Filed October 2025
1,616 applications carry an October 2025 filing date. 1,335 have a decision. 281 were still waiting when the scan last checked.
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.
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
Where this month sits
DOL publishes November 2025 as the filing month its analyst review is working as of August 28, 2026, so it has worked past October 2025. Anything still open here is behind the main queue rather than waiting for its turn.
4,841 cases filed before October 2025 were undecided at their last check, so that’s what sits in front of this month, counting only cases DOL still has to decide. Some will have been decided since, so it runs a little high. It isn’t divided into a wait: the timeline calculator gives the envelope, from the spread of cases DOL has actually decided.
Still pending
232 of them are in analyst review, the ordinary queue that moves in filing order. The rest are in queues that take a case out of that order, so their wait doesn’t follow the month.
- Analyst review 232 the ordinary queue, worked in filing order
- Out of filing order 49 an information request, an audit, supervised recruitment or a hold takes a case off the ordinary queue
- Under appeal or review 0 cases that went to appeal after an adverse determination
| DOL status | Cases |
|---|---|
| Analyst review 232 | |
| Analyst Review | 232 |
| Out of filing order 49 | |
| RFI Issued | 49 |
Already decided
1,335 of the 1,616 applications filed in October 2025 have a final determination.
- Certified 1,242
- Withdrawn 85
- Denied 8
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