I-539 processing times · Application To Extend/Change Nonimmigrant Status

Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the All USCIS Application and Petition Form Types report.

Estimated wait

6.9 months

+32% vs. previous quarter

Pending applications

109,156

+17% vs. previous quarter

Decided in Jan–Mar 2026

47,486

−12% vs. previous quarter

Approval rate

86%

−3% vs. previous quarter

Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending I-539 applications at USCIS grew 17% to 109,156 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 6.9 months, up from 5.2 months.

What happened to the applications

The bars are the I-539 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.

Source: USCIS’s quarterly All USCIS Application and Petition Form Types reports, via the Immigration and Citizenship Data page.
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.

The estimated wait is the pending applications at the end of each quarter, divided by the decisions (approvals and denials) made per month during it. USCIS's median is how long the cases it decided in the quarter had taken.