Tracking Applications, Approvals, and Processing Times by Fiscal Year (October-September)
This dashboard offers an easy way to explore how immigration applications and petitions have changed at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the past decade. Using publicly available data, it highlights trends in how many people are applying, how long cases take to process, how often they’re approved, and where backlogs are growing. It’s designed to make a complex system more understandable for anyone interested in how key immigration pathways work in practice.
- Start by selecting a form: Search or browse to find a visa or form. You can also add a second form to compare trends.
- Switch between metrics: Use the buttons to view different measures, such as completions, applications received, or approval and denial rates.
- Hover to see details: Move your cursor over the charts to view quarterly values and additional context.
Turn your phone sideways
This dashboard is designed for landscape view on phones. Rotate your phone to explore charts and compare visa forms.
Methodology
This dashboard uses data collected from the Immigration and Citizenship Data portal of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which tracks how many immigration applications and petitions are submitted, approved, denied, and still waiting to be processed. We selected a set of major immigration forms—such as those related to work, family, humanitarian protections, and citizenship—because they represent some of the most important pathways people use to come to or remain in the United States.
To make the data easy to compare over time, we organized everything into quarterly or annual snapshots starting in fiscal year 2016. We also cleaned and standardized the information so that it lines up across different forms and reporting periods.
In cases when USCIS did not provide a total number of completed cases, we added approvals and denials together to estimate it. We also calculated approval and denial rates by dividing approved or denied cases by total completions, an efficiency measure showing how many cases are completed compared to how many new ones were received, and an approximate wait‑time indicator by dividing the number of pending cases by the number of completions to gauge how long it may take the USCIS to completely clear the backlogs based on current capacity. If USCIS did not report certain numbers, we left those fields blank. The dashboard displays these gaps so users can clearly see where information is missing.