Frequently Asked Questions

PERM Tracker follows your PERM case through the Department of Labor and tells you where it stands. Look up a case number to see its federal record and where the queue has reached, get an email when the status changes, and track the deadlines around it: PWD expiration, the 30-180 day ETA 9089 filing window, and I-140 filing cutoffs. Attorneys manage full caseloads on the same data.

Spreadsheets require manual deadline math, don’t send reminders, and break when regulations change. PERM Tracker auto-calculates 11 deadline types per case based on DOL regulations (20 CFR 656), sends proactive alerts, validates compliance, and updates all downstream dates when one date changes.

Yes, currently free, with no credit card and no case limit. We may introduce optional premium features in the future, but the data, the calculators and the core deadline tracking stay free.

Yes. Case data is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, sessions expire after 15 minutes of inactivity, and access is isolated per account: no other firm can see your cases. Privacy Mode hides sensitive fields during screen sharing. The public data pages carry no client data at all, only DOL's published records.

Yes. PERM Tracker supports CSV import for bulk uploads. The import wizard auto-maps your fields and validates data before import. You can also export your data at any time.

We monitor DOL regulatory changes and update the deadline calculations accordingly. When regulations change, your existing cases are recalculated automatically. You don’t need to manually update formulas or check for rule changes.

PERM (Program Electronic Review Management) is the process by which U.S. employers demonstrate to the Department of Labor that there are no qualified, willing, and available U.S. workers for a position offered to a foreign national. It’s typically the first step in the employment-based green card process for EB-2 and EB-3 categories.

The complete PERM process typically runs 18 to 36 months end to end: the prevailing wage determination, the recruitment period (2-3 months), the 30-day quiet period, and DOL's processing of the ETA 9089 itself, which DOL's own published average puts at about 372 days as of August 2026. Cases selected for audit take longer. The processing times page carries the live figure, and the case status page reads any specific case number.

The PERM process has five main stages: (1) Prevailing Wage Determination: submit to NPWC and receive the wage level for the position. (2) Recruitment: conduct required advertising including SWA job order, newspaper ads, and additional recruitment steps for professional occupations. (3) Filing: submit ETA Form 9089 electronically after the 30-day cooling-off period. (4) DOL Review: wait for DOL adjudication (approval, denial, or audit). (5) I-140 Filing: file the immigrant petition within 180 days of PERM certification.

A prevailing wage determination is issued by the National Prevailing Wage Center (NPWC) and establishes the minimum wage the employer must offer for the PERM position. The wage is based on the occupation, skill level, and geographic area. PWDs are valid for one year from the determination date, and the PERM application must be filed before expiration.

All PERM cases require: a State Workforce Agency (SWA) job order for 30 days, two print newspaper advertisements, and a 30-day internal company posting. Professional occupations (requiring a bachelor's degree or higher) also need three additional recruitment steps from a list including: job fairs, employer website posting, employee referral program, campus recruitment, trade/professional organizations, or private placement agencies.

Common PERM audit triggers include: layoffs in the same occupation within 6 months, job requirements that exceed the norm for the occupation (such as requiring a specific degree or foreign language without business necessity), discrepancies between the job offer and the beneficiary's qualifications, unusual wage levels, and random selection. Clean documentation and well-justified job requirements reduce audit risk.

The ETA 9089 must be filed no earlier than 30 days after the end of all recruitment activities and no later than 180 days after recruitment ends. This 30-180 day filing window is a critical deadline: filing too early results in denial, and missing the 180-day cutoff means restarting recruitment entirely. PERM Tracker automatically calculates this window based on your recruitment end dates.

The I-140 immigrant petition must be filed within 180 days of PERM certification. Missing this deadline means the PERM certification expires and the entire process must be restarted. PERM Tracker tracks this deadline automatically and sends notifications as it approaches.

Yes. Most advice pages say only the employer or the attorney can check a pending PERM, and that's wrong: DOL's own FLAG system answers a case number for anyone who has it, pending cases included. Put yours into the case status page and you get the live DOL status in plain English, your place in the queue, a stage-aware decision estimate, and an optional email alert when the status changes. The case number is on the filing receipt; ask whoever filed for you if you don't have it.

Straight from the Department of Labor. The queue position and average days come from DOL's own published processing times, refreshed automatically, and the medians come from DOL's quarterly disclosure files: 250,000+ real decided cases, unioned and de-duplicated by case number. The methodology page lists every source and how each figure is built.

California and Texas lead by a wide margin, and volume tracks industry concentration rather than a faster or slower line: DOL works one national queue, oldest first. The interactive state map shows filings, approval rates, median days and median wages for every state, from DOL's own files.

The wages page shows median offered wages by occupation from DOL's disclosure files. These are wages employers committed to in federal filings. Hourly and other units are annualized before medians are taken.

Denials are rare: across DOL's current disclosure window under 3% of decided PERM cases were denied, with withdrawn cases excluded from both sides of that ratio. The rate isn’t evenly spread. The denial rates page breaks it down by offered wage, by fiscal year, and by the three risk questions the ETA-9089 itself asks. A group rate isn’t a probability for any single case.

Fragomen files by far the most, followed by Berry Appleman & Leiden and Ogletree Deakins. Our law firms page ranks the most active firms with case volume, approval rate and median processing days, straight from the firm name DOL prints on every filing. One caution the page states too: DOL prints a single practice under several spellings, so a big firm's true total can span more than one row. Approval rates cluster above 99% across the whole list.

The employers page ranks the hundred biggest PERM sponsors in the current disclosure window, searchable, with each one's filings, certifications, approval rate and median processing days. Names appear exactly as DOL prints them, so one company can appear under several legal entities.