The filing was supposed to go in weeks ago. You have no receipt, no case number, and the person who has both is not answering. This guide is the order to check things in, what each result means, and the one thing no search can tell you.
Who gets the receipt, and why it is not you
A PERM is filed by the employer, or by the attorney filing for the employer. When the Department of Labor receives it, DOL assigns a case number and the filing appears in the FLAG account of whoever filed it. The beneficiary is not a party to the application and has no account, so the receipt lands with the employer or the attorney, and nothing is sent to you.
That is why the question "was it received" so often has no answer for the person it matters most to. The filing is real; the confirmation is just somewhere you cannot see. The searches below read the same federal records the filer's account does.
Three places a filing shows up, in order
The first two answer "was it received". The third never can: DOL's disclosure files hold only cases that have been decided, so a pending filing is absent from them by definition, however long ago it went in.
The two lime boxes are the ones that can confirm a filing while it is still pending. The dashed box is where most "PERM data" on the internet comes from, and it is the wrong place to look for a receipt.
The check, step by step
Search the employer
Open the case search and type the employer's name, the shorter the better: "Acme" finds more spellings than "Acme Technologies Inc." Every PERM, prevailing wage request and H-1B filing under that name comes back together, pending ones included, sorted newest first.
Read the newest rows
Look for a PERM row (a G-100- number) whose filing month matches when you were told it went in. The job title and worksite state are on the row, so a company that files many cases is still readable. A row that says a status like "Analyst review" is a case DOL has received and is holding in the queue.
If you do have a number, look it up directly
A case number in hand skips the search. The case status lookup asks DOL's own index for that number and shows the record as DOL holds it, including a pending status. If our table has never seen the number, the lookup asks DOL live and records the answer, so a filing from yesterday still resolves.
What each answer means
💡 A row with a pending status
DOL has it. The filing month on the row is the month the case number encodes, which is the date DOL received it. From here the processing times page tells you which filing month DOL is deciding now, and the row's own page estimates the wait.
⚠️ No row under the employer, and no number
Three possibilities, and the search cannot tell them apart: the filing has not gone in yet, it went in within the last day or two and the nightly walk has not reached it, or the employer filed under a spelling the search did not match. Try the shortest form of the name first, then wait two days and search again before assuming the worst.
🚨 You have a number and DOL's index returns nothing
That is the one result worth a phone call. DOL's index returns pending cases, so a number that resolves to nothing is either mistyped, from a program the lookup does not cover, or not a number DOL issued. Read it back digit by digit to whoever gave it to you.
If DOL's own site is down
DOL's case status search goes offline for maintenance and went dark for weeks during the October 2025 shutdown. This site keeps its own copy of every case it has ever seen, refreshed nightly, so the employer search and the lookup keep answering from the last sweep with its date shown. A case filed during an outage appears once DOL's index is back and the walk reaches it.
What this cannot tell you
- Whether a filing is about to go in. Nothing exists in any index until DOL receives it.
- Which case is yours, when an employer filed several for the same job title in the same month. The row shows the job and the worksite, not the beneficiary's name, because DOL does not publish it.
- Anything DOL has not decided to show. A pending case shows the status DOL reports and nothing more.
- Whether the case was filed correctly. A received case can still be denied or audited; received means received.
