I-130 processing at Houston, TX
Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the I-130 by Category, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location report.
Estimated wait
18 months
+16% vs. previous quarter
Pending applications
13,157
+11% vs. previous quarter
Decided in Jan–Mar 2026
2,169
−4% vs. previous quarter
Approval rate
92%
unchanged vs. previous quarter
Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending I-130 applications at the Houston office grew 11% to 13,157 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 18 months, up from 16 months. That is faster than the 3.4 years estimated for the country as a whole.
What happened to the applications
The bars are the I-130 decisions the Houston office made each quarter, approved in blue and denied in red. The amber line is its backlog: how many applications were still waiting at the end of that quarter, most of them filed in earlier ones. The dashed line is how many came in.
New quarters show up here within a day of USCIS publishing them and are stored in a JSON file on GitHub.
How long the wait is
The estimated wait is how long it would take to decide every pending application if the office kept up that quarter’s pace. It is not USCIS’s official processing time (which counts only cases already decided), but it moves the same way and shows the trend a quarter or two earlier.