I-485 processing at San Francisco, CA
Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the I-485 by Category, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location report.
Estimated wait
27 months
+33% vs. previous quarter
Pending applications
18,043
+8% vs. previous quarter
Decided in Jan–Mar 2026
1,972
−19% vs. previous quarter
Approval rate
94%
−2% vs. previous quarter
Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending I-485 applications at the San Francisco office grew 8% to 18,043 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 27 months, up from 21 months. That is about the same as the 32 months estimated for the country as a whole.
What happened to the applications
The bars are the I-485 decisions the San Francisco 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.