doubled year over year, from 12.5 months in FY2025 Q2 to 24.1 months in FY2026 Q2. It rose almost 30% in a single quarter, up from 18.6 months in FY2026 Q1.
Employment-based applicants are squarely in the path. Pending I-765 applications for work permits filed by people with pending adjustment-of-status cases rose 206%, from 191,000 to 585,000 — meaning the EAD queue that green card applicants depend on for work authorization nearly tripled in a year. Pending I-129 petitions for nonimmigrant workers, the category covering H-1B, L-1 and O-1, climbed 90% from 63,000 to 120,000, even though receipts in that category fell by less than 1% and the approval rate held steady at 89.6%.
Approval rates moved sharply in several categories between FY2025 Q2 and FY2026 Q2. EB-1 extraordinary ability petitions (I-140, classification E11) dropped 31.0 percentage points, from 72.7% to 41.7%. EB-2 National Interest Waiver petitions fell 19.2 points, from 67.3% to 48.1%. Adjustment applications from Cuban nationals fell 44.6 points to 52.6%, and refugee adjustment applications fell 31.3 points to 66.1%. Parole-in-place approvals under Form I-131 dropped 24.1 points to 54.5%.
One indicator moved the other way: approvals of employment-based I-485 adjustment applications nearly doubled within FY2026, rising from 21,924 in Q1 to 41,979 in Q2. Whether that pace holds against a 24-month clearance estimate is the open question for anyone with a petition currently sitting in the queue.
Note that these figures cover FY2026 Q2. More recent USCIS I-140 data for Q3 shows the NIW approval rate recovering to 55.3%, so the NIW trend line is not uniformly downward — but the backlog picture the Council documents is a separate problem, and it is still getting worse.
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