From a per-case scan

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 at all, so a count of what is still waiting cannot be derived from them at any level of effort.

Anything undecided here is read from DOL’s own case-status search, in batches, every 12 hours. That page is also the authority for any single case. Because it is a sweep rather than a live reading, a case decided between sweeps still counts as waiting here, so these backlog figures run a little high rather than a little low.

Last seen undecided

96,916

cases across 39 filing months, out of 414,365 scanned

DOL is working

November 2025

DOL's own analyst review position, as of August 28, 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 October 2025, which is 83% decided and still holds 281 undecided cases. It sits 10 months behind August 2026, the newest month with filings.

DOL publishes November 2025 as its analyst-review position, which doesn’t match the October 2025 this scan measures. Both figures are shown as they are. Neither has been adjusted towards the other.

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. Anything above 1.0 means DOL was working through filing dates faster than new ones arrived. Across the whole series that rate has run between 0.33x and 2.50x, which is the reason it isn’t a rate anyone should plan around.

DOL issued 19,787 determinations in June 2026, the last full month in its disclosure window, against 96,916 still undecided. Those two figures don’t get divided into a wait. New applications keep arriving, DOL reprioritises, and one month’s output is not a rate. For the envelope a case actually sits inside, the timeline calculator works from the percentile spread of real decided cases.

What those 96,916 cases were doing

A waiting case is in one of three places, and they answer different questions. Analyst review moves in filing order, so the month is the whole story. The other two don’t, which is the honest answer when DOL has passed your month and you still have nothing.

Analyst review 91,168 the ordinary queue, worked in filing order
Out of filing order 3,034 an information request, an audit, supervised recruitment or a hold takes a case off the ordinary queue
Under appeal or review 2,714 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 91,168
Analyst Review	91,168
Out of filing order 3,034
Application On Hold	1,855
RFI Issued	1,044
NORD Issued	122
Determination Issued	9
Supervised Recruitment	3
Pending Audit Response	1
Under appeal or review 2,714
Reconsideration Appeals	2,344
BALCA Appeals	352
Denied - BALCA Dismissed	9
Request For Review	9

The wall, by filing month

Bar length is the number of cases still waiting, on one scale across every month, so the shape is the backlog’s real shape. The colours split each month across the three queues. Any month opens its own page.

28 earlier months DOL has worked past. 4,841 cases across them are still open

Oct 2025 281 83%
DOL is working November 2025 as of August 28, 2026
Nov 2025 13,173 12%
Dec 2025 14,383 3%
Jan 2026 11,128 3%
Feb 2026 5,203 3%
Mar 2026 6,698 3%
Apr 2026 6,720 3%
May 2026 8,131 5%
Jun 2026 9,856 3%
Jul 2026 8,943 2%
Aug 2026 7,559 2%

Your employer’s first letter, and what it is worth

Within a filing month DOL works alphabetically by employer name, so a case sponsored by an A company is decided before one sponsored by a Z company that filed the same month. That much is real, and every public estimator uses it. What none of them publishes is how much it is worth, so here it is measured: the whole alphabet is about 27 days, and in 6 of 30 filing months the back half of the alphabet was decided faster than the front. It is a real term and a small one. Your filing month is worth far more than your initial.

Decided faster than average
Decided slower than average

A -11.4d
B -10.0d
C -5.1d
D -3.2d
E -2.4d
F +0.8d
G +1.7d
H -1.3d
I -5.1d
J +7.5d
K +5.9d
L -0.7d
M +0.1d
N +4.1d
O -2.2d
P +6.7d
Q -2.0d
R +6.0d
S +8.4d
T +1.9d
U +5.2d
V +5.0d
W +6.4d
X +11.3d
Y +13.7d
Z +15.7d

Against a corpus mean of 443 days over 339,518 decided cases. The whole alphabet is worth about 27 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, which holds every application whether or not it has been decided, against 13,629 in September and 15,034 in November. That’s a real event at DOL rather than a hole in the scan, and DOL has published what caused it.

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”, so 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”. DOL extended affected response deadlines by 33 calendar days, which it describes as the span during which staff, “officially recalled back to work on November 3”, could not accept or process applications.

Our own counts land on DOL’s 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.

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.

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

The basics

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 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 Sep 1, 2026 · daily

Processing times: DOL FLAG (flag.dol.gov/processingtimes) · data through Aug 28, 2026 · daily

Case data: DOL quarterly disclosure files (flag.dol.gov) · data through Jun 30, 2026 · quarterly