Updated
How these numbers are computed
On one day in August 2026, public PERM tools reported the same headline figure as anywhere from 335 to 503 days, while DOL's own published average was 372.
One number, six answers
Readings taken 2026-08-24, all describing average PERM processing time. Most of the spread has a mechanical cause.
- 335 days
Crowd-sourced tracker
- 372 days
DOL's own published average
- 387 days
Queue estimator A
- 467 days
Analytics site
- 462-480 days
Queue estimator B
- 503 days
Stale calculator (March data)
Four choices explain nearly every difference between tools' numbers. More
Four causes account for nearly all of it. A tool can measure cases decided recently or cases filed in a month, and those are different populations. It can include audited cases or set them aside. It can run on this quarter's data or on a file from March. And a tool built on crowd reports measures its own users rather than the queue. None of these choices is wrong on its own. What matters is saying which one produced the number.
What our figures are
DOL FLAG processing times
Queue positions and average days, the figures on the processing times page.
Checked daily. A new snapshot is stored only when the figures change.
DOL PERM disclosure files
Case-level decisions, the basis of the timeline calculator's cohort record. The files are unioned and de-duplicated by case number.
Quarterly, when DOL publishes.
USCIS I-140 quarterly counts
Pending and completed petitions by category, the I-140 calculator's queue.
Quarterly, when USCIS publishes.
USCIS quarterly performance workbooks
Every form's median months to a decision, the I-485 by field office, approved I-140s awaiting a visa number by category and country, and I-140 approvals by class and country. Each sheet is reconciled against USCIS's own totals before it is written.
Quarterly, when USCIS publishes; discovered from USCIS's listing, never constructed.
USCIS Case Status API
USCIS's own status text and dated history for one receipt number, read at lookup time under credentials issued to PERM Tracker LLC. Off until USCIS grants access; the lookup page says so.
On demand, per lookup.
State Department visa bulletin
Cutoff dates from every bulletin since October 2014 and most back to June 2005, read from the State Department's own pages as each one appears, with some months from the Internet Archive's copies of the same pages. A few older months are missing, where State's pages don't parse or aren't linked. Paces and backward steps are measured from October 2014. Nothing in it is forecast.
Monthly.
Every figure, traced
Most of these run over the same corpus: 373,939 unique cases from DOL's disclosure files for fiscal years 2024 to 2026, through the third quarter of 2026, unioned and de-duplicated by case number. Where a figure needs a rule that isn't obvious, the rule is here rather than in a footnote on the page that uses it.
Analyst review queue month Processing times
No computation. The value DOL prints in that row, with the date DOL attached to it. Where DOL prints a dash, the page says so instead of substituting anything.
Counted over DOL's published snapshot, read weekly and kept, since DOL overwrites its own.
Average days to a determination Processing times
DOL's own figure, unmodified. It describes cases DOL finished in the reported month, so it looks backwards and includes audited cases that ran long.
Counted over Determinations issued in the month DOL names.
Queue advance rate Processing times
For each month of determinations, the filing month at their median; then the change in filing month divided by the change in calendar month. The range comes from rolling three-month windows, because adjacent months are lumpy enough to produce rates of 0 and 2.0 that describe scheduling rather than pace.
Counted over Every decided case in the unioned disclosure files. DOL publishes today's position and keeps no archive, so this cannot be read from DOL at all.
Decisions per month Processing times
A count of determinations by the month DOL issued them.
Counted over Every decided case in the unioned files. Lags the weekly queue page by a quarter.
Denial rate Denial rates
Denied divided by decided, where decided is certified plus denied. Withdrawn cases sit on neither side: a withdrawal is neither an approval nor a refusal, and putting it in either place moves the rate.
Counted over Decided cases only. Pending cases are absent from these files entirely.
Share of denials Denial rates
A group's denials divided by every denial in the corpus. Published next to the rate rather than instead of it, and never multiplied together into an expected count.
Counted over The same decided cases the rate runs over.
95% range on a rate Denial rates
A Wilson score interval on the denied count over the decided count. It's asymmetric near zero, which a plain plus-or-minus is not, and near zero is where most of these rates sit.
Counted over That group's decided cases. Groups under the population floor carry no rate at all.
Filing concentration by state By state
A state's biggest occupation or employer divided by its total filings. Occupations are grouped on the SOC code without its O*NET suffix, and employers on the slug rather than the spelling, because DOL writes the same firm and the same job several ways.
Counted over Every case with a worksite state, decided or withdrawn. It's a share of a census, so it needs no population floor; the counts are printed beside every bar.
Median wage and wage percentiles Wages
The offered wage annualised through its unit of pay, then kept only between $15,000 and $1,000,000. Outside that band a value is a data-entry artefact, most often an hourly rate recorded as an annual one.
Counted over Certified cases only. A denied case's offered wage is what an employer proposed and DOL rejected, which is not what the job pays. Cells with fewer than 50 wages carry no percentiles.
Median days to a decision By state
The median of decision date minus received date.
Counted over Decided cases in that group. DOL works one national queue, so this barely moves by state.
Cases pending, by filing month Live queue
A count of cases whose status is not final. Pending is read off the case's own final flag, never off a list of status names: sixteen statuses appear in the data and a hardcoded list silently mis-buckets the next one DOL adds.
Counted over A per-case read of DOL's own case-status system. Every case is re-read each morning and the pending ones again each afternoon, so a status change is seen within a day. A different source from the quarterly files, which contain no pending cases at all.
Requests ahead of yours in the wage queue Prevailing wage queue
A running total of DOL's published pending counts from the oldest receipt month to yours. Arithmetic on DOL's own figures, with no rate applied.
Counted over Pending prevailing-wage requests as of DOL's stated date.
Every PERM deadline Deadlines
20 CFR 656 arithmetic, not an estimate. The filing window closes at the earlier of 180 days after the first recruitment step and the wage determination's expiry, and the tool says which one applied.
Counted over Your dates only. Nothing about anyone else's case enters it.
Applications ahead of a priority date I-485 queue position
USCIS suppresses its smallest counts, so a total built from published cells has a known floor and an unknown remainder. The answer is a floor and a ceiling, never a point.
Counted over USCIS's published employment-based adjustment inventory.
Visa bulletin cutoff history Priority dates
Parsed from the published charts. A cell reading C means the category was open to every priority date and U means it was shut to all of them; those are opposites, so they are drawn as different states rather than one shaded band.
Counted over Both charts, employment and family, as the State Department published them, read from its own pages each month as a bulletin appears. Months before the direct read came from the Internet Archive's copies of the same pages.
The sources beside the PERM record
Occupation and city pages also draw on six other federal sources. Each is loaded from the agency's own file, checked against that file's own totals or shape before it's used, and dated on the page.
- O*NET, what a job is
- Descriptions, tasks, Job Zones and reported education from the O*NET Database, and the Bright Outlook list from O*NET OnLine, both by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. What we changed: we show the six core tasks O*NET rates most important rather than every task, round the education shares to whole percents and leave out levels under 5%, and show eight of the titles workers report. Nothing is reworded. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these changes.
- BLS, what a job pays and where it's heading
- Market pay from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics: what employers report paying everyone in a job, nationally, by state and by metro, as five percentiles. The ten-year employment projections and typical entry education come from BLS's projections tables. A percentile BLS publishes as top-coded is shown as "at least" its ceiling, never as a number.
- DOL's wage tables, every year since 2021-22
- The four prevailing wage levels for every job in every area, from the tables the Office of Foreign Labor Certification publishes each July, both the all-industries table and the one for universities and research employers (ACWIA). Most levels are hourly in DOL's files and shown a year at 2,080 hours, as DOL computes them. Jobs DOL publishes yearly (teachers, professors, pilots) are shown as published: DOL labels them from 2023-24 on, and in the two older years we read a figure of $5,000 or more as yearly, since no hourly level in any year comes near it. DOL's own average column is for the H-2 programs and is never shown as a level.
- Census, where a city is
- A worksite city is matched to Census's place and county-subdivision files (which is where New England towns and New Jersey townships are), then to its county and metro area, then to the DOL wage area that county belongs to. A place in several counties takes the county nearest its center, and the page says so. Two places with the same name in one state, or a name Census doesn't list, stay unmatched rather than guessed.
- BEA, what prices are where
- Regional price parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis: a metro's price level against 100 for the country, for all items and for housing rents, read through BEA's API.
- State, the visas issued
- The State Department's monthly immigrant visa issuances since March 2017, by visa class and by country or consulate. A month is used only when its rows add up exactly to State's own grand total. Categories follow State's symbol legend. These are consular issuances only.
What we refuse to publish
- A single blended estimate. Each calculator shows every model its data supports, labelled, and lets them disagree.
- Medians over immature cohorts. A month whose only decided cases are instant withdrawals has a median of one day.
- Stages nobody can measure. Where a wait depends on visa-number availability, the timeline says so instead of inventing a figure.
- Undated numbers. Every figure carries the date of the data behind it.
See it applied
The calculators put all of this into practice.
Case data: DOL quarterly disclosure files (flag.dol.gov) · data through Jun 30, 2026 · quarterly
Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Oct 5, 2026 · daily
Per-case statuses: flag.dol.gov/recaptcha/caseStatus (DOL, direct) · data through Oct 17, 2026 · daily
Wage request statuses: flag.dol.gov case status (DOL, direct) · data through Oct 17, 2026 · daily
LCA statuses: flag.dol.gov case status (DOL, direct) · data through Oct 17, 2026 · daily
H-2A, H-2B and CW-1 statuses: flag.dol.gov case status (DOL, direct) · data through Oct 17, 2026 · daily
Wage determinations: DOL quarterly PW disclosure files (www.dol.gov) · data through Jun 30, 2026 · quarterly
Visa bulletin: State Dept via Internet Archive · data through Oct 2026 · monthly
I-485 pending inventory: USCIS employment-based I-485 inventory (uscis.gov) · data through Aug 5, 2026 · monthly
I-140 filings by category: USCIS Form I-140 by Fiscal Year, Quarter and Case Status (uscis.gov) · data through 2026Q3 · quarterly
What each source includes
Case data: Decided PERM cases only. A case still waiting isn't in here, so counts and durations describe finished cases.
Processing times: DOL's published queue position and average determination time. DOL's own figure, not ours.
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.
Wage request statuses: Live status of prevailing wage requests, pending included. The wage itself is not here; it arrives with the quarterly file.
LCA statuses: Live status of H-1B labor condition applications, pending included.
H-2A, H-2B and CW-1 statuses: Live status of H-2A, H-2B and CW-1 applications, H-2A job orders, and H-2B and CW-1 prevailing wage requests, pending included. No wage or worksite: those come from the quarterly files and SeasonalJobs.
Wage determinations: Decided prevailing wage requests only, with the wage DOL determined. Pending requests are absent.
Visa bulletin: Cutoff dates as the State Department published them each month. Nothing here is forecast.
I-485 pending inventory: USCIS's count of pending I-485s by priority date and country. Employment-based only: USCIS does not publish a family-based equivalent.
I-140 filings by category: I-140 volumes by fiscal quarter and classification, as USCIS publishes them. Counts of filings, not of people waiting.