The PERM backlog: 85,734 cases are still waiting for DOL's decision. By our daily check of DOL's case status on November 9, 2026, DOL is deciding PERM cases filed in February 2026.
DOL has never published how many cases wait in its line, and since October 31, 2026 it doesn’t print which month it’s working either. Its disclosure files carry no pending rows, so the backlog can’t be derived from them. PERM Tracker counts it from DOL’s own case statuses, case by case.
These figures come from a sweep. A case decided between sweeps still counts as waiting here, so the backlog figures run a little high.
Anything undecided here is read from DOL’s own case-status search, in batches: every case daily, and the undecided ones at least twice a day. That page is also the authority for any single case.
Still waiting
85,734
5,776 fewer in 30 daysPERM cases, across 42 filing months
DOL is working
February 2026
4.0% decided by our check of DOL's records on Nov 9.
Months cleared a month
1.8
filing months DOL cleared per month, to June 2026
The oldest filing month that isn’t substantially decided is January 2026, which is 73% decided and still holds 3,181 undecided cases. It sits 10 months behind November 2026, the newest month with filings.
Anything above 1.0 means DOL is clearing filing dates faster than new ones arrive. Across the whole series that rate has run between 0.33x and 2.50x, which is why it isn’t a rate to plan around.
Over the 6 determination months to June 2026, the median filing date on DOL’s determinations moved forward 1.8 months for every calendar month that passed.
DOL issued 19,787 determinations in June 2026, the last full month in its disclosure window, against 85,734 still undecided. Those two figures don’t get divided into a wait: new applications keep arriving and DOL reprioritises. The timeline calculator works from the percentile spread of decided cases instead.
Analyst review moves in filing order, and the other two don’t.
| DOL status | Cases |
|---|---|
| Analyst review 78,565 | |
| Analyst Review | 78,565 |
| Out of filing order 3,686 | |
| Application On Hold | 2,880 |
| RFI Issued | 635 |
| NORD Issued | 166 |
| Supervised Recruitment | 4 |
| Pending Audit Response | 1 |
| Under appeal or review 3,483 | |
| Reconsideration Appeals | 2,559 |
| BALCA Appeals | 911 |
| Request For Review | 12 |
| Reconsideration Appeals - RFI Issued | 1 |
Each bar is one filing month’s cases still waiting, in the colours above. Open a month to see its cases day by day.
Since the end of Sunday, Nov 8: 486 decided, 236 more filings on record
1 more status moved by fewer.
Cases in analyst review at the end of each day, and now.
| Day | Cases |
|---|---|
| Aug 30, 2026 | 95,020 |
| Aug 31, 2026 | 94,645 |
| Sep 1, 2026 | 94,156 |
| Sep 2, 2026 | 93,585 |
| Sep 3, 2026 | 93,151 |
| Sep 4, 2026 | 92,925 |
| Sep 5, 2026 | 92,877 |
| Sep 6, 2026 | 92,772 |
| Sep 7, 2026 | 92,839 |
| Sep 8, 2026 | 92,148 |
| Sep 9, 2026 | 91,688 |
| Sep 10, 2026 | 90,902 |
| Sep 11, 2026 | 91,097 |
| Sep 12, 2026 | 91,003 |
| Sep 13, 2026 | 90,935 |
| Sep 14, 2026 | 90,457 |
| Sep 15, 2026 | 89,915 |
| Sep 16, 2026 | 89,493 |
| Sep 17, 2026 | 89,293 |
| Sep 18, 2026 | 88,979 |
| Sep 19, 2026 | 89,070 |
| Sep 20, 2026 | 89,166 |
| Sep 21, 2026 | 88,753 |
| Sep 22, 2026 | 88,558 |
| Sep 23, 2026 | 88,342 |
| Sep 24, 2026 | 87,834 |
| Sep 25, 2026 | 87,663 |
| Sep 26, 2026 | 87,783 |
| Sep 27, 2026 | 87,830 |
| Sep 28, 2026 | 87,489 |
| Sep 29, 2026 | 86,756 |
| Sep 30, 2026 | 86,374 |
| Oct 1, 2026 | 86,096 |
| Oct 2, 2026 | 86,235 |
| Oct 3, 2026 | 86,352 |
| Oct 4, 2026 | 86,431 |
| Oct 5, 2026 | 86,015 |
| Oct 6, 2026 | 85,479 |
| Oct 7, 2026 | 84,993 |
| Oct 8, 2026 | 83,892 |
| Oct 9, 2026 | 83,782 |
| Oct 10, 2026 | 83,920 |
| Oct 11, 2026 | 83,996 |
| Oct 12, 2026 | 84,310 |
| Oct 13, 2026 | 83,973 |
| Oct 14, 2026 | 83,669 |
| Oct 15, 2026 | 83,323 |
| Oct 16, 2026 | 83,145 |
| Oct 17, 2026 | 83,281 |
| Oct 18, 2026 | 83,365 |
| Oct 19, 2026 | 83,025 |
| Oct 20, 2026 | 82,570 |
| Oct 21, 2026 | 82,235 |
| Oct 22, 2026 | 81,758 |
| Oct 23, 2026 | 81,581 |
| Oct 24, 2026 | 81,678 |
| Oct 25, 2026 | 81,727 |
| Oct 26, 2026 | 81,257 |
| Oct 27, 2026 | 80,890 |
| Oct 28, 2026 | 80,542 |
| Oct 29, 2026 | 80,200 |
| Oct 30, 2026 | 80,153 |
| Oct 31, 2026 | 80,221 |
| Nov 1, 2026 | 80,257 |
| Nov 2, 2026 | 79,999 |
| Nov 3, 2026 | 79,611 |
| Nov 4, 2026 | 79,226 |
| Nov 5, 2026 | 78,818 |
| Nov 6, 2026 | 78,735 |
| Nov 7, 2026 | 78,792 |
| Nov 8, 2026 | 78,833 |
| Now | 78,565 |
The employer picks the line at the I-140, after the PERM. The job decides which it can pick: a master’s or higher, or a bachelor’s and five years, meets the EB-2 bar.
Every PERM job whose wage DOL set from July 2025 to June 2026, the jobs being filed and decided now, by its required education and experience and any alternative (8 CFR 204.5(k)(2)). A job that meets the bar can still go EB-3. The two lines’ cutoffs are on the EB-2 and EB-3 comparison.
Across decided cases DOL tended to work a filing month roughly alphabetically: about 26 days from A to Z, and in 6 of 30 filing months the back half was decided faster. At the front of the queue in September 2026 it didn’t show at all, so no estimate here uses it.
Against a corpus mean of 446 days over 337,194 decided cases. The whole alphabet is worth about 26 days end to end.
1,616 applications carry an October 2025 filing date in the per-case scan, against 13,629 in September and 15,034 in November. That’s a real event at DOL rather than a hole in the scan.
In an announcement dated 5 November 2025, DOL wrote that “due to the government shutdown, beginning October 1, OFLC ceased all application processing activities and suspended public access to its Foreign Labor Application Gateway (FLAG) system”.
October isn’t empty because paper kept moving. DOL says employers who couldn’t file electronically posted their applications, that OFLC entered those by hand once FLAG was back, and that each one “will be considered to have been filed on the date it was postmarked”. So a good part of the 1,616 is mail, backdated into a month when the portal was shut.
DOL’s announcement adds that employers “were unable to prepare and submit requests for prevailing wage determinations or labor certifications using the FLAG system… between October 1, 2025, through October 31, 2025”. It extended affected response deadlines by 33 calendar days, the span during which staff, “officially recalled back to work on November 3”, couldn’t accept or process applications.
Our own counts land on those dates without being fitted to them. The last ordinary day of determinations is 30 September, and there are two in the 30 days that follow. The filing system reopens on 31 October, the day DOL announced the resumption. Ordinary volume returns on 3 November, the day DOL says staff came back.
The collapse also appears in DOL’s own quarterly disclosure release, which is first-party and built from separate records: DOL issued 21 PERM determinations in the whole of October 2025, against 14,239 in September and 8,890 in November. Nineteen of the 21 landed on 31 October. That release holds decided cases only, while the 1,616 above is from the per-case scan, which holds every application whether or not it has been decided.
One observation rather than a finding: OFLC’s filing portal carries the 31 October resumption notice and nothing announcing the stoppage. Its announcements run from 16 May 2025 straight to 31 October. The explanation above is on www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/news, a different DOL host, which refuses automated clients, so the text quoted here was read from an Internet Archive capture of that page.
DOL’s announcement of 5 November 2025, archived OFLC’s resumption notice of 31 October 2025
A case DOL has received and not yet decided, counted from the per-case status feed PERM Tracker reads from DOL at least twice a day. The front of the queue, the filing month DOL is working now, is found the same way: DOL stopped printing that month on October 31, 2026. DOL's own figures, the average days to a decision, are on the processing times page.
A request for information, an audit or a hold takes a case out of filing order into its own slower queue, so every month keeps a tail of open cases after DOL moves on. That split is measured on the RFI and audits page.
Per-case statuses through Nov 9, 2026 · Processing times through Oct 31, 2026 · Case data through Jun 30, 2026. How these figures are counted. Spotted an error? Tell us; every fix is dated in the corrections log.
Per-case statuses: flag.dol.gov/recaptcha/caseStatus (DOL, direct) · data through Nov 9, 2026 · daily
Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Oct 31, 2026 · daily
Case data: DOL quarterly disclosure files (flag.dol.gov) · data through Jun 30, 2026 · quarterly
What each source includes
Per-case statuses: Every PERM case DOL indexes, pending included. No wage, law firm or worksite: DOL reveals those only when a case is published.
Processing times: DOL's published queue position and average determination time, as DOL computes them.
Case data: Decided PERM cases only. A case still waiting isn't in here, so counts and durations describe finished cases.