I-526 processing times · Immigrant Petition by Standalone Investor
Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the All USCIS Application and Petition Form Types report.
Estimated wait
4.8 years
−16% vs. previous quarter
Pending applications
1,806
unchanged vs. previous quarter
Decided in Jan–Mar 2026
95
+19% vs. previous quarter
Approval rate
27%
−37% vs. previous quarter
Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending I-526 applications at USCIS stayed at 1,806 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 4.8 years, down from 5.6 years.
What happened to the applications
The bars are the I-526 decisions USCIS made each quarter, approved in blue and denied in red. The amber line is the 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 USCIS kept up that quarter’s pace. USCIS's own median processing time only counts cases already decided, so it reacts to a slowdown a quarter or two later.