Updated October 18, 2026

Where the PERM queue stands

DOL publishes which month it’s working and nothing about the size of what’s behind it. Its disclosure files carry no pending rows, so the backlog cannot be derived from them.

This is a sweep, not a live reading, so a case decided between sweeps still counts as waiting here: the backlog figures run a little high rather than a little low.

Where these come from

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.

Last seen undecided

90,451

cases across 41 filing months, out of 441,307 scanned

DOL is working

December 2025

DOL's own analyst review position, as of October 5, 2026

Frontier advance

1.8x

filing months cleared per calendar month, over the 6 determination months to June 2026

The oldest filing month that isn’t substantially decided is December 2025, which is 75% decided and still holds 3,765 undecided cases. It sits 10 months behind October 2026, the newest month with filings.

How this position was measured, and how fast it moves

That’s the month DOL publishes as its analyst-review position, reached from the opposite direction: DOL states where it is; this scan finds the oldest month that hasn’t cleared. Two measurements, one answer.

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.

How the advance is measured

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 90,451 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.

What those 90,451 cases were doing

Analyst review moves in filing order; the other two queues don’t, which is the answer when DOL has passed your month and you still have nothing.

Analyst review 83,307 the ordinary queue, worked in filing order
Out of filing order 3,570 an information request, an audit, supervised recruitment or a hold takes a case off the ordinary queue
Under appeal or review 3,574 cases that went to appeal after an adverse determination

Every DOL status a pending PERM case was last seen in, grouped by queue
DOL status	Cases
Analyst review 83,307
Analyst Review	83,307
Out of filing order 3,570
Application On Hold	2,880
RFI Issued	610
NORD Issued	73
Supervised Recruitment	4
Reconsideration Appeals - RFI Issued	2
Pending Audit Response	1
Under appeal or review 3,574
Reconsideration Appeals	2,670
BALCA Appeals	888
Request For Review	16

The wall, by filing month

Bar length is cases still waiting, on one scale across every month. Colours split each month across the three queues. Any month opens its own page.

30 earlier months DOL has worked past. 4,684 cases across them are still open

DOL is working December 2025 as of October 5, 2026
Dec 2025 3,765 75%
Jan 2026 11,234 4%
Feb 2026 5,283 4%
Mar 2026 6,787 4%
Apr 2026 7,057 3%
May 2026 8,110 6%
Jun 2026 10,183 4%
Jul 2026 8,897 3%
Aug 2026 8,733 2%
Sep 2026 10,167 2%
Oct 2026 5,551 1%

Your employer’s first letter: small, and not in our estimates

DOL works a month roughly A to Z, too loosely for any estimate here to use. More

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.

Decided faster than average
Decided slower than average

A -10.5d
B -10.4d
C -6.0d
D -3.5d
E -2.4d
F +1.2d
G +3.8d
H -1.7d
I -5.7d
J +7.1d
K +5.3d
L -1.9d
M -0.7d
N +3.6d
O -2.5d
P +8.2d
Q +5.1d
R +5.6d
S +8.5d
T +1.5d
U +7.7d
V +7.6d
W +6.2d
X +11.2d
Y +11.8d
Z +15.4d

Against a corpus mean of 446 days over 337,173 decided cases. The whole alphabet is worth about 26 days end to end.

October 2025: DOL shut the filing system

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 holds mailed applications DOL backdated to their postmark. More

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.

How this was checked

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”, could not 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; there are two in the 30 days that follow; the filing system reopens on 31 October, the day DOL announced the resumption; and 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

FAQs

What does “pending” mean here?

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 on the processing times page, from DOL's own publication.

Why isn't my month finished when DOL has passed it?

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: flag.dol.gov/recaptcha/caseStatus (DOL, direct) · data through Oct 18, 2026 · daily

Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Oct 5, 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. DOL's own figure, not ours.

Case data: Decided PERM cases only. A case still waiting isn't in here, so counts and durations describe finished cases.

Cite this page

Waiting on a PERM case?

When it'll likely be decided
An email when DOL moves it