8.5 Months in Burlington, 36 in Seattle: Four Years of USCIS Field Office Processing Times

The short version

As of USCIS's September 17, 2026 update, which was still the latest on October 16, the median field office takes 16 months to decide 80% of family-based I-485 applications. That's up from 13 months a year ago, and from 10.5 months in December 2025, the fastest the median office has been since May 2022.

Which office you're assigned to matters far more than the national number. Burlington, Vermont and Tucson, Arizona are tied for fastest at 8.5 months. Seattle is slowest at 36 months, the longest wait it has posted in the four years covered here. That's a 27.5-month gap between offices working the same form.

Naturalization is heading the same way. The median office now takes 12.5 months to decide 80% of N-400 applications, up from 8 months a year ago, and every one of the 90 field offices is slower than it was in October 2025.

Where these numbers come from

USCIS publishes processing times office by office on its Case Processing Times page, but it only ever shows today's figure. When a number changes, the old one is overwritten. There's no official history to go back and check.

The open-source jzebedee/uscis project has saved a copy of that data daily since March 21, 2022, more than 1,600 snapshots so far. We read that archive and string every change at every field office into one timeline. That timeline powers the new office pages at visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times, and it's the source of every number in this article.

The history here starts on May 6, 2022, on purpose. That day USCIS switched its headline figure from the median case to the time it takes to finish 80% of cases. The median office's family-based I-485 figure jumped from 10.5 months to 15 overnight, and its N-400 figure from 10 to 14.5. Nobody's case slowed down that day. The yardstick changed, so comparing numbers across that date will mislead you.

What the two numbers on the USCIS page actually mean

Each office gets two figures. The headline one is how long it took that office to decide 80% of the cases it completed over the last six months. The second is the 93% mark, and that's the one that controls when you can ask USCIS about a slow case.

Once your case is older than the 93% figure, USCIS treats it as outside normal processing time and lets you submit a case inquiry. The 'receipt date for a case inquiry' on the USCIS page is roughly today minus that 93% figure. In Atlanta, the 80% figure is 16.5 months and the 93% figure is 31 months, so on October 16, 2026 the inquiry cutoff was March 25, 2024. An Atlanta case received after that date doesn't qualify yet, however long the wait feels.

The gap between the two numbers is worth watching. For the median office it's now 16 months versus 32.75, the widest spread between the two medians since May 2022. At 38 of the 90 offices, the 93% figure is at least double the 80% figure. Seattle's 93% figure is 56.5 months, Yakima's 57.5 and Spokane's 60.5. In Spokane, only cases received before October 10, 2021 qualified for an inquiry on October 16, 2026.

How bad it got in 2022 and 2023

The first year of the 80% measure was rough. The median office went from 15 months in May 2022 to 20 months on February 7, 2023, the slowest it has been in this data. Some offices were far worse. Baltimore hit 49 months in December 2022, the slowest figure any field office has posted since the method change. Brooklyn reached 40.5 months that same month, and Minneapolis-St. Paul 37.

Salt Lake City peaked at 40 months in March 2023, and Atlanta at 38.5 the same month, with its 93% figure at 52 months. On November 3, 2022, the fastest office, El Paso at 10.5 months, and the slowest, Baltimore at 48.5, were 38 months apart. That's the widest spread in the whole series.

From mid-2023 through most of 2024, things settled. The median office stayed between 16 and 17.5 months for about a year and a half, and the slowest offices came down from the 40s into the mid-30s.

Then late 2025 got fast. Really fast.

The median office was still at 16 months in April 2025. Then it fell at almost every update: 15.5 in May, 14.5 in June, 14 in July, 13 in September, 11 in October and 10.5 on December 9. That's the fastest the median office has been since May 2022.

The slowest offices improved the most. Atlanta went from 32.5 months in April 2025 to 11.5 in December. New Orleans dropped from 42 months in March 2025 to 12 by February 2026. Salt Lake City fell from 30 to 8 between March 2025 and January 2026, and Charleston, South Carolina from 31.5 in March 2025 to 12.5 a year later. By mid-December, only two of the 90 offices were at 20 months or more.

The improvement was broad, not a few outliers. In December 2025, 82 of the 90 offices were faster than a year earlier. On January 15, 2026, the gap between the fastest office and the slowest shrank to 13 months, the narrowest since USCIS adopted the 80% measure. USCIS doesn't explain why a figure moves, and the archive can't either. It can only show you that it did.

2026 gave most of it back

The median started creeping up in January and hasn't come down since. Every USCIS update since March has pushed it higher: 11.5 months in March, 12 in April, 13 in May, 13.5 in June, 14.25 in July, 15.25 in August and 16 in September. That's seven increases in a row, and it puts the median office back where it was through most of 2024.

The latest update was broad too. In USCIS's September 17 figures, 65 offices got slower, 15 got faster and 10 didn't change. Compared with a year ago, 64 offices are slower, 24 are faster and two are unchanged. Twenty offices now take 20 months or more, up from two in December and eight a year ago.

Six offices posted their slowest figure since May 2022 in that update: Seattle at 36 months, Santa Ana at 27.5, Denver at 22.5, Lawrence, Massachusetts and Oklahoma City at 20.5, and San Bernardino at 19. The spread between fastest and slowest is back to 27.5 months, more than double January's 13.

Seattle, San Jose and Santa Ana: the 93% figure moved first

The three biggest jumps of the past year all happened on the West Coast. San Jose went from 10.5 months a year ago to 32.5. Seattle went from 15 to 36. Santa Ana went from 11 to 27.5. No other office rose more than 11.5 months over the same stretch. Washington state stands out in the latest update: Seattle rose 9.5 months, and Spokane and Yakima rose 6.5 each, the three biggest increases of that update.

Look at how Seattle got there. Its 80% figure stayed between 13.5 and 17 months from January 2024 until July 2026. Its 93% figure didn't. That started climbing in March 2025, from 27.5 months to 48 by October 2025 and 52 by June 2026. Then the headline number caught up: 26.5 months in the August update, 36 in September.

San Jose and Santa Ana followed the same pattern. San Jose's 93% figure rose from 19.5 months in October 2025 to 30 in March 2026, while its 80% figure only went from 9 to 11.5. Santa Ana's 93% figure hit 31.5 months in May 2026 while its 80% figure was still 11.5. In both offices the 80% figure then shot up. It doesn't always end that way. In early 2025 the median office's 93% figure climbed for months, and the 80% figure ended up falling instead. But a wide, growing gap at your office is a warning worth taking seriously.

Some offices swung by more than two years

Atlanta is the clearest round trip. It started the 80% era at 24.5 months, peaked at 38.5 in March 2023, stayed between 23.5 and 26.5 months through 2024, climbed back to 32.5 in April 2025, then dropped to 11.5 by December 2025. It's at 16.5 today, half a month slower than the median office.

Baltimore has the biggest range of any office: 49 months in December 2022, 12 in December 2025, 19 now. Salt Lake City went from 40 months to 8 and is back at 15. Minneapolis-St. Paul went from 37 to 9 and is at 16.5. Burlington is the biggest turnaround in the other direction. It was at 23 months in May 2022, well behind the median office's 15, and hit 5 months in May and June 2026, tied for the fastest figure any office has posted since 2022.

The point isn't that any office is permanently fast or slow. Tucson is the closest thing to a steady office: it has never been slower than 16.5 months in the 80% era and is at 8.5 now. But 72 of the 90 offices have swung by 10 months or more since May 2022. A ranking you read today can look very different a year from now.

Naturalization is slower at every single office

The N-400 story has a different shape. The median office peaked at 17 months in September 2022, then fell hard in 2023, from 15 months in February to 10.5 in March and 8 by November. For more than two years after that, from November 2023 through February 2026, the median office stayed between 7.5 and 8 months.

That run ended this spring. The median rose to 8.5 months in March, 9 in May, 10 in June, 10.5 in July, 11.5 in August and 12.5 in September. All 90 field offices are slower than they were a year ago. In the September update, 79 offices got slower, 11 didn't change and not one got faster.

The range is still much tighter than for green cards. Cranbury, New Jersey is fastest at 9 months, followed by five offices at 9.5: Cincinnati, Helena, Hialeah, Montgomery and San Juan. Lawrence, Massachusetts is slowest at 18 months, its longest since 2022. That 9-month spread compares with 27.5 months for family-based I-485. The biggest 12-month increases were in Northern California: San Jose up 8.5 months to 16, San Francisco up 8 to 14.5.

Same office, completely different queue

Don't assume an office that's slow for one form is slow for everything. Seattle is the slowest office in the country for family-based I-485 at 36 months, but its N-400 figure is 13.5 months, tied for 64th of 90. Burlington is tied for fastest on I-485 and tied for 15th on N-400 at 10.5 months. Lawrence is the slowest N-400 office and tied for 72nd on I-485.

Each form has its own queue, even inside the same building. Look up the figure for your form at your office, not a number a friend quoted for something else.

Employment-based I-485 isn't published by office anymore

If you filed an employment-based I-485, you won't find a current figure for your local office, and that's USCIS's choice. Until early March 2025, USCIS published employment-based I-485 times for each field office. The last per-office figures appear in the archive on March 3, 2025. Since March 4, USCIS has published employment-based I-485 times only as combined figures.

The combined figure for all field offices is 9.5 months for 80% of cases and 19 months for 93%, as of the September 17 update. In January 2025, shortly before the per-office numbers disappeared, the median office was at 12 months. Each of our I-485 office pages still shows that office's employment-based history up to March 2025, so you can see how it compared before the data went dark.

Can you move your case to a faster office?

No. You don't pick your field office. USCIS assigns it based on where you live. If you genuinely move, you have to update your address with USCIS, and your case may be transferred to the office that covers your new address.

Moving to chase a faster office would be a bad bet anyway. The numbers above show how quickly a ranking can flip. San Jose was at 9 months in October 2025 and is at 32.5 now. Santa Ana went from 9 months to 27.5 between March and September 2026.

How to check your own office

Start at visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times. The full I-485 table, fastest office first, is at visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times/i-485, and the N-400 table is at visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times/n-400. Every office has its own page with each change USCIS has published since May 2022, for example visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times/i-485/atlanta-ga, visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times/i-485/seattle-wa and visanow.info/en/uscis-processing-times/n-400/lawrence-ma.

On an office page, enter the received date from your I-797C receipt notice. The page shows how long your case has been pending, where the office's 80% mark falls for your receipt date, and whether you're already past the inquiry cutoff. If you are, you can submit an 'outside normal processing times' inquiry through USCIS e-Request.

Keep two things in mind. These figures describe cases USCIS already finished, so they tell you about recent throughput at your office, not a promise about your case. And USCIS updates them roughly once a month. The October update hadn't been published as of October 16, so expect some of the numbers above to move. This article is informational only and isn't legal advice.