N-400 processing at Chicago, IL
Latest USCIS data: Jan–Mar 2026, from the N-400 by Category, Case Status, and USCIS Field Office Location report.
Estimated wait
17 months
+142% vs. previous quarter
Pending applications
19,893
+9% vs. previous quarter
Decided in Jan–Mar 2026
3,484
−55% vs. previous quarter
Approval rate
91%
−2% vs. previous quarter
Quarter-over-quarter highlight: The pile of pending N-400 applications at the Chicago office grew 9% to 19,893 in Jan–Mar 2026. At that quarter's pace of decisions, clearing it would take 17 months, up from 7.1 months. That is about the same as the 20 months estimated for the country as a whole.
What happened to the applications
The bars are the N-400 decisions the Chicago 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.