EB-2 NIW statistics

Official USCIS data, published case studies, and Community case data. What do NIW approval rates mean for your chances?

Page updated October 14, 2026

USCIS source period: FY2026 Q3

USCIS data last verified October 3, 2026

September 2026 roundup

01 · USCISWhat is happening with EB-2 NIW?

FY2026 Q3

55.3%

of decisions approved

+7.2 pts quarter on quarter
+1.3 pts year on year

13,831
Received this quarter: 96,297
Pending at quarter end: 3,835
Approved this quarter: 3,103
Denied this quarter

6,938 decisions this quarter55% approved

55.3%

Approval share, FY2026 Q3

Range in view: 35.7% to 76.7%

13,831

Received, FY2026 Q3

Range across 11 quarters: 12,648 to 20,141

FY2027 EB-2 final action dates

October 2026

Priority dates must be earlier than the listed cutoff. “All other areas” includes Mexico and the Philippines.

India: November 1, 2013
China (mainland born): October 1, 2021
All other areas: January 1, 2025
Status checked: October 14, 2026

Historical worldwide EB-2 annual limit

FY2024Annual limit reachedSeptember 9, 2024

FY2025Annual limit reachedSeptember 2, 2025

FY2026No notice at this checkSeptember 23, 2026

Visa number availability is a separate stage from the NIW I-140 adjudication statistics shown in the other tabs.

Historical USCIS NIW data, FY2018-FY2023

52.6%

of NIW receipts were in STEM fields, FY2023

Excludes a small residual with no job code on record; see methodology

FY2026 Q3

Receipts: 13,831
Decisions: 6,938

FY2024 Q1 to FY2026 Q3, 11 quarters

Source: USCIS Form I-140 statistics · FY2026 Q3

Methodology

Figures come from the Form I-140 statistics that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services publishes on its Immigration and Citizenship Data page, filtered to the Second Preference (EB-2) National Interest Waiver rows. This page reads a normalized copy stored by PetitionMatcher, last retrieved September 23, 2026 from the FY2026 Q3 release.

Approval share is approvals divided by (approvals + denials) for a quarter. It is not approvals divided by receipts: a quarter’s decisions can involve petitions filed in earlier quarters, and a growing pending backlog does not move it. It describes decided cases in aggregate, not the outcome of any one petition.

Quarterly receipts, approvals, and denials are flow statistics for the reporting period; pending is the backlog at quarter end. The History tab compares receipts to decisions (approvals plus denials) by quarter; a quarter’s decisions can involve petitions filed in an earlier quarter, so this is a flow comparison, not a matched cohort, and it is not a backlog calculation.

NIW share of EB-2 receipts is NIW receipts divided by total Second Preference (EB-2) receipts for the same quarter, both from this same USCIS workbook: a filing-volume composition statistic, never approvals or decisions as the denominator. It is left out for a quarter when USCIS’s own EB-2 figure for that quarter cannot be confirmed. Beneficiary country of birth figures for NIW petitions have moved to their own chapter below.

Coverage currently begins FY2024 Q1 and grows as USCIS publishes each quarterly file, so figures on this page cover only the ingested quarters, not an all-time total.

Source: USCIS Immigration and Citizenship Data.

Methodology

Figures come from USCIS’s own STEM-Related Petition Trends: EB-2 and O-1A Categories FY 2018 - FY 2023 fact sheet, a fixed historical report covering FY2018-FY2023, not the recurring quarterly I-140 workbook the rest of this chapter reads. USCIS has not published a successor covering later fiscal years; this tab will not update until it does.

USCIS determines STEM and non-STEM by matching job titles the petitioner provided against the Bureau of Labor Statistics Standard Occupational Classification. A small share of receipts each year has no job code on record and is excluded from the STEM / non-STEM chart shown here, though it is included in the receipts total the STEM share is computed against, so that share is never inflated by leaving it out of the denominator.

Receipts, approvals, and denials in the same fiscal year are not a matched cohort: USCIS notes that a petition approved or denied in a given year may have been received in an earlier one. USCIS’s own report states that an approval or denial rate cannot be validly determined for this STEM / non-STEM breakdown, so none is shown here.

Source: USCIS, STEM-Related Petition Trends: EB-2 and O-1A Categories FY 2018 - FY 2023, data as of October 2023.

02 · COUNTRIESWhere are NIW petitions coming from?

By country of birth · FY2026 Q3

Top 10 of 188 · counts, not approval rates

Beneficiary country of birth

2,119

China, FY2026 Q3

Published country-data quarters only

Source: USCIS Form I-140 statistics · FY2026 Q3

Methodology

Country means beneficiary country of birth, as USCIS reports it. USCIS publishes NIW receipts and approvals by country in the same Form I-140 workbook as the USCIS chapter, but not denials, so no country approval rate is calculated here.

Not every fiscal quarter has a published country breakdown. The quarters shown are exactly the ones USCIS actually released one for, which is not always the same set as the USCIS chapter’s quarterly aggregate. A fiscal quarter with no published breakdown is left out of these views entirely; it is never shown as a country having zero activity.

03 · PROCESSING TIMESWhat do the official processing benchmarks show?

Official USCIS processing time

30 months

80% of NIW petitions were completed within this time over USCIS’s trailing 6-month reporting window.

Checked: September 22, 2026

Source: USCIS Check Case Processing Times

All I-140 classifications

3.6 months

Non-premium median, FY2026 through August 30, 2026

Premium median: 1.0 months

These USCIS medians include I-140 categories beyond NIW and are shown as broader processing context, not an NIW-specific figure or a prediction for an individual petition.

Source: USCIS Check Case Processing Times

Methodology

This figure comes directly from USCIS’s own Check Case Processing Times tool for Form I-140, Advanced degree or exceptional ability requesting a National Interest Waiver (NIW). USCIS defines it as the time within which approximately 80% of adjudicated petitions in this category were completed, measured over a trailing 6-month reporting window; USCIS updates the tool monthly, so up to 20% of petitions take longer than the displayed figure.

Whether USCIS's methodology excludes premium-processed petitions from this specific figure has not been confirmed for this observation.

This elapsed time can include time spent on a Request for Evidence: it is not USCIS’s internal working time and not a post-RFE turnaround figure. PetitionMatcher does not compute either of those from this source.

PetitionMatcher checks this figure periodically and records it only when it changes, building a dated history over time; the live USCIS tool is not queried when you load this page. This is an official population-level benchmark, not a prediction, estimate, or guarantee for any individual petition, and it measures a different population under a different methodology than the published-case tabs on this page.

04 · AAOWhat issues appear in appealed NIW cases?

426

non-precedent AAO decisions on EB-2 NIW petitions, issued 2026.

385 / 37 / 4
dismissed / remanded / sustained: 390 / 36
on appeal / on a motion

How far the NIW analysis reached

All three prongs reached18 of 4264.2%
Some prongs, rest not reached311 of 42673%
Stopped at EB-2 eligibility35 of 4268.2%
Decided on procedure only53 of 42612%
Other9 of 4262.1%

Substantial merit

4.2%

not satisfied · 9 of 213 decided

National importance

83.8%

not satisfied · 253 of 302 decided

Later prongs, where reached

Prong 2: Well positioned85 of 9292%
Prong 3: Beneficial to waive21 of 25 †84%

† Fewer than 30 decided; read as indicative.

National importance, found not satisfied

Social Sciences24 of 24100%
Business & Economics50 of 5198%
Computer Science & AI50 of 6182%
Engineering60 of 7976%

n = 215 decided across shown fields

Source: PetitionMatcher AAO dataset · 426 non-precedent decisions · issued 2026

Methodology

PetitionMatcher has read and structured 426 non-precedent decisions issued by the USCIS Administrative Appeals Office in 2026 on EB-2 National Interest Waiver petitions. An AAO decision resolves an administrative appeal or motion inside USCIS. These are not federal court rulings, and as non-precedent decisions they do not bind later USCIS adjudications.

This set contains only petitions whose denial was carried to AAO and whose decision AAO released. It is not a representative sample of NIW denials, and still less of NIW petitions in general. Nothing here is a denial rate or an approval probability. A figure such as “national importance was found not satisfied in 83% of the decisions that reached it” describes this set of appealed decisions, not NIW cases at large.

USCIS weighs NIW eligibility against the three prongs of Matter of Dhanasar (2016), reviewed with its original sources and later USCIS guidance on the NIW policy timeline. When AAO finds an earlier prong not satisfied it often does not reach the later ones. Every prong figure on this page is calculated only over the decisions where AAO actually decided that prong, meaning it recorded the prong as satisfied or not satisfied. Decisions where the prong was not reached, or where a favorable lower finding was left undisputed, are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator. They are never counted as satisfied.

Prong 1 has two parts, the proposed endeavor’s substantial merit and its national importance, and they are reported separately here because AAO’s decisions turn on them very differently. National importance is the one broken out by field because it is what these appeals most often turn on; the by-field figures are not denial rates.

Field labels use PetitionMatcher’s matching taxonomy, the same one used elsewhere on the site. The by-field comparison shows only fields with at least 20 decisions where national importance was decided, and always shows the underlying counts.

01 · PUBLISHED CASESWhat do successful published cases look like?

5,275

publicly documented successful NIW cases

14
professional fields: 13
profession families

Reported in each case study

n = 5,113 case studies

Publications5,062 of 5,11399%
Citations5,037 of 5,11399%
Peer review or judging3,317 of 5,11365%
Recommendation letters3,097 of 5,11361%
Funding1,926 of 5,11338%
Government support1,650 of 5,11332%
Patents473 of 5,1139.3%
Implementation or adoption458 of 5,1139.0%
Commercialization21 of 5,1130.4%

Top 10 of 14

Computer Science & AI503 of 66176%
Agriculture & Food Sciences88 of 11875%
Public Health89 of 12671%
Mathematics & Statistics85 of 12369%
Engineering1,164 of 1,74967%
Medical & Clinical Sciences314 of 49164%
Biological Sciences540 of 93758%
Physics140 of 24557%
Chemistry185 of 37649%

Peer review or judging reported · 9 fields · n = 4,826

Source: PetitionMatcher dataset · 5,275 published NIW case studies · 2012 to 2026

Methodology

PetitionMatcher analyzes publicly available NIW case studies published by immigration service providers. This corpus currently holds 5,275 case studies drawn from 2 public collections. Facts are read from each published article by an AI extraction step and attributed to the petitioner’s own work at or before filing. PetitionMatcher did not adjudicate or approve any of these cases.

Published case studies are selected by their publishers as illustrative successes. They are not a representative sample of NIW approvals and cannot be used to compute an approval rate. Every figure here describes this published-case corpus, not NIW applicants in general, and none of it is an approval probability or an evidence requirement.

One publisher currently accounts for approximately 97% of this corpus, so these statistics may reflect that publisher’s case selection and reporting practices more than the field as a whole.

“Reported” means the case study states the evidence type for this petitioner. When a case study does not mention publications, patents, funding, and so on, that is recorded as not reported: a published summary can simply omit something the petitioner had. An explicit “none” is recorded only when the source states it, which these marketing summaries almost never do, so there is no “approved without” view.

Evidence rates are computed over the 5,113 case studies in the largest collection only. The smaller collections do not record peer review, funding, government support, or implementation, so including them would understate those rates for a reason that is a data convention, not reality. Field and profession labels use PetitionMatcher’s matching taxonomy.

The By field tab compares only the evidence types that vary: publications and citations are reported in about 99% of case studies in every field, so they carry no signal. It shows a field only when it has at least 100 case studies in this scope, and every bar is drawn on a common 0 to 100% scale.

02 · PROCESSING TIMESHow long did published NIW cases take?

Observed timelines from successful EB-2 NIW case studies published by Wegreened and NIWUS with enough date information to calculate each interval. These are historical case-study timelines, not USCIS-wide processing times or a prediction for an individual petition.

165

median days from filing to decision

55 to 389
days, middle 50% of cases: 431
qualifying case studies

Of 5,275 public case studies, 431 state both a filing date and a decision date.

Cases reporting an RFE had a median filing-to-decision time of 357 days, compared with 315 days among cases explicitly confirming no RFE.

This dataset does not record when an RFE was issued or when a petitioner responded, so it cannot show time to RFE or time after an RFE response.

350 qualifying case studies do not address RFE status either way and are left out of this comparison, not counted as no RFE.

Reported an RFEN = 55

201d357d median554d

Confirmed no RFEN = 26

153d315d median471d

Median days from filing to decision, by the quarter the case was filed.

2023 Q4365dN=38
2024 Q1477dN=58
2024 Q2323dN=49
2024 Q3226dN=36
2024 Q478dN=39
2025 Q1130dN=52
2025 Q290dN=41

Filing-quarter comparisons include only cohorts whose quarter ended at least 389 days ago and that contain at least 20 qualifying cases.

Source: PetitionMatcher dataset · 431 case studies with both a filing and a decision date

Methodology

Observed timelines from the same PetitionMatcher published-case corpus used in the Published Cases section: publicly documented NIW case studies where the publisher, or PetitionMatcher’s AI extraction from that publication, states both a filing date and a decision date. Of 5,275 eligible case studies, 431 (8%) state both dates and are used here. A case study missing either date contributes to every other statistics section but not to this one: unknown dates are never guessed, and a missing date is never treated as zero.

“Decision” means the date the case study reports its NIW approval; this corpus is success stories only, so there is no denial date to compare against. The interval is calendar days from filing to that approval, restricted to a first-instance I-140 decision: a case study whose own text flags an appeal or reopened petition is excluded, because that interval spans a different and longer process than a direct decision (2 currently excluded on this basis). A handful of case studies report an internally inconsistent decision before filing; those are excluded rather than shown as a negative or zero duration (none currently excluded on this basis).

Every group shown here has at least 20 qualifying cases, chosen so a median and interquartile range are not decided by a handful of cases. A group, RFE comparison, or filing quarter that does not clear that bar is left out rather than shown as a misleading small sample.

This dataset has no record of when an RFE was issued or when a petitioner responded to one, only whether a case study explicitly addresses RFE status at all. The RFE tab therefore cannot show time to RFE or time from RFE response to decision, and it is not an official USCIS processing-time figure. It instead compares total filing-to-decision time between case studies that explicitly report receiving an RFE and case studies that explicitly report receiving none, each verified to carry a supporting statement rather than a simple unaddressed field. Case studies that never address RFE status either way are left out of that comparison rather than counted toward “no RFE”.

Processing type is not consistently reported across this population. The dataset includes confirmed premium-processing cases, so these figures should not be read as regular-processing benchmarks. A regular-versus-premium split is not shown: it is stated for too few case studies, and almost entirely confirms premium processing, so a split would compare a large premium group against a handful of regular cases rather than a fair sample of both.

Filing-quarter comparisons on the By filing period tab include only cohorts whose quarter ended at least 389 days ago and that contain at least 20 qualifying cases. This is a display rule that keeps a filing quarter off the chart while it is still too new to compare fairly against older quarters, not a statistical adjustment to the underlying figures.

These are historical observations from cases in the PetitionMatcher dataset, not USCIS processing-time estimates and not a prediction for an individual petition. Published case studies are selected by their publishers as illustrative successes: a case still pending has not yet been published as a success story and cannot appear here.

01 · COMMUNITY CASE LIBRARYWhat can you compare in the matcher?

Snapshot · October 8, 2026

1,279

Community cases available for matching

The September archive review excluded 248 additional records from the matcher.

74.7%Approved

Approved: 95574.7%
Denied: 25519.9%
Unlisted: 675.2%
Other: 20.2%

02 · REPORTING ACTIVITYWhat are people reporting in the community?

Reviewed September 2026 sample

22
Reviewed reports: 19
Reported approvals: 3
Reported denials

We reviewed 22 community posts reporting September 2026 NIW I-140 outcomes. These are self-reported results from a selected sample, not all September cases or a measure of your approval chances.

Source methodology

Reviewed 85 visible rows linked from source-labelled weeks 36 to 40: 22 distinct primary reports included, 23 rows excluded and 40 unresolved. Headline totals differ from listed rows.
Inclusion requires a firsthand NIW I-140 final outcome and explicit September 2026 evidence in the original post. Month-only dates remain month-only; notice receipt and tracker dates are not collapsed into a decision day.
Duplicates, older outcomes, pending RFEs, consular or adjustment milestones and non-NIW cases are excluded. Missing dates, unclear category and inaccessible originals remain unresolved.
Two included approvals report September 28 and 29 dates. This establishes individual reports, not exhaustive coverage of those days or September 30.
Source review checks what posts report. Outcomes are not independently verified against USCIS records.
The sample is separate from the 1,705-thread historical tracker. Underlying petition identity and tracker membership remain unreconciled; no reports are added to historical charts or totals.

Coverage: individual reports through Aug. 17, 2026; September sample reviewed from original posts linked in source-labelled weeks 36 to 40.

Methodology and coverage

The matcher library contains 1,268 imported archive cases and 11 earlier Community cases.
Eleven newly included cases have assumed posting months. Those months are excluded from verified source-date cohorts and do not establish September reporting coverage.
Filing months are estimated from reported decision dates and processing days. Only final outcomes with both values are used.
Premium may include cases upgraded after filing, so reported time is not the Premium Processing clock.
The reviewed September sample is selected, self-reported and not exhaustive. Reporting-week labels do not establish calendar capture boundaries.
The 1,705-thread historical report tracker is separate from the matcher case collection. New extracted cases do not automatically increase report totals.
The reviewed sample remains excluded from historical tracker charts and totals pending underlying-petition and membership reconciliation.
Original identities, post text, platform identifiers, and source URLs are not displayed.

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