Three statuses cover a PERM under appeal, and they're steps on one ladder rather than alternatives. Reconsideration asks the officer who denied the case to change their mind. A request for review asks a judge to. BALCA APPEALS is the case sitting with those judges. Each step has its own rule, its own window, and a measurable population of cases waiting at it.
The outcomes BALCA can reach
Under 20 CFR 656.27(c) the Board affirms the denial, directs the Certifying Officer to grant the certification, or orders a hearing. The regulation lists those three and nothing else.
The ladder
Reconsideration
The request goes to the officer who issued the denial, within 30 days of it. It can only carry documents DOL already received, or documents the employer had no earlier chance to submit that existed when the application was filed and were kept on file. That's the whole of what can be added, and it's why reconsideration works for a misread form and rarely for a missing one.
The officer has two choices: reconsider, or treat the request as a request for review and send it to the Board. Under 656.24(g)(3) reconsideration isn't available where the denial came from disregarding a system prompt or a direct instruction.
Request for review
This is the step that puts the denial in front of the Board. It goes to the officer rather than to BALCA directly, within 30 days of the determination, and has to identify the determination, set out the grounds and attach the final determination. The officer forwards the file. Nothing new is added to the record at this point either.
Letting both this window and the reconsideration window pass counts as a failure to exhaust administrative remedies. The denial then becomes the final determination of the Secretary, which forecloses a federal court looking at it later.
BALCA
The Board of Alien Labor Certification Appeals is a panel of administrative law judges sitting outside the office that denied the case. It reviews the record the decision was made on, plus the request for review and any briefs, and every party gets 30 days to file a statement of position. Then one of the three outcomes above. Because the review is on the record, the argument is legal: whether the officer applied the regulation correctly to the facts already in the file, not whether the facts could be improved.
A fourth status, DENIED - BALCA DISMISSED, marks an appeal that ended without the Board ruling on its merits. DOL publishes no definition; the words are the record.
What the record shows
| Measured, as of September 8, 2026 | Cases | Median age since filing |
|---|---|---|
| RECONSIDERATION APPEALS | 2,351 | 522 days |
| REQUEST FOR REVIEW | 15 | not reported below 25 cases |
| BALCA APPEALS | 362 | 711 days |
The Board publishes no processing time, so the median age is the only measured figure, and it's an age rather than a duration: it includes the year the case spent in the ordinary queue before the denial. The stage pages under RFI and audits list every case at each step, oldest filing first, with the employer names.
What this guide can't tell you
- Whether your denial has grounds worth appealing. That's the attorney's reading of the letter against the file.
- How long BALCA will take. No published time exists; the cases waiting are what can be measured.
- The chance of success. BALCA's decisions are published, but this site doesn't hold them as data yet, and a rate quoted from memory would be worth nothing.
Related
- PERM denied: what happens next, which covers refiling as the third route
- Every case status, explained
- The three 180-day clocks, for what an earlier approved I-140 keeps through all of this
